Artificial Intelligence Isn't Booting Marketers, for Now.

"Generative AI has already been used to create advertising materials and reduce a certain amount of grunt work. But one question hangs over marketers: How soon will it come for their jobs?

The timeline is unclear, but AI's ability to draw on pools of data to help create ads could begin to outpace human performance. And pressure is growing to embrace the technology in the name of both enhanced productivity and costs savings -- including through layoffs.

The biggest long-term impact, though, may be in how AI changes the nature of jobs in marketing. Executives say they will inevitably need to reconfigure workloads and recruit people with AI expertise, while some say the shifts will leave their teams with fewer employees and smaller budgets.

For now, CMOs want to determine how artificial intelligence can help with tasks such as replying to social-media posts and creating personalized messages for individual users, said Laura Beaudin, a partner at consulting firm Bain & Co.

"From a CMO's perspective, they are going to need to be one of the first to have a very solid explanation of what it means and how they're adopting it," Beaudin said.

Marketers' top goal for AI for now is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their campaigns, according to a survey conducted by market research firm NewtonX for The Wall Street Journal. When asked to name relevant objectives, 78% of marketers picked greater efficiency, while 63% said they think AI will help them produce new kinds of content. 

Executives also think AI will help them cut costs by around 13% on average, according to the survey. Internal head count reductions will be the biggest source of those savings, according to 19% of survey participants.

Yet job losses will remain modest for some time due to legal uncertainty around AI, according to market research firm Forrester." [1]

1. EXCHANGE --- Artificial Intelligence Isn't Booting Marketers, for Now. Coffee, Patrick. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 24 June 2023: B.3.