Out of the fog: fog computing-enabled AI to support smart marketing management

Marketing and consumer research use a variety of data and electronic measurement devices for research, theory-building, and applied decision-making. Managing data deluge produced by ‘smart devices’ and internet of things (IoT) actuators and sensors is one of the challenges faced by managers when using IoT systems. With the advent of the cloud-based IoT and artificial intelligence, which are advancing a ‘smart world’ and introducing automation in many application areas, such as ‘smart marketing,’ a need has arisen for various modifications to support the IoT devices that are at the center of the automation world, including recent language models like, ChatGPT and Bart, and technologies like nanotechnology. The article introduces the marketing community to a recent computing development: IoT-driven fog computing (FC)—an emerging concept that decentralizes operations, management, and data into the network utilizing a distributed and federated computing paradigm. Although numerous research studies have been published on ‘smart’ applications, none hitherto have been conducted on fog-based smart marketing. FC is considered a novel computational system, which can mitigate latency and improve bandwidth utilization for autonomous marketing applications requiring real-time processing of ‘big data’ typical of smart marketing ecosystems.