A quarter of senior marketers say their business has upskilled for genAI

A quarter of client-side senior executives say they have already conducted skill-building programmes centred on generative AI, according to Adobe’s 2024 Digital Trends survey.

Another two thirds (65%, figure 1) say upskilling is either a work in progress or currently in the planning stage, with a further 10% admitting they are yet to start or have no plans to upskill.

Respondents are split almost identically when also asked about their readiness as regards aligning an AI roadmap with broader business goals, and in identifying KPIs to assess AI impact.

Strategic oversight lacking?

The report authors posit that more strategic oversight is needed if generative AI deployment is to live up to expectations, given the fact that fully two-thirds of senior executives say they are optimistic the technology will deliver significant or major business transformation in everything from analytics to customer service, content workflows to sales processes (see figure 2).

Generative AI’s first use case is content

As for what practitioners are actually intending to do with generative AI in 2024, figure 3 shows that creative workflows and asset production are most popular (41% say they intend to deploy in this area in 2024), followed by customer journey optimisation and assisting with self-service (both 38%), updating content in real time (36%) and improving campaign iteration through testing (31%).

These findings and others in the report demonstrate clearly that content is the first and possibly the most pragmatic (or easily realised) use case for generative AI. Though this comes as no surprise, arguably more skill-building programmes are necessary (along with strategic oversight) to ensure marketing teams don’t run before they can walk.

Upskilling is currently in lockstep with AI roadmap development (as shown in figure 1), but the report also reminds us that, above all else, consumers want to know their data is being used responsibly if their expectations are to be met. The importance of governance and ethical AI use is no doubt one reason why nearly half of senior marketers plan to prioritise basic AI understanding for all employees in 2024 (figure 4).

Skills training for key staff and basic AI understanding across the board are top priorities for 2024

Senior client-side execs identified their top priorities for preparing for generative AI in 2024 as providing advanced AI skills to key team members (48%) and ensuring all employees have a basic understanding of AI (46%). These were closely followed by ‘creating policies for ethical AI use and data security’ (45%) and ‘developing and implementing AI governance frameworks’ (44%).

With the consumer part of the survey revealing that some people are still not comfortable with the use of generative AI to make chatbots more helpful (23%) or to generate imagery to make marketing messages more engaging (32%), it’s surely vital that the wider marketing organisation is quickly trained to understand the strengths and the weaknesses of this technology.