For more than a year now, marketers have been living with generative AI tools, learning about their capabilities through either first-hand experience or observation. Initially, some approached AI with apprehension – that the tools coming into the tech marketplace might be either too unsophisticated for everyday use or so sophisticated that they might make human employees obsolete.

Today, it’s no longer just the diehard AI evangelists and business leaders at the bleeding edge of innovation who champion the tech’s potential; nearly all marketers now understand that AI is poised to have a transformative effect on their business. From the AI Transformation Index, a survey of more than 300 marketers, 95% of respondents described AI as “game-changing” and said they believe it will dramatically change how marketing is done. And 78% believe that going forward, AI’s role in marketing will be significant at least and crucial at most.

With this optimism for an AI-powered future, innovative and imaginative marketers understand generative AI is at a point in its evolution where it can absolutely lighten the workload and increase efficiencies on a day-to-day basis – provided they have the know-how to find the tools’ most valuable use cases.

Among survey respondents, 50% suggested AI will play a significant role in most marketing tasks, and 28% believe it will play a crucial role in every aspect of marketing. AI can be used to automate highly manual marketing tasks, templatize and create content, manage and analyze data, make recommendations for business decisions, personalize and target advertising, improve SEO tactics, and more.

Currently, the two most widely adopted AI use cases among marketers are chatbots and ad targeting. This suggests that marketers are still just scratching the surface on how to best leverage AI for their businesses, as these are channels that can be tested and leveraged on the side and likely not fully integrated into a marketing team’s workflow.

Slowly integrating AI into your team’s workflow is essential in AI adoption and a big piece in realizing its full potential. As a result, marketers need to focus on prioritizing aspects of their business that can truly benefit from AI. This may involve targeting areas where significant time is invested in repetitive tasks or addressing challenges encountered by teams during the creative process, such as content development or crafting compelling headlines. From here, marketers should evaluate their existing tech tools and vendor partnerships to see how they are applying AI. This is a quick way to gauge the immediate impact AI can have on your team or business since the technology is already integrated and likely part of your workflow. However, it’s important to keep in mind that although this is a great strategy for testing and learning, this is not the best long term strategy for realizing AI’s full potential.

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Beyond identifying immediate use cases, in the long run, your AI must be fed and trained on the most comprehensive, first-party data set possible for marketers to reap the full value. Businesses must consider how to amass data from all the platforms and point solutions in their marketing tech stack, and seek partnership from tech providers who can free data from disparate silos. Siloing AI into narrow sets of data will result in very limited results in the future. In fact, a recent Boston Consulting Group study showed that one of the keys to differentiation will be the ability to fine-tune generative AI models with large volumes of high-quality, business-specific data, as generative AI’s strength often comes from finding surprising or even counterintuitive patterns and connections. To make the most of these advantages, companies need a solid system for handling and analyzing data.

The final piece in achieving “game changing” results with AI is realizing that this will result in larger tech evaluation and eventual consolidation of tools. That’s how marketers’ enthusiasm and widespread adoption of AI translates into real business success.

To recap, marketers should think about where AI could genuinely make their daily tasks smoother or spark some creativity in the short term to kickstart the integration of AI. But looking ahead, we need to dream bigger about how all our data plays together in the long run. Imagine if AI could really understand our business from every angle, pulling insights from all corners of our data universe. Let’s roll up our sleeves, think big picture, and get ready for a future where everything connects seamlessly, letting AI take our marketing strategies to the next level to achieve those game-changing results.

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