Guest editorial: artificial intelligence for B2B marketing: challenges and opportunities

A growing body of evidence indicates that implementing artificial intelligence (AI) at scale can improve market performance in B2B settings by accelerating decision-making process. Despite its popularity in the B2B sector, there have been few academic studies about this phenomenon in the context of industrial markets. Currently, AI research focuses predominantly on the marketing aspect of consumers, but in fact industrial data is rarely analyzed to address the issues regarding organizational behavior, product innovation, supply chain management, and B2B customer relationship management. The special issue presents 16 papers that explore why do B2B companies seek to use AI for marketing purposes, how AI can be used to foster innovation and use supply chain networks, how AI can enhance B2B customer experience and customer relationship management, and how AI can be used to develop dynamic capabilities on B2B marketing. These research articles provide insights into various industrial contexts and have applied both qualitative and quantitative approaches to identify AI applications for value creation.