Abstract: Since the industrial revolution we have been living in the age of machines. Intelligent machines or artificial intelligence are again much discussed, financed and promising after a previous phase of stagnation in its development. Along with digitalization, this has created new expectations among marketing managers and advertisers: The promise of accurately targeted addressing in digital contact and the associated increase in effectiveness through the immediacy of communication. The article describes what the machine (today) can already do, why it fools us and what happens in reality.