The landscape of Marketing and IT is undergoing a seismic shift, driven by the relentless evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI). New AI apps are rapidly seeping into every facet of business, reshaping customer experiences, streamlining operations, and enabling workflow automation.
This presents a vast opportunity for CMOs and CIOs, yet also a disruptive force demanding rapid adaptation. To stay ahead of the AI trend, these key decision-makers must become active participants.
International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that by 2027, Generative AI (GenAI) will assume 30 percent of traditional marketing mundane tasks -- such as website optimization, data analysis, customer segmentation, and hyper-personalization.
GenAI Applications Market Development
According to the IDC survey results, 37.8 percent of CMOs indicated they have already begun implementing GenAI technologies. Also, 51 percent of CMOs say their top business objective in the next 12 months is to improve lead generation through superior quality content marketing.
The CMO role is evolving towards being more data-driven. With factors such as GenAI, marketing content fatigue, phasing out of cookies, and a shift towards an open advertising ecosystem, leaders must stay updated on evolving trends.
IDC’s predictions highlight that AI will drive a greater level of automation across tasks which will transform the marketing role to leverage advanced skillsets and cross-functional collaboration.
The following are predictions for the Asia-Pacific region:
- Dynamic Journey Orchestration: By 2028, the A2000 will utilize data & AI to automate 30 percent of actions in the buyer journey across marketing and sales, shifting to sensing, dynamically delivering to the adventure the buyer chooses.
- GenAI Eats Marketing: By 2027, GenAI will assume 30 percent of traditional marketing's mundane tasks such as SEO, content and website optimization, customer data analysis, segmentation, lead scoring and hyper-personalization.
- Bidirectional AI Marketing Takeover: Trying to reduce content ingestion, by 2026 more than 50 percent of consumers will employ AI through mobile devices to discover, evaluate, and purchase most of the products and services they want.
- Conversational Marketing Goes Mainstream: Pervasive sentiment and intent AI will propel 50 percent of A500 firms to conduct all marketing journeys as real-time, two-way conversations by 2026, improving leads to purchase conversions by 40 percent.
In the near term (2024-2026), the focus will be on consumer-controlled AI, value creation from zero and first-party data, a more open advertising environment and intelligent journey orchestration driven by contextualized conversations.
In the longer term (2027-2029), there will be a shift to automation of traditional marketing tasks, employ of hosted communities quantum sensing and intent AI, expansion of marketers' skills, and greater collaboration.
IDC's additional marketing-related predictions include:
- Create Fans for Brands: By 2027, 60 percent of A1000 companies will seek to create fans, not just customers, by using hosted communities to drive loyalty, engagement, ideation, and first-party data that becomes an annuity.
- Trust-based Marketing: By 2026, 55 percent of A1000 companies will adopt trust-based marketing programs, harness greater value from zero- and first-party data, and improve marketing profitability by 40 percent.
- Quantum Sensing Marketing: By 2029, 10 percent of the A1000 will employ quantum sensing in their marketing efforts and build contextual experiences to better understand the feelings, perceptions, and intentions of customers.
- Walled Gardens Open Up: By 2026, 20 percent of walled garden vendor revenue will come from indirect sources as pressure from consumers, marketers, and governments encourages more open tactics and greater interoperability.
- The Creative Scientist: By 2027, 30 percent of marketers in A1000 firms will possess a blend of data analysis, experience design, storytelling, and creativity skillsets, fulfilling emerging roles for marketing’s experience era.
- CMO Orchestrates Customer Value: By 2027, 50 percent of CMOs in A1000 organizations will be primarily measured for their ability to deliver customer value outcomes, forcing 30 percent to evolve into becoming orchestrators of customer value.
"There will be a clear shift towards marketers expanding their skillsets to include capabilities such as storytelling, data analytics, and greater cross-functional collaboration with other teams such as IT, sales, and operations," said Lavanya Jindal, research analyst at IDC.
Outlook for GenAI Marketing Apps Growth
That said, I believe CMOs and CIOs must understand AI application trends, anticipate the impact on their respective functions, and strategically position themselves to ride the next wave of digital business transformation.
This critical juncture demands technical prowess, a visionary mindset, a willingness to embrace change, and the courage to boldly navigate through the uncharted future of GenAI-powered go-to-market innovation.