MarTech Interview with Vikram Ramachandran, Principal, AI @ 2X

Vikram Ramachandran, Principal, AI @ 2X comments on the impact of AI and what marketers need to keep in mind before implementing new AI powered martech to drive their efforts:

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Hi Vikram, tell us about yourself and more about your role at 2X.

I’m currently the Principal of AI at 2X, where I lead AI-related initiatives both internally and for our clients. I’ve been in this role for a couple of months, and prior to that, I was part of our Content team as a writer and strategist. I’ve been well-immersed in the B2B marketing space for 5 years now, and have gotten a first-hand look at how B2B marketing is changing and how AI underpins that evolution.

We’d love to hear more about 2X’s use of AI-Driven tech and strategies that helps enable modern marketers…

Our approach to AI builds on the foundation of our offering – a Marketing Resource Center that brings together best-in-class marketers with new-age marketing skills and cutting-edge MarTech to drive tangible impact. We’re adopting AI to enhance the fundamentals of that model, in terms of efficiency, productivity, and more.

One of our areas of expertise is using generative AI for content production, which we actually started doing even before ChatGPT went public in November 2022. More than 70 content writers at 2X are now skilled at using AI to produce content and copy, and that enables them to create written content up to 30% faster and cut down research time by 33%. AI also allows us to generate 2-3 times more creative for digital campaigns, because the key to impact here is strategic application of the productivity gains beyond just ‘more marketing output’. Being able to produce more creative allows us to invest in personalization, ensuring we create content for prospects of every relevant persona at every stage of the funnel. We also have the capacity to do more A/B testing, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. AI enables us to be more efficient marketers, but also more effective marketers when we have time and capacity to be more targeted, strategic, and focused.

How are you seeing AI redefine modern marketing: can you talk about some unique instances of AI’s use in marketing that have piqued your interest?

Digital marketing is built on the foundation of data – high-quality data allows you to execute more targeted marketing tactics and track their effectiveness to drive the results that really matter.

AI can enhance that ecosystem in numerous ways, and we’re seeing some exciting growth areas. 2X is a leading proponent of using intent data to craft more effective and result-driving marketing campaigns. With 6sense, we’re able to pinpoint the right audience, at the right stage, and serve them targeted content that matches their interests and buying propensity. The AI intelligence that 6sense delivers eliminates guesswork and allows us to focus on the tactics and segments most likely to convert.

The challenge we’ve seen many organizations encounter is how to then fuel that turbo engine – running multiple concurrent account-based experience (ABX) campaigns takes a lot of content and creative fuel. AI can once again alleviate that demand by helping us create content at a greater volume and efficiency to help drive those efforts. And because we have a deeper understanding of the audience and their interests, that added capacity is no longer spray-and-pray, but laser-focused by segment and persona.

Finally, AI will help us make sense of the results, as a vital component of the modern marketing engine is optimization. With so much data being collected from more marketing activity, it becomes all the more crucial to know what’s working and where to optimize your investments. Individual platforms have their own analytics capabilities, but I believe we will start to see more integrated approaches, and there’s immense value in an AI layer that can then surface the most pertinent insights for marketers to action.

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How can modern B2B marketers use AI and insights more deeply to identify and fix gaps across their marketing cycles?

For a start, AI gives you the entry point, a fresh opportunity to fully unearth issues and fix them. As a recent report from IBM says, “Automating bad processes won’t make them better. Break the business down to its essential elements to deliver real productivity gains.” Marketers can leverage the push to adopt AI to finally tackle to-fix lists, and get the gears in motion again. For example, you may want to use AI to automate email outreach, but most generative tools require a solid foundation of data points upon which to build the final content. You may then realize the data flowing from your CRM is far from hygienic, and other junctions in that flow where manual work has been shoring up broken processes. In order to adopt an AI solution that makes the process more efficient, you have to fix the underlying process, which was always ‘good enough’ until now. AI gives you the license to get it fixed, and the potential gains to the business are the carrot.

In what ways do you feel B2B tech marketing should evolve and why? What are some of the trends that will dominate the space in 2024?

MarTech already grows at an exponential rate, but as Scott Brinker’s famed ‘Martec’s Law’ illustrates, organizations change logarithmically – in other words, our ability to adopt tech never grows as fast as the tech itself. That dynamic will continue to be the case, as AI supercharges the development of MarTech and its capabilities. At the same time, talent development moves more slowly – educational institutions are still grappling with how to adapt to genAI – so it will be while longer until the next generation of marketers arrives who are genAI natives and can fully utilize bourgeoning capabilities. In 2023, Gartner’s CMO survey found that MarTech utilization had plummeted to 33%, which indicates that the appetite for tech is there but the ability to execute is lacking. To justify those tech investments, marketing leadership must work on closing that gap, and evaluate whether their talent is the right fit for a tech-first marketing organization.

If you had to share five predictions about the future of martech and marketing: what would they be?”

1. We’re going to see an explosion of products and services. One of the reasons AI is on everyone’s mind is because it touches every aspect of how we work, and it’s a catalyst for countless business processes and outcomes. As that integrates more fully over time, we’ll see the impact in terms of new solutions, new products, new categories of services that all leverage AI.
2. New roles and jobs will emerge and solidify. We’re already seeing that shift, where more and more creative roles have assumed that editor/curator responsibility, shepherding a host of AI tools that produce first-draft content. That’s going to happen across the organization, where more and more elements of lower-priority work can be achieved with AI, and we turn to humans to do what only humans can do best.
3. Investments will grow. Enterprises will continue to double down on tech and AI to supercharge their growth. BCG’s recent surveyof 1,400 C-suite execs found them bullish, with 71% saying they plan to increase their company’s tech investments in 2024, up from 60% in 2023, and an even larger percentage (85%) indicating they’d increase their spending on AI and GenAI in 2024.
4. Investment which needs to be funded by pruning elsewhere. As mentioned, MarTech utilization is declining, and marketers will have to account for that under-delivering investment when CFOs come knocking. Whether it’s consolidation or aggregation, expect the focus to be on trimming the fat, either to fund more promising areas or general cost-cutting.
5. But all of that depends on the legal and ethical challenges surrounding AI. Copyright and privacy will be the defining issues of the AI era. Already we’re seeing the largest players like OpenAI declare that “it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials”. That’s hardly a viable defense to access copyrighted content – and the ongoing court case with the New York Times will decide that – but consumers and businesses are cagey as there are still-unanswered questions of privacy and data protection. When it comes to AI, we’ve moved fast and broken things, so it’ll be time to reevaluate and consider the ramifications of this technology.

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