Over 63% of marketing leaders are planning to invest in generative AI in the next 24 months, while more than half (56%) see greater reward than risk in generative AI, according to a recent study from Gartner.
The research, which surveyed 405 marketing leaders, also revealed organisations used just 33% of their overall martech capability in 2023.
This marks a second consecutive year of decline, after the figures fell by 42% in 2022 and 58% in 2020.
“CMOs recognise both the promise and challenges of generative AI,” said Gartner marketing practice vice president analyst Benjamin Bloom.
“There’s a clear tension between investing more in the current tech stack to drive utilisation, or reallocating their finite resources towards the coming crop of generative AI applications that may not suffer from the same utilisation problems.”
Chief marketing officer Kevin Ruane at Precisely, data integrity firm, added: “Generative AI enables marketing teams to quickly produce novel and contextually relevant content, as well as to streamline tasks such as market research and lead scoring.
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“However, the true power of generative AI can only be fully realised with data that is accurate, consistent, and fully contextualised,” he warned.
In addition, Gartner’s 2023 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey also found that organizations are spending 25.4% of their 2023 marketing budget on technology.
However, as martech utilisation declines, there’s increasing pressure to optimize costs. The report attributed this to the realization that marketers are using only a third of the technology capabilities, despite it consuming a significant portion of their budget.
By contrast, the few organizations that use more than 50% of their martech stack are significantly less likely to report being asked to cut their martech budget.
Yet the report also revealed how increasing an organisation’s martech utilisation is difficult, as just 11% of respondents reported increasing their utilization of marketing technology by more than 10% in 2023, compared to 12 months ago.
Most common challenges that hindered the effective utilisation of martech stack included customer data challenges, the complexity of the current ecosystem and inflexible governance.
“Marketers tend to acquire new technologies without a systematic approach for adopting them,” said Bloom. “Combined with multi-year contracts, under-utilized or abandoned technology can easily result in an unwieldy stack over time.
“CMOs should press martech teams to find opportunities to simplify so the rest of the function can flourish.”
