[Research Round-Up] The State of Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

(The marketing world has been captivated by ChatGPT for the past several weeks. The generative AI-powered chatbot developed by OpenAI has been widely hailed by some members of the marketing community, and widely criticized by others. While the jury is still out on the actual impact of ChatGPT on marketing, the use of artificial intelligence has been one of the hottest topics in marketing for the past few years. So, it seems appropriate that this month's Research Round-Up features two recent surveys that explore the state of AI in marketing.)

2022 State of Marketing and Sales AI Report by the Marketing AI Institute and Drift

Source:  Marketing AI Institute and Drift

• A survey of more than 600 marketers representing a wide range of industries and company sizes
• 49% of the respondents were director level or above
• 65% of the respondents were based in the United States, the UK, India, Canada, and Germany
• 38% of the respondents work exclusively in B2B - 41% work in both B2B and B2C
• Survey open from June 1, 2021 to June 1, 2022

The objective of this survey was to gain insight into how marketers are using artificial intelligence to support their activities and programs. Overall, the survey findings indicate that the use of AI in marketing is still in the early stages.

Two-thirds of the respondents (67%) said they were still learning how AI works and exploring use cases and technologies. Just 15% of the respondents reported that they had achieved wide-scale implementation of AI.

When asked how they would classify their understanding of AI terminology and capabilities, 45% of the respondents rated their level of understanding as beginner, 43% said intermediate, and only 12% said advanced. In addition, only 29% of the respondents said they are highly confident or very highly confident in their ability to evaluate AI-powered marketing technologies.

The research found that marketers recognize the importance of AI and expect its use to grow significantly in the near future. Fifty-one percent of the survey respondents said AI is very important or critically important to their marketing success over the next 12 months. And another 33% said it is somewhat important.

Over three-quarters of the survey respondents (77%) said they are currently automating 25% or less of their marketing tasks using AI, but a similar proportion of respondents (74%) said they expect more than 25% of their tasks will be automated using AI over the next five years.

The final part of the survey report provides interesting data on 50 marketing AI use cases across five categories of marketing activities - planning, production, promotion, personalization, and performance. This portion of the research should be particularly useful for any marketer who is evaluating potential AI use cases.

The state of AI in 2022 - and a half decade in review (McKinsey & Company)

Source:  McKinsey & Company

• This article discusses the major findings from the 2022 McKinsey Global Survey on AI
• Survey produced 1,498 responses
• Survey respondents represented "the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures."
• Survey was in the field from May 3 to May 22, 2022 and from August 15 to August 17, 2022

Note:  McKinsey's Global Survey on AI focuses on the use of artificial intelligence by business organizations, not exclusively on the use of AI in marketing. However, some of the survey findings are specifically about the use of AI by the marketing and sales function.

McKinsey has been conducting surveys to track the use of AI in business for the past five years, and the research shows that AI adoption has more than doubled during that period. In the 2022 edition of the survey, 50% of the survey respondents said they had adopted AI in at least one business function, up from 20% in the 2017 edition of the survey.

However, the survey also showed that the proportion of survey participants using AI has plateaued between about 50% and about 60% for the past four years.

The research found that the average number of AI capabilities that organizations use has doubled over the past four years, rising from 1.9 in the 2018 survey to 3.8 in the 2022 survey.

The investment in AI has increased significantly over the past five years. In the 2017 edition of McKinsey's survey, 40% of the survey respondents at organizations using AI said that more than 5% of their digital budgets went to AI; in the 2022 edition of the survey, more than half of the respondents reported that level of investment. In addition, 63% of the respondents in the 2022 survey said they expect their organization's investment in AI to increase over the next three years.

Of the ten most commonly adopted AI use cases identified by respondents in the 2022 survey, three were marketing and sales use cases - customer service analytics, customer segmentation, and customer acquisition and lead generation.

Lastly, 70% of the survey respondents at organizations using AI for marketing said their marketing and sales function realized revenue increases in 2021 from the adoption of AI.