The Reality of Generative AI in Marketing May Not Be What You Think

According to Statista, 73% of companies use generative AI in their marketing campaigns.

Last week, Accenture announced it is working with Adobe to develop solutions to help organizations create personalized content at scale and accelerate the transformation of their content supply chains.

Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16z, released research that showed surprising findings about changing attitudes around budgeting for generative AI. They found that:

• Promising results from generative AI experiments prompted enterprises to increase their budget two to five times higher this year than last.
• Leaders are reallocating AI investments from last year’s “innovation budgets” into more permanent line items in IT, business units, and research and product development.
• There have been top-down mandates to find and deploy generative AI solutions in the last six months.

Generative AI is not considered a strategy in marketing because it is an amazing, transformational innovation that can be applied to a strategy. In marketing, it provides a new ability to do something that couldn't be done without huge human effort or something that can now be done faster or more efficiently. The distinction is important because it explains why companies haven't hurried to make enterprise-wide generative AI applications a priority.

Instead of asking for the budget to acquire all the models to build 500 use cases for generative AI, it is advised to ask senior management for a budget for the change management necessary in marketing and content operations to create a new strategy. Then, assess the priorities for generative AI use cases and budget for the technology needed to do that.