Report: Marketers like AI-based tools, but think they already have them

Report: Marketers like AI-based tools, but think they already have them. Marketers sure love them some artificial intelligence (AI). And that’s a key conclusion from another recent study, conducted by Forrester Consulting for Adgorithms, which has created an AI-driven marketing platform called Albert. The study, “AI: The Next Generation of Marketing,” conducted in-depth surveys with 150 marketing executives. The key finding: “Forrester found that confusion and misunderstanding of AI-driven marketing is quite prevalent today. However, when the benefits of AI-driven marketing were proposed to them, they were overwhelmingly likely to find these benefits appealing.” For Forrester, AI is about “having autonomy, making ongoing improvements, and delivering powerful insights while using less manual time and bandwidth.” Unsurprisingly, an overwhelming 94 percent of respondents reacted positively to the idea of a tool with “continuous, autonomous optimization across channels,” and 88 percent reacted positively to a tool that reduces time required for preparing reports and analysis. This report focuses quite a bit on the idea that full-funnel contextual marketing is one of the most useful results of AI in marketing tools. One source of the confusion could be that marketing tools have been selling for years the idea of targeting “the right information at the right time to the right person,” which is a good shorthand for context. The clearer promise of AI involves autonomous platforms that make many of their own decisions — based on key performance indicators and business rules — and that generate insights from data well beyond the questions that marketers typically ask. Over 40 percent of marketers in our study told us they thought they had adopted AI-driven marketing today, reflecting a belief that their targeting capabilities and automation meant that AI was operating behind the scenes.