• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Here’s the memo to email marketers and B2B marketing teams in general: Stop fantasizing about how artificial intelligence is going to solve all your problems. On the contrary, it will create new ones, judging by a new study by Optimizely.  

Case in point: your tech stack. You may say it is fully integrated—45% of B2B leaders do—but the same study shows that 81% are running on a fragmented system. Only 19% are operating on a single integrated system, although U.S. firms are more likely to do so.  

Then there’s the so-called “revision tax.” Of those polled, 75% of B2B marketing leaders spend three hours or more per week editing copy, fact-checking and correcting AI output.

“That’s not a rounding error. It’s a second job that nobody budgeted for,” the study says.  

Even with all that editing, 25% confess that under deadline pressure, they often publish AI-generated content that is not totally on-brand. And 30% admit they pass off AI copy as their own original work. 

Your enthusiasm for AI is likely to depend on your pay grade. Over half C-level types believe their systems are fully aligned and that the staff has been liberated by AI, but the percentages of vice presidents, directors, managers and analysts who say that is much lower.  

Meanwhile, it is easy to get overwhelmed by what the study calls “invisible work.” The biggest drains on time are:

• Hallucination review—48% 
• Copy-pasting between tools that don’t talk to each other—40% 
• Legal and compliance checking—37%

Only 4% say AI saves time at every step of the process. 

The result is copy that is functional at best. “This is the gap that volume metrics don’t capture,” the study continues. “Speed improves. And the thing that made the brand distinctive—the tone, the point of view, the instinct—slowly gets averaged out.”

Want to see how your brand holds up? Ask yourself this: “If you stripped your logo off your AI-generated content and put a competitor's on it, would your customers notice?” 

The answer to that swap test is as follows:  

“For 15% of B2B marketing leaders, the honest answer is probably not. Two thirds of respondents (66%) have some level of concern about AI driving a convergence in brand voice and content quality — though for most, it's a risk they're managing rather than a crisis they're facing.” 

But even while 85% believe they would pass the swap test, a mere 30% feel their brand voice is unmistakable. 

That may account, at least in part, for the finding that 65% would like to halt their AI rollout for 90 days to reset things. 

Optimizely surveyed 2,003 B2B marketing leaders throughout several countries.