Revolution When: Generative AI in 2025

It is frequently suggested that technology revolutions take longer to arrive than people expect, but then mass adoption happens faster than anyone thought possible. MIT first observed this pattern during the computing revolution, which was predicted in the 1960s but didn't reach mainstream adoption until the mid 1990s. Subsequent digital transformations have followed an accelerated timescale, but the pattern has remained the same.

All new technologies follow a very similar hype curve, which Gartner have spent many years modelling. Every year, they measure where specific technologies are in the process. For AI, we're still at the start of that cycle. No one doubts that AI will eventually revolutionise business, but the question is when. Advocates claim the transformational moment is happening right now. Real world experience shows that we're still a few years away from AI seriously affecting people's everyday lives, although some applications of the technology are more advanced.

Marketing is at the forefront of the AI trend, because Generative AI has immense potential to finally deliver the kinds of personalised experiences that customers want to see. The technology could be equally impactful for operations teams, allowing many more processes to be automated than is currently the case. We're starting to see good examples of this in certain industries, but the final blueprint for what an AI-powered marketing engine looks like in practice is still uncertain.

The Year of Predictive AI?

Already, one thing is becoming clear. Manual approaches to data management are no longer sustainable. With the shift to digital selling, customers now provide a myriad of different buying signals as they progress through the buying journey. Correctly interpreting these signals is essential for accurate audience targeting and successful lead qualification. Yet, few B2B marketing teams have the data science skills required to deliver the necessary insights out of the different data sets, which is why AI-powered intent data and propensity modelling have become so important.

At the start of the year, I predicted that 2024 would be the year that machine learning and predictive AI reached mainstream adoption. The success of ABM platforms such as 6sense indicates that this prediction was broadly correct. The hype around AI has moved on to newer Generative AI technologies, while existing predictive and machine learning approaches get rolled out to marketing teams of all sizes.

Marketers are adopting the likes of 6sense and HG Insights because their intent data and predictive scoring capabilities promise to finally fix everyone's data quality challenges. In reality, intent data cannot compensate for poor targeting or incomplete customer data, but it does provide an additional layer of information that can be used for more accurate segmentation. As a result, AI provides clear measurable benefits when used to enrich marketing databases with these additional insights.

Future Delayed

So far, the benefits of using Generative AI are not so clear cut. Fundamentally, the technology cannot be trusted to run independently. Every output from a Generative AI model must be reviewed and closely monitored. That's rarely an efficient use of people's time. There are still plenty of business processes where Generative AI has benefited marketers, but they're mostly content processes that businesses were looking to automate anyway. Translation is a good example. There has been an ongoing shift towards machine translation over many years. Generative AI has merely accelerated that trend. A similar dynamic applies to chatbots.

There are exceptions. Generative AI has proved surprisingly effective in one unexpected area: search. Indeed, the Generative AI projects I've worked on recently have all been related to market research. The hype around Perplexity and ChatGPT Search is not totally without merit. The trouble for AI vendors is that such research tasks rarely need to be automated, while agents generally aren't necessary for those that do.

The Year of the Agent?

According to many analysts, 2025 will be the year of the AI agent. A new wave of digital transformation will see the technology reach mass adoption across the enterprise. According to such claims, we will see an explosion of custom built AI applications, all intended to embed generative AI into everyday business processes. Such predictions are reasonable, but the timeline seems excessively optimistic. AI technology is still too expensive and too immature for such widespread adoption.

That's because automation takes time and costs money. It also adds complexity. After all, AI agents aren't just competing with manual business processes. They must also offer clear cost and efficiency benefits over copying and pasting a ChatGPT prompt. People have become comfortable using ChatGPT for ad-hoc requests, but ongoing AI automation is still seen as a technology for developers rather than operations teams. Until that usability gap is resolved, AI will struggle to achieve the widespread adoption that people expect.

HubSpot Acquires Frame AI

This is another area where AI already offers substantial efficiency benefits, namely in sentiment analysis and the interpretation of unstructured data such as emails or call logs. Insights pulled from such information can be used to support sales teams and enhance intent data. Therefore, it's no surprise that HubSpot has acquired Frame AI, a company which specialises in using unstructured data to support sales teams.

Maximising Marketing Automation ROI

Understanding the effectiveness of your marketing efforts has never been more important. And understanding how your marketing technologies and systems are contributing to - or hindering - success is equally crucial. This new blog from CRMT Digital explains the thinking behind their new System Health Check service.

Marketing Operations Roadmap Matrix

A Marketing Operations Roadmap is an essential strategic tool that aligns marketing priorities with your overall business goals. Any roadmap begins with understanding where your marketing organisation is right now, and then defining where you want to get to. This free Marketing Operations Roadmap Matrix from CRMT Digital allows you to do exactly that.

,