Marketing technology (martech) vendors are heavily pitching AI. However, AI per se is not new and won’t solve CMOs’ problems overnight. In fact, many marketers use AI without even knowing it, when they use AI-powered algorithms for programmatic ad buying! The reality is that AI will scale existing data-driven marketing approaches and give modern CMOs the ability to personalize branded experiences in real time at scale.

AI is opening up new marketing use cases and will lead to a marketing renaissance, enabling CMOs to focus their energy on core marketing activities: customer understanding, brand strategy, and brand experience.

In particular, I think CMOs will be able to use AI to become the conductor of the customer experience by:

  • Acting on insights with personalized experiences and dynamic content.
  • Automating cross-channel campaigns and optimizing marketing mixes.
  • Blurring the boundaries between marketing, sales, and customer care.
  • Enabling CMOs to orchestrate CX across the organization.

Much like mobile, AI represents a paradigm shift, allowing CMOs to transform marketing. Like many disruptive forces, AI will kill some jobs and create others, but it will primarily force marketers to work more with machines strategically. Most tend to overestimate the short-term impact and to underestimate the long-term impact. In the next decade, I think AI will raise several key challenges for CMOs, including:

  • Building customer trust as the ultimate differentiator.
  • Commanding the brand story.
  • Monitoring the outputs of the AI black box.
  • Identifying the right partners in a revamped marketing and advertising ecosystem.
  • Accelerating the death of agencies that fail to reinvent.

Clients who want to know more about this can read the full report here.