The State of AI for Marketing (and Travel)

It's been a while now that we've been following the Marketing AI Institute. Although its focus is heavily on the U.S. market, we do draw interesting findings from the contents they post (be it in the form of podcasts or their recent book). In this edition of our Monday Learn Day, we would want to take our readers through the results of a survey that ran from June 2021 to June 2022. Its results just got published. Who is this for?

1. Marketers (obviously ??) - given its source
2. Decision makers who'd like to know the readiness of marketing departments for the AI-powered steamer that is coming their way.
3. We'll also translate part of the results to the travel sector - as you know. In July and August, our "Summer Travel Posts" are all about the leisure, travel and tourism industry.

First important lesson:

"80% of what marketers do every day will be intelligently automated to some degree the next 3 to 5 years."

Marketers know and feel what is coming, they recognize this transformative impact and they acknowledge that AI is critical to success in 2022. If you look at the "top 3" of where respondents thought AI would have most impact, we find:

1. Personalized consumer experiences
2. Accelerate revenue
3. Getting more actionable insights

To our friends in the travel and tourism industry. What if you could use deepfake to create memories of travels that have not yet come to pass? What if you could picture potential customers a perfect walkthrough beyond the pictures that are used on websites and travel magazines. Couldn't that give you "an edge" unseen in the industry? We believe it could. The same with "actionable insights." What if you would have detailed metrics of your prospects' search behavior - you'd know upfront what kind of trip they would be into. You might even have an idea of budget? Leveraging those insights will be the differentiating factor tomorrow! But to reap the benefits tomorrow, you must start with it today.

To be fair, education will be needed if marketers want to start reaping the benefits of AI. Indeed, the report we read stated that of the 700+ respondents who completed the survey,

• 67% considered their organization still in the exploratory phases
• Only 15% argued they were "scaling" AI for marketing

Lack of education and training was still considered the "main barrier to adoption" (65% of respondents mentioned this), with lack of awareness (52%) and lack of talent (43%) a close second and third.

We have argued before that talent will only become more scarce and very hard to hold on to if that talent is not a key component of your organizational structure. In the case of our industry; focus on recruiting and developing top travel experts who are obsessed with what they do. Trying to hire and hold on to data analysts or data engineers: apart from maybe a few global players, we would advise against bidding in this race as it will end up costing a lot of money with limited reach. Instead, look at what AI experts can do for you.