Key Takeaways
According to BCG’ 2024 survey in partnership with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) of over 200 CMOs in 7 countries, CMOs increasingly view generative AI (GenAI) not only as a way to improve efficiencies but also to unlock growth.
- More than 75% of the CMOs in our survey are optimistic and confident about the future impact of GenAI on their organizations. Over half are forecasting at least 5% topline growth in their GenAI-related business cases and are investing accordingly.
- Around 80% of CMOs have already deployed GenAI to make internal processes faster, more productive, and less labor intensive, especially in areas such as content creation and social media engagement.
- However, the most promising strategic areas for GenAI solutions—such as personalization, customer insight generation, and predictive analytics—will take longer to develop and deploy at scale.
As CMOs harness AI, strategic areas like personalization, customer insights, and predictive analytics will require a thoughtful approach to fully integrate and scale.
CMOs are navigating a tough environment, balancing demands to achieve short-term improvements in marketing efficiency and effectiveness with long-term investments in digital transformations, tech stack upgrades, and AI adoption. Boards, CEOs, and CFOs are scrutinizing marketing’s overall contribution to performance and whether recent technology investments are paying off.
In the face of this pressure, many CMOs view GenAI as a tool to improve efficiencies and unlock growth. A majority of the respondents in our April 2024 survey of over 200 CMOs in 7 countries, conducted in partnership with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), cited the adoption of AI or GenAI as one of their top five priorities over the next year. Around 80% said that GenAI is already improving automation, speed, and productivity. But the transformation is not progressing at the same speed for all, because it is exposing current shortcomings in the core operating models and data foundations that marketers will need to deploy GenAI at scale.
CMOs remain very optimistic about the promise of GenAI, as Exhibit 1 shows. In the year since our previous survey in April 2023, however, their expectations have shifted from wide-eyed to pragmatic. They have identified the operational areas where they can scale GenAI initiatives rapidly and which initiatives will take longer to scale. They have learned firsthand where they can automate certain tasks to achieve step-change improvements in efficiency—and where human intervention will remain essential.
CMOs are also using AI tools to enrich how they “listen” to social media.
CMOs Are Balancing Ambition and Reality
GenAI can help create the necessary content variation for personalization, but it takes predictive AI to know what action to take next with each customer.
Three out of five CMOs say they are the driving force behind the funding and investment for GenAI.
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