I’m a big fan of books.
I love reading blog posts. I love reading X posts. I love videos. But of all my favorite formats of content consumption…
Books are at the top of the list.
A wise person (George R.R. Martin) once said:
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.
I couldn’t agree more.
And in today’s day and age with the rise of AI… It feels like there’s more unique stories to read than ever before.
It can feel overwhelming at times. I wanted to put together a list of some of the top AI related books that I’ve read in the last few years. I’ll keep this list updated as I continue to read more about AI and ML but let’s start with these.
AI is already reshaping marketing. And it’s moving faster than most teams can keep up.
Hyper-personalized content. Agentic campaigns. New ethical questions nobody trained us for. The marketers who win this next stretch will understand the tools AND the bigger picture. Here are six books that give you both. These are five books that I’ve enjoyed and strongly recommend.
Whether you’re deep in the campaigns or running the strategy… these will sharpen your edge.
Here are 5 Must Read Artificial Intelligence Books That Every Marketer Should Read:
1. The LLM Engineering Handbook by Paul Iusztin and Maxime Labonne
Here’s the thing. You don’t have to become an AI engineer. Understanding how LLMs actually work under the hood is enough to give you an edge most marketers will never have.
Better prompts. Smarter tool integrations. Sharper judgment on what’s good output and what’s garbage.
This one lives on the production side… RAG, vector databases, evaluation, deployment, optimization. It shows you why some AI content performs and how to build systems that hold up. Think content engines that scale. Chat-based lead qualifiers that actually qualify.
It’s the manual for getting past basic prompts.
2. Understanding Deep Learning by Simon J.D. Prince
Before you scale anything, you need systems thinking.
Prince walks through some of the most important ideas that make up what we know about Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence.
I found this paper which is available to read for free to be a great no-hype look at some of the core mechanics of AI. It started by providing the introductory lessons around what supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning are then wrapped it in a bow by discussing ethics.
From there… It goes really deep.
It dives into Neural Networks, universal approximation theorem and the difference between shallow and deep neural networks. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have to go Google a few things I read in this paper more than once to go figure out what it was about. But at the end of the paper I felt like I had a better grasp of what goes on behind the hood of an LLM than I ever did before.
This is a heavy one. But it’s one that I strongly recommend people read.
If you’re building recommendation engines, predictive analytics, or automated personalization… or even just briefing the team that does… read this. The principles outlast the models.
3. Empire of AI by Karen Hao
This one reads like a thriller.
Hao takes you inside OpenAI. The chaos. The power struggles. The scale-at-all-costs mindset driving the entire industry forward.
For marketers, it’s context you can’t afford to skip. Supply chain realities. Ethical trade-offs. The incentives quietly shaping what these models prioritize.
Read it and you’ll make better calls on vendors, brand safety, and where to place your long-term bets.
4. Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
Harari zooms all the way out. this book goes back in time and talks about how humans, as Homo sapiens, have evolved and why we do the things that we do.
It’s not book on how AI can be a better marketer..
But it is a good book to give you a high-level, overarching perspective on the macro environment and how it’s influencing humans at large.
He traces how information networks shape human cooperation. From ancient myths to the algorithms running your feed. Then he warns about what happens when AI supercharges all of it.
We live at the intersection of stories and data. This is the book that helps you think clearly about attention, truth, and influence in a world drowning in AI-generated content.
The big-picture counterweight to all the tactical noise.
5. The AI-Driven Leader by Geoff Woods
Leadership now means knowing how to work with AI as a thought partner.
The one thing that I loved about this book is that it gave you practical ideas around how you could use AI in your day-to-day. I read this book when it first came out, and it helped me quickly gain context around some of the immediate wins that I could leverage with AI back in 2024. I view this as a fundamental read for many marketers the one thing that I loved about this book is that it gave you practical ideas around how you could use AI in your day-to-day.
I read this book when it first came out, and it helped me quickly gain context around some of the immediate wins that I could leverage with AI back in 2024. I view this as a fundamental read for many marketers & leaders.
Woods hands you frameworks (CRIT is the standout) for delegating the tactical stuff and protecting your time for the decisions that actually move the business. It’s loaded with case studies on using AI to move faster and smarter. Built for leaders juggling creativity, data, and execution all at once.