What marketers want to achieve by implementing artificial intelligence (AI)

Customer satisfaction and more ROI for the company, due to more opportunities for personalized real-time campaigns and automated workflows, are just some of the goals marketers want to achieve when using artificial intelligence. According to the recent Forrester and Emarsys study ‘Building Trust and Confidence: AI Marketing Readiness in Retail and E-Commerce’, around half of the retailers surveyed are still missing out on leveraging AI marketing. They lack the better understanding of customer behaviors, the report states.

Fundamental changes

Especially, retail corporations are hoping for a lot from AI-powered marketing. This technology supports their strategic work (79%) and brings more efficiency (86%) to their marketing teams. Thanks to AI automating workflows, marketers also hope to have more time to focus on value-generating tasks. They wish to reinvent their work.

However, the study also identified that 70% of business decision-makers believe that their marketing team lacks technical skills. They don’t necessarily understand AI marketing, which is a potential barrier to mainstream adoption of AI marketing technology.

Although the use of AI in the marketing industry could enable retail companies to succeed alongside industry giants, such as Amazon, the majority are currently struggling with the implementation. They have no proper strategy in place. The reason could be that a high percentage believes AI technologies are primarily made for analysts and scientists. They still just hope they will be able to work efficiently and effectively with it one fine day, too. Three-quarters admit that it is difficult for them to keep up with the digital transformation.

“For retailers to harness the value of AI marketing and combat competitive threats, such as Amazon’s growth into adjacent markets, requires a clear understanding of how AI can change the marketer’s role,” Allen Nance, CMO at Emarsys, explains. “We believe that an easy-to-use AI marketing...