Main Scope of the issue

A forthcoming issue of Industrial Marketing Management (IMM) will be devoted to the presentation of original, rigorous and significant contributions on Artificial Intelligence-based solutions, with a strong, practical logic and preferably with empirical applications, developed to aid the management of any of the marketing issues in a Business-to-Business context. Rationale for the special issue Basically, the 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 (Martínez-López and Casillas, 2009)