It’s been a while since generative AI became a part of our day-to-day lives.
Since then, we’ve seen a lot of fascination with tech. But also doom-mongering, weird predictions, failures and success stories—and playing down the use case of generative AI.
Now, roughly two years after it took the marketing world by storm, we’ll look at how people in the industry are faring with generative AI. Are they using it—and for what?
Get your human eyes ready—and let’s jump in.
🖱️📈 Clicking on each individual chart will take you to its interactive board.
Which marketing departments have been using AI the most?
Copywriters? Designers? Nah, that’s too easy.
Here’s what it looked like at the end of last year:
It’s actually marketing analysts who are cooperating with AI the most, according to data.
The 39% percentage probably rose further in the past couple of months—and it does make sense.
ML and LLMs can analyze loads of customer data quickly and find patterns or trends, and better predict customer behavior. On top of that, LLMs can also deconstruct charts and find angles you might’ve missed.
All this ties well with market research being a close second (35%). And by that, they might mean customer surveys, competitor research, ideas, and similar… It makes sense.
AI can streamline this large-scale data collection and ideation and make it easier to analyze thanks to—you’ve guessed it—AI-powered analytics.
Only one fifth of respondents use AI for copywriting. And only 16% for image generation. SEOs are also not adopting AI that quickly, nor are customer service teams.
The Crew’s opinion: If used properly, AI can help most departments scale.
But while AI’s more creative tools are getting the most buzz, it’s actually the research and analytics departments that are benefiting most from generative AI. Quite a twist.
AI adoption will probably keep increasing
How do we know this?
Because most decision-makers in marketing appear to be banking on generative AI:
Do you see what we see? Only 6% of CMO respondents worldwide said to have no plans to adopt AI.
So if you’re holding any role in marketing, you’ve either:
- Already integrated some form of AI in your business (32%),
- Plan to do it very soon—across all or some departments (24%),
- Explore options in the future (39%).
Nothing is certain, of course. But it does point out that—if you’re in that 6% bracket—you’ll probably lag behind other marketing teams who are already on top of these tools.
It’s not FOMO. It’s data.
Another thing to consider is that AI is darn easy to adopt and integrate day-to-day:
As you see, the jump in AI usage from first to second year is super steep.
What does that say? Well, it didn’t take users long to go from the discovery phase to the usage phase. That, of course, paints a favorable picture for AI adoption in the future.
💼 What about the future of marketing jobs? A Gartner survey from February found that 87% of marketers are concerned about new technologies replacing their jobs.
And while the initial Gen AI boom came with layoffs and “job takeovers”, recent data shows that Gen AI is growing increasingly complementary with human work. Let’s see.
What is stopping marketers from using AI?
We know why marketers use AI. But the bigger question is—why isn’t everyone using it?
This might shed some light on the subject:
About a third of respondents haven’t used AI for marketing operations.
It looks like the main reason (over 40%) for not using AI is simply lacking understanding and knowledge, and 10.8% have a lack of technical expertise.
Which makes education responsible for half of respondents not adopting AI yet—a bottleneck that’s somewhat easy to solve within the business.
Financial concerns, such as high implementation costs (23.7%) and uncertainty of investment (10.8%) follow closely.
The Crew’s opinion: If AI remains an integral part of marketing tech—and all points to that—the gradual adoption and learning will probably solve the education part by itself.
On top of that, as AI technology evolves it should become more accessible, to the point where financial outlay may not be that significant.
Overall, it appears that these two obstacles will diminish in the future—which may see us adopt AI at an even quicker rate.
📊 The chart ablove says 71% of respondents think AI can outperform humans at their jobs. But research says that generative AI didn’t have much of an impact on replacing job roles.
And most of the roles replaced are those that are easy to automate, like supply chain optimization or legal research. Hmm. Maybe it’s not that bleak.
What upsides do global organizations see with AI adoption?
If businesses feel they’ll benefit from AI, they’ll most certainly use it.
And here’s what they see the most benefit from:
Overall, most businesses see AI as a tool that should up the pace and streamline operations.
And if more than half of all businesses see that AI improves efficiency and productivity, followed by cost-cutting, that’s a huge sign that they’ll look to adopt it.
On the other hand, organizations also think AI can improve their existing products and services (29%), encourage innovation (29%), enhance customer relations (23%), and uncover new ideas (19%).
The Crew’s opinion: The main reason for rapid AI adoption is efficiency and the ability to scale better, of course.
But some businesses see AI as more than just a tool for optimization; they view it as a strategic asset that can drive innovation, create new business models, and provide a competitive edge.
You might want to be the latter, as well.
🔀 Reshuffling the workforce: 26% of companies see AI as a way to shift workers from low-value to high-value tasks, according to the data above.
That’s another more optimistic outlook on the job market—where AI could open more internal pathways to more purposeful jobs, while “robots” take over the automated ones.
What is the economic aspect of AI adoption for marketers?
Let’s focus on the resource-saving element of generative AI.
First up, it saves time. Time to create ads, time to generate images, time to write emails, and such. And small businesses agree:
Most SMBs estimate that AI could save form 41 to 60 minutes per week. At the same time, only 8% think AI doesn’t significantly save their time.
Now let’s look at the money:
More than two thirds of all respondents claim that they are expected to save up to $5k a year by using Gen AI—while a significant chunk of them doesn’t expect any significant savings.
Around 15% expect to save $5k to $10k, while only around 13% expect huge savings—from $10k all the way to north of $25k.
So if you’re a small business—and want to invest in AI, don’t expect huge savings at the start unless you plan to replace an entire department—which isn’t really possible.
But it’s not only about the dough:
As you can see, AI can help marketers improve customer experience and conduct effective data analysis and market predictions. Some of these were already tackled in this article.
Thus, investing in AI can help you improve marketing operations first, and then see the results compound over time—better analytics lead to better insights, which leads to better targeted campaigns.
That helps you acquire higher quality customers, which over time become loyal due to better customer experience—helping you quantify all that with more revenue and growth.
Sounds easy, eh?
🤖 Marketers are adopting AI, but so are regular users. Millennials, for instance, have started using AI for shopping—which we’ve covered as a part of another Data Story.
What are other benefits of generative AI for marketers?
…besides saving time and money, of course.
Let’s check:
Market research (70%) is once again topping the charts when it comes to AI adoption.
The ability to quickly create and scale content, or use it as an ideation tool is just a bit behind.
Also, around half of all respondents say AI helps in improving customer experience, generating images, and streamlining back-end processes.
The most interesting bit, however, is that almost nobody thinks AI is a passing fad. Which is quite unusual for an emerging tech trend.
And here’s another interesting chart:
In AI, marketers are seeing opportunities to optimize and improve their funnel.
Plenty of respondents claim AI can improve real-time engagement and responsiveness to leads and help scale outbound marketing.
There’s also some that would use AI to personalize, segment, and optimize messaging and content.
So in a nutshell, your top and mid-funnel could benefit a lot from proper use of AI tools. Think about it.
🗞️ Further reading: Online users might be turning to AI for search and shopping. At least some of them are—and you can find out more in one of our earlier data stories.
How high are AI tools in the priority pecking order?
In the end, some good news:
People and real human work are still super important for companies. More than twice as important as spending extra budget on AI and automation, that is.
However, it looks like CMOs would rather spend leftover cash on AI than on analytics, insights, content, and customer experience—showing the growing importance of the tech.
But it may also indicate that CMOs see AI and automation as tools that can tackle these issues just as well.
Getting used to robots
Generative AI seems to be integrating into marketing quickly, but not in areas you might’ve thought. In fact, the highest adoption is not in content generation, but in research and analytics departments.
In any way, it’s obvious that marketers want to leverage the new tech for efficiency, while the only thing that’s stopping AI from even wider adoption is education and financial concerns. Something that might resolve itself in due time.
Some roles face the horrors of AI “taking their job”, but the tech’s complementary role with human work still signals a promising future for marketing tech.
We’ll follow the developments—and you can join us.
Level up your marketing skills at no cost!
Stacked Marketer was built to filter through the daily noise that exists in the marketing world. It’s a digital marketer’s 7-minute daily read, jam-packed with the latest news, trends, tech and actionable advice.
100% Free.
No Spam.
Unsubscribe any time.
