Revolutionizing Your Marketing Department Through AI Innovations

With a plethora of new AI tools now available, it is crucial to consider how a typical marketing department can be transformed and be ahead of the curve vs competitors. Advocates of AI are very bullish on the impact that AI can have on marketing tasks. For example, according to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, AI could perform many of the tasks that human marketeers undertake currently:

"95% of what marketers use, agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI — and the AI will likely be able to test the creative against real or synthetic customer focus groups for predicting results and optimizing. Again, all free, instant, and nearly perfect. Images, videos, campaign ideas? No problem.”

According to the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, 80 % of what knowledge workers do every day will be AI-assisted to some degree in the next 1–2 years, and this will of course include marketing functions. There is indeed no shortage of voices and tools that offer the promise of improved marketing ROI and productivity.

It is tempting to bury our heads in the sand but CMOs should consider immediately which roles can be fully automated and performed end-to-end by AI agents, and which roles can be partially assisted to become more productive, either freeing up individuals to increase their output or allowing them to focus on value-added tasks rather than repetitive, low-value work.

For example, just in the arena of data, AI agents can profile your customer base, build personas, and conduct deep dives into specific trends. They could also measure and track changes in customer sentiment based on ratings and reviews, all without the help of an extensive data team or a data agency. The same applies to content production such as banners, blogs, and videos. Many of these tasks are led by agencies or internal creative teams; however, in the future, we should expect AI to drive down content costs. To bring this to life a little more, I recently saw a demo of the content-management tool Jasper, and it was able to apply a company's brand guidelines automatically to all content, negating the need for a production person to apply brand guidelines to images!

So where to start in re-imagining your marketing team? A good starting point for a CMO is to imagine what the marketing team operating model would be with AI fully integrated and to build a roadmap to get there, identifying roles that can be displaced or made more productive with AI and building an integrated AI adoption plan

Efficiency as a measure of a marketing team's performance will become even more important in order to demonstrate the benefits of AI. CMOs should think about efficiency measures such as revenue generated per marketing head, spend on content, etc. Even though efficiency is an appealing metric—tangible, measurable, and tied to the bottom line—it is perhaps not the most important metric. We have all seen team members who struggle to focus on value-added activities because they are bogged down with day-to-day manual processes. Sometimes this workload is an excuse to avoid the challenging creative or strategic thinking that creates value. The benefit of AI is that it gives CMOs the opportunity to raise the bar on what the marketing team can deliver, sharpen focus on ideas and plans that really move the needle, and allow team members to have a more fulfilling career by removing repetitive tasks and freeing them up to focus on the things that made them pursue a career in marketing in the first place!

Beyond efficiency, CMOs must treat AI adoption as a change-management exercise. Staff need to be reskilled to prompt, quality-assure, and interpret AI outputs. Governance frameworks should detect bias, protect customer data, and ensure brand-safe content; otherwise the organisation risks compliance breaches and reputational damage.

AI also unlocks higher-order capabilities—hyper-personalised journeys, predictive lead scoring, and real-time creative optimisation—but these gains materialise only when human creativity and strategic judgement remain at the centre. AI is narrow; it amplifies the data and instructions it is given. The differentiator is still the marketer who can ask the right questions and apply the insights.

In short, start with the end-state operating model, build a phased roadmap, measure more than just cost-per-output, and invest early in upskilling and governance. The marketers who master AI will not merely be faster and cheaper—they will redefine what “great marketing” looks like.