Marketers are realizing gains with AI in three key areas: increasing sales productivity, increasing customer satisfaction, and reducing marketing overhead, according to a new study.
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From content creation to software coding to customer segmentation, the fever for deploying artificial intelligence is real. But despite much speculation from media, analysts and executives about AI’s impact on business, it’s still not easy to see where organizations are reaping the results. For new insights into what’s happening now with AI deployments in marketing and the associated benefits, The CMO survey asked a sample of 316 marketing managers from for-profit US companies to assess the impact of using AI in marketing on the bottom line. Marketing executives, 95.6% of whom were at the vice president level or above, reported gains in three key areas: a 6.2% increase in sales productivity, a 7% increase in customer satisfaction and a 7.2% decrease in marketing overhead costs.
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Given these positive results, we dug deeper into the survey results to understand the factors that improve or harm AI outcomes. We found that ROI in AI varies depending on the time to adoption of AI tools, the company’s stage of digital transformation, and its level of experimentation with AI. Let’s take a closer look at the data and what it shows marketers.
The AI Adoption-Reward Curve
One of the survey’s striking findings is that AI does not have a long history in marketing in most organizations. The results indicate that 60.4% of companies have been using AI in marketing for less than a year, 17.9% for one year and 18.7% for two to five years, and only 2.9% are using it. AI in marketing for over five years.
Why this slow start for so many organizations? Many companies have encountered difficulty scaling AI in their business functions due to the cost, effort and complexity of training and deploying AI data models. However, the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 has made it much easier to try out AI tools. Executives have begun to explore the potential of generative AI to innovate, optimize tasks, and enable domain-specific business processes more broadly within their organizations. Gartner predicted that more than 80% of companies will use generative AI APIs or have deployed generative AI applications by 2026. This is up from 5% in 2023.
AI adoption time matters in terms of results.
