Abstract This research identifies the current state of research on the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in marketing. Here we adopted a systematic literature review of 140 papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Timeline analysis was conducted on the paper abstracts. The study revealed a recent interest in the focus area, key journals and associated themes. The key themes included consumer research, advertisement and digital customer, future of online services, chatbots, results- based frameworks, humans and technologies, social use, management process and sales. The five-issue areas were identified to be industry standards for data mining, preparing marketers to understand AI, uncertain effects of AI in marketing, preparing customers to experience AI and safety and privacy concerns. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Marketing, Advertising, Customer Experience, Chabots AI in Marketing: Literature Review on Focus Areas and Issues Purnima Bhatnagar*, Amoli Tadiparthi** * Assistant Professor, Department of Management, Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Dayalbagh, Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India. Email: pbhatnagar.dei@gmail.com ** Former Student, Bachelor of Science (Major: Biology), Baylor University, Texas, USA. Currently, Research Assistant at Stanford University, CA, USA. Email: amolit@gmail.com Introducon The Fourth Industrial Revolution is expected to be an age of significant change, especially from the perspective of the emergence of new technologies, information technology, and digitalisation (De Ruyter et al., 2021). In this context, Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is one of the technological innovations associated with the present age, presents interesting research implications for the field of business, especially marketing. According to the Oxford Dictionary, AI is “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages” (Jarek & Mazurek, 2019). Marketing, on the other hand, is defined as the “activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, International Journal of Applied Marketing and Management 8 (1) 2023, 17-28 http://publishingindia.com/ijamm/ and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” [American Marketing Association]. The recent acceptance of AI may be attributed to the availability of big data, access to power and new AI techniques (Overgoor et al., 2019). Businesses value AI due to expectations of “productivity” enhancements, timely “product promotion” to the target population, and “consumer experience” (S. Gupta et al., 2020). Researchers have examined the association between the two using specific directions like the uses of AI, customer reactions to AI, among other aspects. However, a holistic study of key thematic areas has not been attempted yet, which is the focus of the current research article. Hence, the present research addresses the following questions: ● Research Question 1 (RQ 1): What is the state of current research on the role of AI in marketing? ● Research Question 2 (RQ 2): What are the focus and issue areas which researchers have identified so far? ● Research Question 3 (RQ 3): What are the future research areas that researchers feel need further investigation? The present article discusses the research methodology in the next section, which is followed by findings, discussion and conclusions. Research Methodology To address this exercise, research articles, conference proceedings and research reports published in databases like JSTOR, Scopus, Google Scholar, Proquest and EBSCO were accessed for the period 2010–2021. Further, out of 84 journal articles, commentaries, editorials, 75 research articles for the period 2019–2021, published in