These 6 Charts Show How Marketers Are Adopting GenAI

On Friday, President Biden brought seven AI companies, including Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Meta, to the White House for a summit on the fast-growing industry. All are committing to responsible innovation. "These companies have an obligation to make sure their technology is safe before releasing it to the public," said Biden, adding that they must secure their systems against cyber threats and manage the risk to national security. "These commitments, which the companies will implement immediately, underscore three fundamental principles: safety, security and trust." As developers focus on safety, security and trust, marketers are moving forward with implementation. In a recent Gartner survey, nearly half of marketing leaders (48%) said they are already using GenAI tools within their funnels; 43% said they are not at the moment, but plan to; and 6% revealed there are no plans to introduce the tools. Gartner surveyed 98 international marketing leaders between March and May. According to Gartner's Nicole Denman Greene, the issues of hidden bias, intellectual property and consumer perception are marketers' main concerns. "When you think about marketers trying to use GenAI techniques and tools in order to enable better customer experiences, the question then becomes: 'Is it really in service of the customer? Are they going to care [how] it's generated?'" she said. Of the marketing teams using GenAI now, the most common use case (76%) was content marketing, followed by 43% for product marketing. More than half (58%) are using it for content production, which includes generating copy for blogs and video editing, and 52% use it to produce copy for social media. More than a quarter (27%) use it to generate marketing design assets. Almost all marketers (94%) said they expect GenAI to become a regular part of their teams' tech stack within the next four years. That timespan for adoption struck Sean Betts, chief product and technology officer at OMG UK, as being "far too long" based on the volume of conversations he's had with clients. He said they anticipate most marketing organizations would adopt GenAI in the next six to 18 months. "Most of the disruption from GenAI will be in marketing planning and execution in the nearer term," he said. "We expect disruption to marketing strategy will develop over a longer timeframe as generative AI gains more capabilities around strategy and long-term planning." Benefits reported by the respondents working with GenAI include improved speed to market (56%), productivity (53%) and return on investment (34%). "Our consumer behavior is going to become so that we expect brands to be able to respond faster to big events," added Denman Greene. "And especially in regulated industries, they're going to need to find ways to get through compliance faster so that they can be responsive, because that's really what this is all going to do. It's going to enable us to create more content, it's going to enable us to dynamically insert message variations for different segments or personalized audiences." As far as barriers for adoption, the majority of marketers (56%) believe there is a professional skill gap when it comes to using GenAI. And 47% are wary of potential security issues the tools may introduce. Tom Head, founder and chief executive of technology consultancy Comparative Linguistics, feels the research shows the continued variance in understanding the impact GenAI could have. “People don’t fully grasp what’s going on, and this technology is going to create winners and losers,” he said. “Those who get their strategy right and harness the technology will create a competitive advantage, and those that don’t will either be left behind or succumb to the pitfalls of misuse … which could range from insignificant to catastrophic. “The ones that are building this into their teams and business are going to stretch away from the rest fairly soon," Head added. In a similar vein, Mark Sandys, Diageo's chief innovation officer, said while speaking on stage at Cannes Lions last month: "The brands and companies that embrace the opportunity of AI and use it to complement human creativity will create significant capacity." Sandys went on to showcase how Diageo has begun to ideate its packaging design using an in-house tool and also revealed that AI was being used to predict future flavor trends and to help find the most effective media programs. How do consumers feel? In a separate study, generated through the Gartner Consumer Community, 303 respondents were asked about their perception of GenAI tools. The survey, taken between June 28 and July 5, revealed that 53% believe the tools will not be a positive force. Two-thirds expressed concern about it producing discrimination or bias. This was an issue confirmed by Chris Duffey, strategic development manager at Adobe Creative Cloud, during a recent Adweek roundtable discussion. Duffey revealed the meta-tagging that informs the technology would have a bias based on the gender or experience of the individual who trains it. This Brand's Social Experiment Uses AI to Expose the Dark Side of 'Sharenting' “If a woman starts to tag things, that is quite different than if a man does, so this is really surfacing the importance of diversity in the meta-tagging of the assets,” Duffey explained. “This is really raising the importance of diversity in the industry.” "We are going to expect every brand to be hyper-relevant to our situation," added Gartner's Denman Greene. "So for brands that can't do that, and aren't using AI, they are going to get left behind." Earlier this month, Forrester, through its Top 10 Emerging Technologies report, predicted that GenAI will begin to deliver significant return on investment for most enterprises in the next two to four years. It did caveat that in order to benefit from its use, there would be risks that must be navigated by each company including trustworthiness, evolving regulations and potential intellectual property complications. “While many emerging technologies show great promise, it is imperative for tech leaders to assess whether these technologies can deliver value and if their business can navigate their associated risks,” said Brian Hopkins, Forrester vp, emerging technology portfolio. As President Biden put it Friday alongside leaders from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and OpenAI: "We'll see more technology change in the next few years than we've seen in the last 50 years. The group here will be critical in shepherding that innovation with responsibility and safety."

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These 6 Charts Show How Marketers Are Adopting GenAI and What Worries Them

Gartner studied how marketing teams are using the technology

Stephen Lepitak

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Stephen Lepitak