Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to computer systems that imitate human abilities: learning from data, recognising patterns, generating content and making decisions. In marketing it powers targeting, automatic campaign optimisation, forecasting and content creation, and on the search side it is changing the very way audiences are reached (see GEO). The breakthroughs for mainstream access were ChatGPT (late 2022) and AI Overviews in Google’s results (2024). It gives a real operational edge, but it needs oversight: quality depends on the data, and results can be wrong or biased. (Compare: Machine Learning, AI Agent, GEO)