Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Evanta’s 2019 CISO Executive Summit in St. Louis. My talk was titled “AI in 2020: What’s Real, What’s Fake and What’s Next?”

At Maritz Motivation, we are making a commitment to AI. This is not a “here today, gone tomorrow” trend. It’s going to become an invaluable tool which transforms industries. Loyalty is one of those industries. In fact, loyalty presents some unique opportunities, which makes it ripe for AI functionality.

Consumers are human beings first. This is important to keep in mind when you think about building customer loyalty.

If necessity is the mother of invention, perhaps innovation is its father.

The Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) released its annual trends report, and as is always the case with IRF offerings, it includes plenty of pertinent and interesting information. The 10 trends with implications for incentive travel and reward and recognition programs include: 

There is a famous quote, attributed to anonymous, "We are the middle children of history, born too late to explore the Earth, born too early to explore the stars." Fortunately for us, we were born at the perfect time for Artificial Intelligence. A few years ago, AI was technologically impossible. A few years from now, all of the low-hanging fruit will have been picked. But right now, in most industries, if you can apply AI to your business, you might be the first person in history to do so. That's awesome to think about.