• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, March 12, 2018

While artificial intelligence in various forms of virtual assistants has caught the eye of many in business, its adoption by marketing leaders may be a bit lagging.

A quarter of customer service and support operations will include virtual customer assistant or chatbot technology within two years, according to recent predictions by Gartner. That would be an increase from just 2% last year.

More than half of businesses already have invested in virtual customer assistants for customer service, Gartner says.

However, the picture for chatbots in the world of marketers may not be so rosy.

Only 7% of marketing decision-makers say they are currently using AI-powered chatbots, according to a survey of 500 senior marketers worldwide, with most based in the U.S. or U.K. The study was conducted by ClickZ for Freedman International.

For this year, 27% of marketers said it is something they plan to think about. The most popular reasons for not using artificial intelligence were internal teams not being ready for it and not having the budget for it.

A relatively small number (13%) of marketers said their customers were not ready for AI.

Looks like the full-blown rollout of chatbots by marketers will remain a bit down the road.