5 Ways Marketing and Sales Leaders Can Embrace GenAI

A survey of over 600 business leaders from large U.S. companies suggests they’ve been reluctant to do so.

November 16, 2023

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Generative AI holds the promise of transforming marketing in all sorts of remarkable ways, but marketing leaders have been reluctant to embrace it and lag behind their peers in other fields. This and other findings emerged in a survey that the authors recently conducted with 600 business leaders from large U.S.-based companies. The authors lay out what they learned in the survey, describe many of the potential benefits that AI has to offer marketers, and argue that it’s time for leaders in the field to overcome their caution and start experimenting with the technology.

In almost all key marketing processes, AI and machine learning have facilitated the introduction of new practices and sometimes even entire ecosystems. In advertising, targeting algorithms and the programmatic advertising infrastructure have enabled the rise of behemoths such as Google and Meta. In retailing, recommender systems have been key to the rise of Amazon and other e-commerce platforms. In market research, natural language processing has enabled customer-sentiment analysis at scale and in real time. The list goes on.

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Jeremy Korst is the president of GBK Collective, a strategic-insights, consumer-behavior, and analytics consultancy. He has previously held senior executive roles at Microsoft, T-Mobile, and Avalara, among other brands.

Stefano Puntoni is the Sebastian S. Kresge professor of marketing at the Wharton School, where he serves as the co-director of AI at Wharton.