Despite risk-management challenges, 14% of 405 senior marketing
technologists participating in a Gartner survey said they have invested in tools based on generative artificial intelligence (GAI), but another 63% said they plan to do the same within the next 24
months. Just slightly more than half see greater reward than risk.
The data is part of the 2023 Gartner Marketing Technology Survey, which explores how marketing technologies enable outcomes
and impact the use of these technologies on martech investments.
The study includes organizational strategies used to develop marketing technology capabilities, as well as the growing interest
in emerging technologies to support marketing strategies.
Decisions around marketing technology -- from vendor selection to implementation -- continue to shift into IT departments within an
organization. And it is obvious why, with technology like GAI supporting many of the marketing functions now being used.
Survey participants said the acquisition of martech budgets is a joint
responsibility between marketing and IT. Some 32% said marketing leads with guidance from IT, where as 19% said IT leads with guidance from marketing.
The creation of marketing technology
roadmaps, for the most part, remains the responsibility of both areas. Some 29% of participants said marketing owns the activity, while 29% said marketing leads with guidance from IT, and 20% said IT
leads with guidance from marketing.
Capabilities such as customer data management also have moved from marketing to IT, as 78% of organizations report centralizing customer data management in
information technology units.
Changing the way employees think across organizations, especially in marketing, requires a focus on capabilities instead of shiny technologies. More technology
requires a higher understanding.
Gartner outlines several impediments to this logic, but the fourth most common named by survey respondents will cause the most concern in years to come. The
difficulty in identifying and recruiting martech talent.
Today’s shallow talent pool and tomorrow’s generation of technologies drive talent gaps and a lack of capacity to
facilitate the change to which a large share of organizations aspire. Sixty-two percent of respondents said the current technology and talent environment needs so much attention that they won’t
be able to spare resources to pursue using new emerging technologies like GAI.
Another 53% of respondents said they are too overwhelmed by existing technologies and projects to explore
emerging technology, and 59% said their struggle with existing tech gives them little appetite to add emerging tech.
Martech teams are struggling, according to Gartner. About 62% agree the
availability of skilled talent limits their understand or use of emerging technologies. Some 59% of IT policies or strategies constrain use of emerging technologies, and 59% struggle with integrating
existing technology so much so that it provides little reason to add it. Forty-seven percent also said customers are not rapid adopters of emerging technology, so they have little interest.