Back in 2023 I had the pleasure of presenting a session on AI in Martech at the Clevertouch “Marketing in 2030” event (cleverly entitled "AI, AI...Oh! by our Marketing Director). The event itself was an opportunity to look ahead at some of the key trends in Martech, and provide valuable insight into where things would be heading in the years ahead. Naturally, AI was a key focus for many of the marketers in the room.
As the dust now settles on the recent Adobe Summit and their plethora of exciting announcements around AI & B2B 3.0, as well as with Salesforce’s announcements on their Agentforce suite, it feels like now is a good time to look back briefly at a core message I delivered two years ago, and how it’s turned out to be more relevant today than I anticipated it being back then.
Rest assured, despite the nature and topic covered in this post, and my overall love of AI technologies, this blog post was written purely by myself! A little bit of AI was used to help make sure things made grammatical sense (even good ol’ spell check can’t help me there)…
Keep the Marketers in Marketing
During my talk, one of the key messages I presented was the need to “keep the marketers in marketing” because despite all the hype, excitement and growth of AI at the time, the reality was that AI really wasn’t at all ready to replace your marketing people.
The truth is that even as of today, that remains a core message of mine because I truly believe that while AI has grown tremendously over recent years, the opportunity for marketing leaders is clearly to leverage AI to enhance, enable and empower your marketers, not replace them.
Adobe & Salesforce seem to agree…
All the recent announcements of AI agents within Martech have very much reinforced my views that we want to ensure marketing is lead by AI-enabled marketers, rather than being led by AI marketers.
Salesforce directly mention “supervise” with their Agentforce developer tools and is a clear reference to how you’ll still need people to oversee the vital output of this powerful toolset.
And Adobe is no different, as when talking about the Adobe Experience Manager Sites Optimizer, they make it clear that “the AI agent can identify the issues and propose adjustments. Marketers can then instantly implement suggestions in one click”
You still need, and more importantly want marketers to be making those decisions the AI is recommending. No AI agent, tool or service is perfect, and there is a myriad of reasons why these AI agents could get things wrong, so that sense check and opportunity to refine the content to meet your brand expectations is still very much beneficial.
Start enabling your marketers with AI today
The use of AI technologies and tools by your teams is as instrumental in their work as the internet, it’s critical to their capabilities and helping them to deliver better campaigns and experiences for your end-users.
AI is more than just content generation. A message that Adam Sharp delivered during the very same Marketing 2030 event two years ago - it's about data, it’s about attribution (or ROI) or about improving your workflows and so much more. As impressive as it is to have AI generate email templates, images or to proofread a blog post, that’s only scratching the surface of the possibilities and capabilities.
A truly AI-enabled business will be able to deliver hyper-personalised, real-time engaging campaigns without the typically required days or even months of planning. You will be able to support your marketers in achieving far more than they could today and these technologies are here - now - and available for you to use.
So yes, it’s only been two years, we’re still a long way from 2030 but I feel confident that however AI moves forward, organisations will still need to rely on the skills and capabilities of their marketing people to realise the opportunity and potential that AI offers.
Connect with me to keep in touch and read about my thoughts and ideas on Martech, AI and more!