Artificial intelligence (AI): multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging challenges, opportunities, and agenda for research and practice

As far back as the industrial revolution, great leaps in technical innovation succeeded in transforming numerous manual tasks and processes that had been in existence for decades where humans had reached the limits of physical capacity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers this same transformative potential for the augmentation and potential replacement of human tasks and activities within a wide range of industrial, intellectual and social applications. The pace of change for this new AI technological age is staggering, with new breakthroughs in algorithmic machine learning and autonomous decision making engendering new opportunities for continued innovation. The impact of AI is significant, with industries ranging from: finance, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, supply chain and logistics all set to be disrupted by the onset of AI technologies. The study brings together the collective insight from a number of leading expert contributors to highlight the significant opportunities, challenges and potential research agenda posed by the rapid emergence of AI within a number of domains: technological, business and management, science and technology, government and public sector. The research offers significant and timely insight to AI technology and its impact on the future of industry and society in general

How Does Market Orientation Affect Sales and Marketing Collaboration and Business Performance?

Studies into the sales and marketing interface have neglected the relationship between market orientation and collaboration between sales and marketing. We found that market intelligence processes and management attitudes towards coordination have positive impacts on market orientation, which then has benefits for collaboration between sales and marketing, and business performance. The sales and marketing interface has attracted considerable attention from researchers, but the relationship between market orientation and the level of collaboration between sales and marketing has not yet been fully explored. This issue is important to help understand how to improve collaboration between sales and marketing. As organizations are competing in increasingly crowded markets with more demanding customers and who are struggling to differentiate their offer from their competitors, the effective operation of the customer-facing interface of sales and marketing is critical in helping to achieve success (e.g. Homburg and Jensen, 2007). The objectives of this study are to help understand the relationship between market orientation and collaboration between sales and marketing; to identify the role of senior management and market intelligence in creating market orientation, and to explore if these variables directly or indirectly impact on business performance. Further, the study aims to contribute to the debate on the sales and marketing interface by bridging gaps found in literature. Evidence from recent studies indicate sales and marketing staff are frequently set individual targets that may pull them in different directions and that there is a less than optimum working relationship (Dewsnap and Jobber, 2000; Rouzies et al., 2005). Friction can be aggravated by differing perspectives, strong independent cultures and need to maintain independent functionality (Shaprio, 2002; Kotler, Rackham and Krishnaswamy 2006), but sales and marketing still need to coordinate their efforts to maximize the return on their activities and a marketing orientation should facilitate this. If an organization has a market orientation, logic suggests that the organization should be customer orientated and the objectives of sales and marketing departments should exhibit greater alignment and ensure that the response to the market is efficient. Senior management need to create an internal culture of cooperation and provide guidance to sales and marketing managers on aligning goals and improving communications. They also have a key role in building an environment that will facilitate the development of market orientation and an understanding of the part that sales and marketing play in achieving organizational objectives. Senior managers also provide sales and marketing with the guidance and tools to enable them to align their activities, share information more efficiently and appreciate each others’ contribution to achieving objectives. Integrated market intelligence processes enable sales and marketing to understand market conditions more effectively and share information in a structured environment, thereby improving efficiency in responding to customers and competitors. This study explores this topic through a quantitative survey questionnaire sent to Managing Directors/CEOs of large, UK organizations who had separate sales and marketing departments. The study finds an effective market intelligence system that collects and disseminates market information internally positively supports a market orientation, but does not directly impact business performance. A positive senior management attitude towards coordination impacts on marketing orientation, but not directly on business performance or collaboration between sales and marketing. Finally, market orientation does have a significant and positive impact on achieving collaboration between sales and marketing, and the findings confirm that this collaboration has a positive and direct impact on business performance. Organizations should not only work to create market orientation, but also need to develop an effective market intelligence system and engender a positive attitude to coordination in senior managers to improving interfunctional collaboration. For too long managers have allowed separate sales and marketing departments to maintain silos, developing their own specialist skills and routines without establishing sufficient links to share and expand joint competences. Collaboration between sales and marketing is a key element in achieving improvements in business performance

Sales and Marketing, and Customer Relationships: A Structured Abstract

This research investigates the impact of sales and marketing collaboration on the customer’s propensity to purchase and customer value, thereby extending the current research into the sales and marketing interface. Prior research has established that sales departments may fail to support marketing initiatives and that marketing been known to fail to communicate marketing objectives effectively and to exclude sales from decision-making. This lack of coordination may become visible to the customer and consequently influence their relationship with the supplier. We suggest that internal sales and marketing relationships can impact on relationship quality and consequently the customers’ propensity to purchase. Customers demand greater value from their suppliers and consequently a relationship-building approach to marketing has been more widely adopted by many organizations (Harker and Egan 2006; Biggemann and Buttle 2012). Further, sustainable long-term relationships benefit the supplier by reducing costs and increasing sales (e.g., Hennig-Thurau et al. 2002). It has been suggested that relationship quality encompasses the concepts of satisfaction, trust and commitment related to the selling organization (Crosby et al. 1990; Palmatier et al. 2006). The study was conducted through a series of semi-structured, hour-long interviews within the sales and marketing personnel from four B2B organizations in the UK, and with a selection of their customers. This approach produces rich qualitative data on the participants’ attitudes and experiences of the interface between buyer and seller. The customer respondents were selected randomly from the organizations’ databases. The study highlights that conflict or collaboration between sales and marketing is visible to the customer and affects the different dimensions of relationship quality. Collaboration creates customer satisfaction and operating through the dimensions of trust to improve customer commitment, and creates customer value in the relationship and leads to an increased propensity to purchase