If you’re using AI only to drive campaign decisions like email timing, you’re making a mistake.
It means you’re stuck in 2016 and are relying on AI for assistive or operating use, judging by Harnessing AI’s Potential, a Forrester Consulting paper commissioned by Albert.
AI use or marketing has grown from 43% in 2016 to 88% today, but “this spike correlates with declining brand reliance on campaigns,” the study notes.
And marketing tech that focuses only on campaign deployment “is inadequate to effectively engage today’s empowered customers who expect highly personalized interactions delivered at the right time and place,” it adds.
However, only 26% of Ai users describe their technology as “AI-autonomous, or collaborative in practice,” the study continues. The remainder are relying on AI for manual decision making to send campaigns.
What does autonomous mean?
It is a technological setup through which marketers focus “less on outbound communication and more on creating a continuous cycle of insight-driven personalized interactions.” That would include triggered email.
advertisement
advertisement
Consider it this way. The two main attributes of assistive AI are that it:
In contrast, autonomous AI provides these benefits:
There is certainly a demand for the more advanced solution. Almost 90% of those surveyed say they need to “personalized marketing across channels, devices, and customer life-cycle stages (e.g., discovery, exploration, purchase),” Forrester reports.
Forrester clarifies that this should include making “broad decisions in instances where nuance is needed.”
So how are brands using AI?
Of those surveyed, 54% Say they are AI-assisted across more than one channel. Another 20% are AI-assisted in one channel.
Only 19% are AI-autonomous in more than one channel, and 7% are autonomous in a single channel.
And how well are their marketing stacks supporting their key objectives? They say their technology helps them:
Pretty good, right? But marketers still face these challenges:
To end on a positive note, here are the outcomes AI-autonomous marketers have enjoyed:
What’s more, 39% say AI can play a role in creative development, and 34% believe it can provide insights to other business functions, the paper says.
Forrester surveyed 156 marketing, customer intelligence, and ecommerce decision makers and decision influencers.