Artificial intelligence in marketing: exploring current and future trends

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized marketing domain, driving rapid digital transformation by enhancing processes, accelerating growth, and transforming the business landscape. Despite the growing attention towards artificial intelligence review studies, there remains a dearth of comprehensive reviews within the marketing domain. Thus, the current study aims to explore the use of artificial intelligence in marketing as an emerging research topic using a systematic literature review (SLR) method. A corpus of 522 studies between 2015 and July 2023 was gathered and finalised from the Web of Science (WoS) database. Furthermore, the current study expanded the SLR using a bibliometric analysis. Observably, a growing trend of artificial intelligence exists in the marketing domain. The bibliometric analysis findings depicted six emerging clusters of artificial intelligence in marketing research, namely psychosocial dynamic, artificial intelligence-enhanced market dynamic strategies, artificial intelligence for consumer services, artificial intelligence for decision-making, artificial intelligence for value transformation, and artificial intelligence for ethical marketing. The findings highlighted future research avenues in terms of context, methods, and theory. The study also discussed the outcomes for academics and practitioners and proposed a future research agenda to examine the ongoing shift driven by rapid artificial intelligence implementation in marketing.