CMOs’ Strategies Shaping Their GenAI Future by Mark Abraham, David Edelman and Lauren Wiener

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, CMOs are seizing the opportunity to harness the power of GenAI. As they navigate this transformative journey, CMOs are shaping their future by strategically leveraging AI to drive growth, enhance customer experiences, and stay ahead of the competition.

Discover how CMOs are pioneering the GenAI revolution and learn the key strategies you can implement to future-proof your marketing efforts in this insightful article.

Genres

Marketing, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Business Strategy, Digital Transformation, Customer Experience, Innovation, Leadership, Data-Driven Decision Making, Future Trends

The article “How CMOs Are Shaping Their GenAI Future” by Mark Abraham, David Edelman, and Lauren Wiener explores the ways in which Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are leveraging Generative AI (GenAI) to transform their marketing strategies and drive business success.

The authors highlight the potential of GenAI to revolutionize various aspects of marketing, including personalization, content creation, and customer engagement. They emphasize the importance of CMOs taking a proactive approach in shaping their GenAI future by understanding the technology, identifying key opportunities, and developing a strategic roadmap for implementation.

The article provides valuable insights into the challenges and considerations CMOs must navigate as they embrace GenAI, such as data privacy, ethical concerns, and the need for human oversight. Through real-world examples and expert opinions, the authors offer practical guidance on how CMOs can effectively integrate GenAI into their marketing efforts to achieve measurable results and stay competitive in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Review

“How CMOs Are Shaping Their GenAI Future” is a timely and insightful article that sheds light on the transformative impact of Generative AI on the marketing industry. The authors, Mark Abraham, David Edelman, and Lauren Wiener, provide a comprehensive overview of the opportunities and challenges CMOs face as they navigate the GenAI landscape.

The article’s strength lies in its practical approach, offering actionable strategies and real-world examples that CMOs can learn from and apply to their own organizations. The authors effectively illustrate the potential of GenAI to revolutionize various aspects of marketing, from personalization to content creation, while also addressing the ethical and operational considerations that come with AI adoption.

The article strikes a balance between showcasing the benefits of GenAI and cautioning CMOs about the need for responsible implementation and human oversight. Overall, “How CMOs Are Shaping Their GenAI Future” serves as a valuable resource for marketing leaders seeking to understand and leverage the power of GenAI to drive business success in the AI-driven future.

Recommendation

According to Boston Consulting Group research, GenAI is a hot topic among marketers, with the vast majority expressing confidence in its potential benefits to their organization. However, marketing teams must be strategic when adopting GenAI. CMOs are the driving force behind GenAI adoption at organizations, which means they have the power to shape the way companies embrace this powerful tool. It can be tempting to overly focus on boosting efficiencies through automation at the expense of innovation. Learn why the most successful campaigns combine both GenAI and predictive AI with human creativity and emotional intelligence.

Take-Aways

• CMOs are optimistic about GenAI’s potential, but should prepare for brand risks as well.
• You won’t become a personalization leader with GenAI alone — leverage predictive AI and human capabilities.
• Focus on innovation — not just automation — when adopting GenAI tools.

Summary

CMOs are optimistic about GenAI’s potential, but should prepare for brand risks as well.

CMOs see generative AI’s (GenAI) potential, viewing it as a way to trigger growth and boost efficiencies. In fact, over 75 percent of CMOs report feeling both confident and optimistic regarding the future impact this new technology will have at their organization. According to research from Boston Consulting Group’s 2024 survey of more than 200 CMOs across seven countries (conducted in partnership with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA)), 80 percent of CMOs feel that GenAI is “already improving automation, speed, and productivity.”

“GenAI has had its greatest impact thus far on internal processes: better speed, higher productivity, and less manual labor. In terms of content quality, however, CMOs now have firsthand proof that GenAI content can be bland or unimaginative.”

Many CMOs have already harnessed GenAI’s potential when it comes to low-hanging fruit applications, using GenAI tools for everything from content creation to social media “listening.” However, scaling GenAI at a broad level throughout the organization has risks that you need to prepare for: Focusing too heavily on capturing efficiencies can harm your brand if not done carefully. For example, if AI creates the majority of your content, you risk producing dull, off-brand content and failing to stand out from the competition. Over 70 percent of CMOs are concerned that GenAI will negatively impact their brand voice and creativity — and for good reason, as humans outperform machines in this area. Moving forward, brands will have to embed quality control and “guardrails” to ensure GenAI aligns with their desired message.

You won’t become a personalization leader with GenAI alone — leverage predictive AI and human capabilities.

Marketers should aim for personalization, embracing an experimental ethos, working in cross-functional, agile teams to test AI-generated messaging. Brands achieving “personalization maturity” and connecting best with customers are those that score highly on Boston Consulting Group’s Personalization Index. For 15 percent of the highest-scoring companies, it took years to achieve personalization maturity. While GenAI can help brands quickly generate the variation in content required for personalization, GenAI alone cannot help you rapidly achieve personalization maturity, as GenAI doesn’t yet anticipate how best to approach customers and discern which content is appropriate to share (or when and how to share it).

“GenAI tools can help create the necessary content variation for personalization, but it takes predictive AI to know what action to take next with each customer.”

If you want to personalize engagement to better connect with customers, you’ll need to combine predictive AI with GenAI, as the former is designed to sense the next best actions to take with individuals. CMOs hoping to better personalize brand messaging must also harness human capacities. Many CMOs report telling marketing teams to focus on building emotional connections with customers and tapping into their creativity. Your organization will build intelligence, while refining its brand voice and improving personalization, if you commit to an iterative cycle of “testing, learning, and refinement by feeding machine-learning models with a nonstop flow of data” to better understand customer behavior.

Focus on innovation — not just automation — when adopting GenAI tools.

To achieve growth on your investment in GenAI, don’t just focus on automation — focus on using GenAI to drive innovation. Start shifting your priorities toward more strategic uses of GenAI, such as segmentation, predictive analytics, personalization, and customer insight generation. Consider testing more disruptive uses of GenAI. For example, Boston Consulting Group worked with a packaged goods company that spent less than a day sifting through data insights, leveraging these insights to generate a new product concept “in days,” which teams then spent a week testing on synthetic focus groups. Traditionally, the process of designing and testing a new product would take four months, but with the help of GenAI, the company achieved results much more quickly. When the company validated its results on real-world focus groups, it achieved positive results, confirming the power of combining GenAI with human creativity.

“As they capitalize on GenAI, and AI in general, CMOs will need to show the enterprise that they themselves can transform how work gets done and be the beacon for others.”

GenAI has the potential to dramatically change the way marketers work, effectively providing every team member with their own virtual assistant. When marketers use GenAI, they can reduce “the toil and increase the joy of the work,” while benefiting from more granular data insights. Today, GenAI provides CMOs with the tools they need to drive bottom-up change, enabling them to collaborate across silos with tech and data executives, while ushering in a powerful transformation that’s poised to trigger disruption on a grand scale.

About the Authors

Mark Abraham, David Edelman, and Lauren Wiener are professionals with Boston Consulting Group.