The future of marketing: AI-infused MarTech

In one of his speeches, Sam Altman sent shockwaves through the waters of marketing professionals. The CEO of OpenAI boldly claims: "Artificial general intelligence (AGI) will dramatically transform marketing, with 95% of tasks currently performed by marketing agencies, strategists, and creative professionals being handled by AI." What does this mean for the marketer? Where is the industry heading?

Experimenting with artificial intelligence 

As AI capabilities advance, the MarTech landscape is exploding with new AI-powered tools and platforms. Thanks to a flurry of AI-powered startups, the landscape grew from 8,000 solutions to over 14,000 between 2020 and 2024. For comparison, in the same period between 2011 and 2015, the landscape grew from 150 apps to only 1900, according to a Chiefmartec report.

Marketers face a dizzying array of options, each promising to revolutionize campaigns, content production, personalization, and more. But which solutions are truly worth investing in? Finding what tools or solutions fit into a specific company could be a full-time commitment. 

Components determining AI efficiency

When you started exploring artificial intelligence, you might have been driven by curiosity or a desire to streamline specific tasks. Most of us have already experimented with well-known AI providers like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, or Anthropic. While these are undoubtedly powerful AI models, you may soon realize that something is missing. A quiet voice in the back of your mind whispers: "Maybe a different provider like Gemini or Claude would be better suited for some of our use cases."

Indeed, these AI models differ in capabilities; for some workflows, one may outperform the other. Benchmarks comparing AI models across different tasks can provide insights, but there's a catch—the models are constantly evolving, and their performance is changing.

Determined to find the right solution, you may look into aggregator platforms such as Anakin.ai, which offer a unified interface to access and manage multiple AI providers from one place. But even with this expanded access and sophisticated prompting strategies, you may feel the results are not as consistent and accurate as you hoped.

The truth is that to determine the AI tool's effectiveness, you need to look at the synergy between:

• The model's architecture
• The training dataset
• The workflow or use case it is applied to

These components are constantly changing, so it's hard to achieve consistent results over time. The key to unlocking AI's full potential in marketing is not choosing a particular AI service or provider but identifying and optimizing the right workflows for AI applications.

The current strengths of AI and what's worth waiting for

AI is considered to be a transformative force for the entire MarTech industry. But what is the real impact of AI on your work? Where is AI going to help you and what is worth waiting for?

MKT1, a platform focused on education in marketing with 30,000+ subscribers, conducted an interesting survey. They asked their audience how much AI has changed their workflow.

The results were quite contrary to the current hype: 53% of respondents say that they got minor efficiency gains, and only 7% state that their workflow has been completely transformed with AI. The fact that so many people feel AI helped them only with little things could be understood as dissatisfaction or disappointment with the current trend. The reason is that while AI can easily do some marketing tasks, others still need a lot of human input.

Written content creation and research: AI's superpower

Without much surprise, the most significant impact of AI is currently on content marketing. AI assists editors when researching topics, generating content drafts, and writing copy. Most marketers are using AI for content help, and most of them stick to it, unlike, for example, using AI to generate social posts, which 20% of marketers tried and stopped using, according to MKT1 research.

Regarding audience research and competitive research, AI performs well as expected in fields with enough information on the internet. The more niche the domain, the more difficult it is for generic AI models to provide relevant results.

Design: Almost there

AI-generated images are already usable, at least in some cases, such as the header of this blog post. You can successfully prompt AI to create images based on your brief and look for similar authentic pictures in a photo bank. Or you can use generative fill to complete a blank spot in your image. But often, AI-generated images still lack realistic details and authenticity, which is perhaps why the same MKT1 research identifies image creation on social media as one tool that many people try and quickly abandon.

Outreach and marketing operations: Ready for advanced users

To perform tasks such as reporting, analytics, marketing automation, and account-based marketing, you need to connect multiple data layers typically located in different places and tools. Google already provides an automated AI algorithm for optimizing AdWords campaigns for more efficient customer acquisition, but most mainstream AI services are limited in access to external data sources. That's why we can't see more people using AI for outbound marketing and analytics. It simply requires more digital skills, knowledge, and consolidated data.

Personalization - Great potential for the future

When you decide to provide personalized content, you (or AI) need access to a wide range of information and tools. Setting up personalization involves dynamic content creation, automation, segmentation, and rules-based content targeting; in other words, several data sets. AI can only do this if it can access all relevant inputs—content, user data, and performance metrics. You can learn more about it in our article AI recommendation systems: Key takeaways and insights.

The future is in AI-infused MarTech

Once we solve the problem of data consolidation, AI is likely to dominate in more marketing areas. Experimenting with standalone AI tools is a helpful starting point. But to truly unleash AI's potential for more complex marketing workflows, we need to move beyond one-off AI implementations to integrating AI with the whole MarTech ecosystem.

Does it mean that every piece of your technology should have built-in AI? No. As artificial intelligence is now included in nearly every piece of software, the next step is to consolidate its power into one super-powerful system with access to all needed data.

You can achieve this by placing a digital experience platform (DXP) with AI into the center of your system.  

From there, you can deliver omnichannel content, collect customer data, and analyze performance. Because all these capabilities are in one piece of technology, AI has access to all your data in one place. It gets a holistic overview of your content performance, and that's how it can provide consistent and accurate results.

Imagine AI as an intelligence layer that weaves into your whole tech stack. It can read and generate your content, analyze user behavior, and optimize your campaigns based on the results.

The DXP provides AI access to your content repository and customer behavior analytics. It gives your AI the entire context. Artificial intelligence can then effectively help with many more things:

• Content personalization
• Generating content - copy, tags, video transcripts, etc.
• Creating emails, social posts, or teasers from existing content
• Automated campaign optimization
• Dynamic adjustments of marketing activities based on customers' behavior

Get AI to transform your marketing

The future of AI in marketing is in technologies that can work with your unique data. Sam Altman from OpenAI has predicted that one day, AGI will transform most of what we do in marketing today. At the moment, the transformation lies in strategically embedding AI capabilities within the core MarTech stack. 

So, looking forward, the key is to connect AI securely with all the data it needs. If you have a multifunctional digital experience platform, there's nothing in your way. 

Discover more about the effective use of AI in our ebook: Use AI to create texts people want to read.