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The potential for artificial intelligence applications in marketing, sales and customer service is believed to be unlimited over the next decade and beyond, so it seems counterintuitive that software applications for CRM and content management may have peaked last year and are on a downward slide. Even though a level of maturity has been reached in areas like social media management, the overall decline may have more to do with companies shifting their software focus from the premises to the cloud. Overall, packaged business applications planned for implementations and upgrades show a significant drop-off this year compared to last year, with CRM the only packaged business app holding steady, according to TechTarget's "2018 IT Priorities Survey." Social media management and monitoring leads the slide downward with a 62% decline, followed by enterprise content management, down 56%, and marketing automation, down 40%. TechTarget speculates that these declines are due mostly to the adoption of cloud-based software. "Only very large...