ONE STAT THAT MATTERS

GenAI’s whopping impact on marketing

If you listen to the hype, GenAI is like a tornado, ready to sweep up everything in its path. But how impactful will it actually be, especially in marketing? To provide some much-needed context, here’s one stat that matters…

That may sound like a lot but McKinsey believes it’s on the conservative end. They anticipate GenAI’s impact on marketing and sales could contribute up to $1.2 trillion in value annually (through increased productivity, cost savings and revenue), and account for more than a quarter of GenAI’s total economic impact.

In fact, marketing and sales is the business function where AI’s influence will be most profound, followed by software engineering, customer operations and product R&D. And that impact will be felt strongly in virtually every industry.

Where will all this additional value come from?
Today, GenAI is already helping companies generate more cost-efficient and effective creative content, optimize SEO, enhance the use of data, personalize customer journeys, improve lead development and nurturing, and much more.

And new capabilities are continually emerging. According to McKinsey, “It seems possible that within the next three years, anything not connected to AI will be considered obsolete or ineffective.”

CMOs will lead the charge
With GenAI poised to transform organizations, the next test is moving from isolated use cases to implementations at scale. For their part, CMOs seem ready. 81% say they anticipate using GenAI to support new business models in the next 12 to 18 months.²

From what we’ve been hearing in the field, many CMOs expect to be tasked with leading GenAI initiatives across their entire organizations, not just their departments – similar to what they’ve done with customer experience and digital experience initiatives.

But what about the challenges?
Without doubt, integrating GenAI into the marketing workflow requires overcoming obstacles: siloed AI expertise, a lax regulatory environment, rogue AI usage, fearful employees.³ But with this much economic opportunity on the table, it may be well worth the effort. A sound rollout strategy could mitigate risks by:

• Putting up proper guardrails to avoid issues like AI plagiarism, content that’s unoriginal or plagued by biases, and copyright infringement
• Maintaining transparency about AI usage to ensure customer trust
• Establishing strong security and privacy protocols to protect company and user data
• Ensuring AI solutions are scalable, adaptable and accessible for users

Pilot, then re-pilot if needed
In today’s fast-moving tech world, an AI product that wasn’t ready for prime time three months ago could be a game changer now. Need help navigating this ever-changing landscape? Let’s talk ›

¹ McKinsey & Company, Beyond the hype: Capturing the potential of AI and gen AI in tech, media, and telecom, February 2024

² PwC Pulse Survey, August 2023

³ Forrester, CMOs: Advancing From GenAI Pilots to Proficiency Doesn’t Come Easy, February 2024