Let’s catch up with news about AI in programmatic advertising.  Starting with a company the cutest name, Gravity4 has launched Mona Lisa, a digital assistant that forecasts which programmatic media channels will yield the best results.  She’s one smart lady, doing automated lookalike modeling, lead scoring, collaborative filtering, classification, regression, decision trees, recommendation engines, clustering, topic modeling and sequential pattern mining on data from 19 countries.  Gravity4 assembles customer data from social, CRM, email, mobile, and advertising apps based on at least fifteen acquisitions since 2014.

Here’s another modern miracle: ScopeMedia has launched ScopeStyle, a “visual fashion discovery platform” that not only searches the Web for products similar to a photo you upload, but also finds complementary items to complete the outfit based on your style preferences. If you think about what’s required, it’s an awesomely impressive achievement for artificial intelligence. On the other hand, many of us have parents, friends, or spouses who offer similar critiques for free.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.