AI Won't Save Marketing Until Marketing Fixes Its Data

The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO

Everybody’s boss wants AI in the workflow yesterday. The board read about it in the Financial Times, the CEO heard about it at a Very Expensive Conference, and now marketing is supposed to make it happen. Ninety percent of the time, the pressure to adopt AI comes directly from the C-suite.

But a new Supermetrics survey (pdf) of 435 marketers globally confirms what many of us know: the ambition is running way ahead of the infrastructure.

It says that only 6% of marketers have fully implemented AI in their workflows.

So what’s in the way? Not the technology. The data. Marketing data is scattered across fifteen platforms, half of it is stale, and nobody owns the strategy for collecting or connecting it. Over half of the surveyed marketers said their data strategy is owned by teams outside marketing. You can’t build AI-powered analytics on data someone else decided to collect for different reasons. AI can’t fix what it can’t see.

Now, Supermetrics is a marketing data company, so when they con…