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 conclude the missing piece is better data — yeah, they are talking their book. But they’re not wrong. We see this constantly in our own practice: teams that want sophisticated AI workflows but can’t answer basic questions about last quarter’s cross-channel performance because their data lives in seven disconnected Excel sheets nobody trusts anyway. You don’t need to solve this with Supermetrics specifically, but you need to solve it.
The other pattern in the data is arguably worse. Marketers are using AI where it’s easiest, not where it’s most valuable — 70% for efficiency, 61% for repetitive task automation. Content generation and task automation are fine, but they’re table stakes. The real opportunity is using AI to bridge the chronic understaffing of analytics teams, to move from reporting to activation, to finally get personalization working at scale. But only 24% have managed that last one. Because, again, the data underneath isn’t ready.
The lesson: fix the plumbing first. Then install the smart home.
— Torsten and Peter
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