• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 10, 2024

Ninety percent of companies plan to invest in generative AI for marketing by 2025, but a whopping 90% of CMOs admit they do not fully understand the potential impact on their business.

Based on complexities of the technology, many have discovered it takes collaborative efforts between marketing, information technology and legal departments to overcome the very long list of challenges cited in a joint report published Tuesday by analytics company SAS and market research agency Coleman-Parkes.

The survey of 300 marketers worldwide from a variety of sectors adopting GAI examines specific ways marketers deploy the technology, and many of the challenges faced.

Privacy, using public and priority data, proving return on investments (ROI), absence of tools, and transitioning to GAI are some of the major challenges businesses have found when it comes to implementing the technology. The ones they foresee include accuracy, compatibility, internal expertise, costs, and insufficient data.

The research shows marketers encounter obstacles as they implement the technology, especially when they do not work with IT.

Some of the obstacles include fully understanding GAI capabilities, progressing past simplistic use cases to achieve more, embedding trust and security, and developing responsible AI to avoid regulatory noncompliance.

Despite those obstacles, 75% already use GAI, while 25% plan to do so in the next two years. Some 63% of marketers use the technology at least daily, compared with 29% in IT departments.

Some 63% of marketers are already using the technology, hoping to save time and costs, while 62% want to improve risk management and compliance and 60% hope to enable more efficient processing of large data sets, which requires knowing what data sets to use.

Knowledge of those datasets will fulfill one goal of marketing -- to enhance personalization --and some 58% also want to improve innovation.

About 92% of marketers using GAI see improved personalization, while 89% have seen customer satisfaction and retention, 88% can process large data sets and 88% see accuracy in predictive analytics.

In contrast, only 68% of IT professionals report an increase in accuracy in predictive analytics as an outcome of GAI.

Four in 10 marketing departments already use synthetic data in marketing processes and another third would consider doing so.

CTOs make the primary adoption decision when it comes to GAI, the study found, and 66% of the time it belongs to them. About 55% of the time the decision belongs to CIOs, while about 29% it belongs to IT directors and marketers, and 18% of the time it belongs to CTOs or CDOs.