Artificial intelligence-based systems applied in industrial marketing: An historical overview, current and future insights

a r t i c l e i n f o Intelligent systems have particular potentialities and strengths to support decisional situations faced by companies , especially those of a strategic nature, where good strategic intelligence is necessary. In this paper, we carry out an historical literature review of artificial intelligence-based systems applied to marketing, covering a time period of several decades (from the 1970s to the present day), with special focus on applications to industrial marketing. A detailed review is presented, along with conclusions and some future insights. Then, we briefly introduce the set of papers in this special issue. The artificial intelligence (AI) core focuses on the development of valuable, automated solutions (i.e. intelligent agents/systems) to problems which would require the intervention of intelligence if done by humans (Negnevitsky, 2004). In a business context, there are problems to be tackled that require this particular characteristic, which need human judgement and analysis to assess and solve these problems with guarantees of success. These decisional situations frequently relate to strategic issues in firms, where problems are far from being well-structured. Developing and applying ad-hoc intelligent systems, due to their particular strengths, to process data and provide valuable information either with a data-driven or, especially, with a knowledge-driven approach, might be of interest to managers in their decision-making (see Casillas, However, in spite of their potentialities to contribute to compa-nies' strategic intelligence (i.e. business intelligence + competitive intelligence + knowledge management) (see Liebowitz, 2006), this research theme has received scarce attention in journals that primarily deal with business and management issues. A basic search in Scopus 1 (i.e. article title, abstract and keywords) reveals that the total number of papers published on both business and AI/intelligent systems in business/management-focused journals is less than 150. With this special issue, we have aimed to promote, stimulate and publish high-quality contributions on applied-intelligent systems to support the management of any marketing issue among businesses. The particular and interesting areas of applications within the industrial/ business marketing framework are numerous. Some of them might be, but are not limited to, the following:-Segmenting and targeting business markets.-Managing customers' relationships.-Marketing channel relationships.-Organizational buying and supply chain management processes.-Business intelligence and knowledge management.-Managing personal selling.-B2B communications decisions.-B2B pricing strategies.-Product development, innovation and creativity.-Services management in business markets.-Web intelligence and B2B e-commerce applications. Although some of these areas have been covered in the set of papers accepted for publication, …