What Marketing Can Teach Business About AI

This article was co-authored by Nicole Greene.

Generative AI is paving the way for chief marketing officers (CMOs) to elevate their role within C-suite. Marketing is at the forefront of enterprise adoption of genAI. Nearly 70% of enterprise marketers experimenting with the technology have already implemented genAI or plan to do so in the next six months, compared to less than 54% of business leaders in other non-IT functions.

Drawing on their early experience in addressing business challenges and supporting other departments, CMOs are uniquely positioned to lead the adoption of AI in the enterprise, particularly in three key areas:

• Connecting AI investments to business outcomes.
• Transforming the workforce.
• Facing risks head on.

Connecting AI Investments to Business Outcomes

To maximize the potential of genAI, CMOs must tie AI initiatives to measurable business outcomes, such as increased revenue and improved customer experience.

For example, using AI in guided selling with the explicit intention of reducing returns can generate direct revenue gains that companies can test and measure. It also offers more indirect benefits, such as improving customer satisfaction and strengthening brand values ​​of innovation.

Here are some ways to create a strong business case with clear links to outcomes:

• Highlighting how genAI can solve business priorities: Identify use cases that address critical business outcomes such as revenue, profit, and risk reduction and are most achievable for the organization.
• Determine the adoption strategy: The opportunities and options for integrating GenAI into the organization can be overwhelming. From hyperscalers and martech vendors to agencies and point solutions, everyone is touting their specific AI/ML and GenAI capabilities. GenAI is part of the technology that marketing teams rely on every day, such as enterprise and martech solutions. Look at specific use cases and compare potential applications of GenAI to assess whether they are fit for purpose.
• Create a template for rapid productivity gains: Marketing has rapidly increased productivity through improved access to content, improved search capability, content creation and personalization, and optimization of ad purchases. Each area could be modified for use in other business contexts.
• Value attribution: Identifying the best ways to measure the impact of pilot programs is critical and may be one of the most important lessons CMOs can teach other business unit leaders.

Dig deeper: How to Implement AI for Your Marketing Team

Transforming the Workforce

Employees are nervous, especially in light of recent statements from AI developers touting the technology’s ability to replace most advertising and marketing Employees who believe AI can replace their job within the next five years see their intention to stay in their job for another year drop from 41% to 14%.

How CMOs choose to improve work will have a direct impact on business results. Early advances in creativity and user experience help people access information and create digital experiences faster.

Using genAI in a marketing team’s daily work allows them to focus on higher-level and more effective ideation, testing, and creative analysis tasks. To avoid employee worries:

• Create a discovery community: Host monthly meetings to help early adopters on your team share how they’re using genAI applications, both within the company and at home. This safe space creates a sense of community and supports the culture change needed to drive adoption.
• Establish safeguards for responsible use by employees: Develop meaningful communication and guidelines to ensure your employees feel comfortable with genAI, given the inherent risks. Educate employees on key concerns, build trust in the organization, and reinforce employees’ sense of empowerment.
• Train your staff: Empower creative teams to leverage genAI augmentation not only for creative execution, but also for dashboard development, analytics, code writing, and testing. Ask your external agencies to do the same.
• Promising new roles: As companies create new products and explore new ways to market, they can create entirely new jobs. The Institute for the Future and Dell Technologies predict that 85% of the jobs in 2030 have not yet been invented.

Dig deeper: A User-Friendly Approach to Adopting AI in Marketing

Facing risks head on

As companies move from genAI testing to pilots and real-world deployments, discomfort with the risks of the technology is driving boardrooms and exposing marketing to accusations of recklessness. Organizations should be concerned: 72% of consumers believe AI-powered content generators could spread false or misleading information. Incidents undermine trust, reputation, and shareholder value.

Marketers help shape the formation of enterprise AI leadership councils to establish risk mitigation policies. At the tactical level, they operationalize practices to prevent, detect, and respond to high-risk scenarios that undermine brand trust and cause reputational damage. These operations are called TrustOps, and include three main activities:

• Content certification. Setting and enforcing authenticity standards strengthens the trustworthiness of the content your brand produces. On a policy level, this means setting usage and disclosure policies for GenAI tools, such as requiring that images of employees and customers use photographs of real people and that synthetic images be labeled as such. On a practical level, this means enforcing open standards such as Content Credentials at all stages of production.
• Listening to fake content. While media monitoring and brand protection practices are well established, GenAI amplifies and diversifies the nature of threats. CMOs are working with risk managers to expand the scope of media monitoring, particularly in social networksThis will help organizations recognize threats in images and video clips, rather than just text, and define new automated response practices that go beyond issuing takedown notices.
• Engage with stakeholders. AI tools can streamline compliance workflows and shorten approval cycles, allowing companies to anticipate issues before they spiral out of control. This capability is especially important in regulated industries with strict compliance requirements. One solution is to combine legal and regulatory compliance with brand compliance into a single-step process. Organizations that take this approach can improve customer relationships by providing them with timely, reliable, and consistent information with greater confidence.

As marketing departments pioneer this transformative technology and develop best practices for effectively using genAI, CMOs can demonstrate their leadership value to the business by delivering actionable solutions to help solve their organization’s most pressing business challenges.

Dig deeper: Why Brands Need to Address the AI ​​Adoption Knowledge Gap