AI Is Great, But What Does It Mean I Have to Actually Do as a CMO? AI is the wakeup call that CMOs need to finally embrace technology..

You would need to have been on Mars to avoid the onslaught of news stories and startup launches in the AI space, but there remains a paucity of good perspective on the implications for marketing. Technology has become an extension of humans for many years starting with the personal computer evolving to the www and then the smartphone. AI is no different but arguably represents a more fundamental and tectonic shift as it is not purely behavioral, it is a new form of intelligence, meaning limitless applications.

Marketing and technology have been on a collision course for well over two decades, but never have we seen such a clear manifestation of how technology will enhance the creativity and innovation of both performance marketers and brand creatives. AI is not simply about automation (although anything that can be automated, will be automated), it is about inspiration, it is about optimization, it is also about innovation. AI will augment humans to deliver better marketing, not 'more marketing' so it is imperative that the CMO takes the mantle to lead the debate and strategy, rather than leaving it to IT.

CMO's cannot and must not delegate responsibility for the role of AI (and technology more broadly) within their marketing strategy and execution. As a minimum, CMO's must understand the differences between ChatGPT, Gemini, and Co-Pilot and be able to ask the right questions rather than abdicate responsibility to their performance marketers and IT team. We are already seeing that marketing is one of the disciplines with real use cases emerging and these are not just all automation and production focused.

There are five macro use cases that marketers should be embracing gen AI today:

1. Automating the analysis of millions of research data points to generate quicker insights into customer pain points and growth opportunities

2. Harmonizing data attributes from disparate systems and leverage gen AI to auto segment and identify personalization opportunities

3. Automating customer service interactions to allow for more time to be spent on strategic growth and customer experience related work

4. Leveraging AI to develop greater breadth of concepts to serve a communications strategy and apply frameworks to then prioritize

5. Accelerating the production of larger, more dynamic library of localized and personalized content/creative assets from text to image to video

And, six core principles must be adopted by all CMOs and Marketing departments to ensure that AI delivers value creation:

1. Ensure that every gen AI strategy starts and ends with the customer.

2. Own gen AI strategy in-house rather than outsource to a tech vendor or agency.

3. Demonstrate that marketing is at the forefront of gen AI by embracing multiple use cases that cut across CX, data, and content.

4. Develop an iterative, test and learn approach so that multiple experiments can be run and evaluated at once.

5. Ensure that there is accountability within marketing for discovering and exploring new gen AI software and tools.

6. Document and define operating model, processes, user journeys and use cases and guidelines as AI rewards specificity and detail.

The CMO can be the catalyst at the board table to identify genuine value creation that delivers growth, improved effectiveness, and greater efficiencies. To see AI purely as the latter is to fundamentally misunderstand the wider applications of AI to augment creative and data talent. Let it be said that the speed at which AI is evolving, means delaying experimentation by just one quarter, risks a loss of competitive advantage and revenue.        

AI offers the potential to elevate marketing and the CMO to cement the influence of marketing at the board table. It also has the potential to rob the CMO and Marketing of that influence if it is not embraced nor understood. Which CMO do you want to be?

Published earlier this week on the Association of American Advertisers website.