- Marketing chiefs are expected to ramp up expenditures on talent specializing in generative artificial intelligence (AI) to make their dollars go further, according to the newest forecasts from Gartner’s marketing practice.
- By 2026, 80% of top creative roles can have a much bigger mandate around generative AI to realize “differentiated results,” the researcher said. Generative AI’s positioning around boosting productivity will lead creatives to bet on more strategic applications of the technology, including innovation in services and products.
- The fast-emerging field may also end in a 50% or more decrease in organic search traffic to brands by 2028, impacting the power to drive sales. That shift, coupled with questions over authenticity in an increasingly artificial environment, should spur marketing leaders to invest more in AI guardrails.
Generative AI poses a double-edged sword for marketers, as underscored in the newest outlook from Gartner. On the one hand, the power to automate more processes faster could open the door to fresh creative possibilities and fewer time spent on marketing busywork. That promise will lead CMOs to seriously increase their spending on AI talent, a trend that might potentially profit agencies which are quickly constructing out infrastructure to support the technology.
Agencies have been eager to jump on the generative AI train, anticipating the boom could buoy demand for marketing services. WPP, the world’s largest ad-holding group, earlier this yr struck a take care of chipmaker Nvidia around developing a content engine powered by generative AI. Forecasts expect that firms of all stripes will soon bill themselves as AI experts in the identical way that many today claim to focus on digital to the purpose where the term carries less weight than it once did.
At the identical time, the growing prevalence of AI and its association with disinformation will create problems for CMOs and their marketing service providers. By 2027, one-fifth of brands will leverage an absence of AI of their business as a degree of differentiation, according to Gartner, looking to meet demands for authenticity.
Seventy-two percent of consumers surveyed by Gartner called out the potential for AI-based platforms to spread false and misleading information, pointing to underlying trust issues. As social media continues to wrestle with bot problems, toxic discourse and pretend news, over half of respondents (53%) think the channel has decayed, with 70% believing generative AI integrations could further harm the user experience.
“Mistrust and lack of confidence in AI’s abilities will drive some consumers to hunt down AI-free brands and interactions,” said Emily Weiss, senior principal researcher at Gartner’s marketing practice, within the report. “A subsection of brands will shun AI and prioritize more human positioning. This ‘acoustic’ concept will probably be leveraged to distance brands from perceptions of AI-powered businesses as impersonal and homogeneous.”
By 2026, 60% of marketing chiefs will employ tools like content-authenticating technology and user-generated content to protect against AI-related pitfalls. CMOs may also have to contend with the impact on search as top platforms like Google and Microsoft’s Bing get up generative AI features that might lower the quantity of web sites users visit. Among consumers surveyed by Gartner, 79% expect to use AI-enhanced search in the following yr and over two-thirds (70%) expressed some level of trust in the outcomes provided by these services.
“Marketing leaders whose brands depend on search engine marketing should consider allocating resources to testing other channels so as to diversify,” said Weiss.
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