AI has emerged in the business landscape in three primary formats: as a tool that surfaces insights to help people make smarter decisions, as an assistant or chatbot that aides in finding information or completing tasks and as an autonomous system that makes decisions and acts on them on humans’ behalf.

The latter format has inspired both AI conspiracy theories (“Robots are going to take over the world!”) and motivated marketers to emerge as one of the more active business audiences to adopt AI technologies.

At face value, this makes sense: Marketers are immersed in data and insights and struggle to keep up with the day-to-day tasks that go into data-driven campaign execution and management. And advertising has shifted from the pretty picture school of thought (“The CEO’s spouse liked a proposed ad campaign, so we’ll roll it out”) to a much more quantitative focus.

The industry’s disproportionate dependence on data leaves marketers and advertisers perfectly primed for technologies that can eliminate number-crunching and analysis-based tasks. But freeing up their time isn’t the main reason they’re adopting AI. For marketers, AI expedites data analysis and therefore expedites revenue. From my perspective, they’re simply following the money.

According to research by internet marketing services firm Sailthru, marketers in the retail space are specifically investing in personalization and AI technologies that give them more knowledge about their customers and allow them to “act on that knowledge with messaging and products that are relevant to their interests.“ Retailers are following the money, too.