• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, December 26, 2024

Consumers and marketers both had a rough time in 2024. 

On the consumer side, inboxes were crammed with political email from candidates, from the presidential level on down. The mission was less to educate than to pull in money. Moreover, there were scams of all types. 

But the big story for marketers in 2024, as in 2023, was AI. It was deployed for everything from content creation to personalization — 88% of all email senders were experimenting with it, according to a recent study by Kaltura. 

Even more importantly, technology and information officers now expect every software package to have embedded AI tools, according to a set of predictions from Lucidworks.

What will they be used for? On the ecommerce front, AI-driven tools will generate “dynamic content, custom product configurations and hyper-relevant product imagery (i.e., automated AR) based on customer behavior and preferences using real-time data and deep learning models,” says Phil Ryan, senior vice president, strategy & innovation at Lucidworks. 

And conversational input fields will become “the standard interface for most websites moving forward. It'll make searching for information, browsing/navigating, and completing tasks more personalized and the interactions more human-like,” says Jaisy De La Cruz, vice president, global revenue enablement at Lucidworks. 

Don’t think it will easy. As Kaltura found out, marketers are troubled by data security issues, integration, ethical and privacy concerns and other challenges. But rest assured AI will be at the center of the conversation.