TL;DR: This article explores the third of the three distinct eras of marketing and technology that will shape the future: the AI Elevation Era (2028-2030). It examines the defining characteristics and shifts of the Elevation era, drawing insights from marketing professionals and experts. The section also identifies and explores the strategic imperative that marketers should adopt to stay competitive during this final stage of AI’s impact on marketing.
- The AI Elevation Era: The potential rise of artificial general intelligence (AGI)
- Core Competencies of the Future Marketer
The AI Elevation Era (2028-2030)
While artificial general intelligence (AGI) won’t be fully realized in this era, we’ll begin to glimpse its potential. Early precursors to AGI will emerge, offering a hint of an intelligence source that could one day rival the human mind and underpin all platforms. These advancements will make today’s frontier models seem as basic as calculators by comparison. This glimpse into AGI’s potential could foreshadow a profound shift in how we interact with technology and its role in our lives.
In the workplace, we’ll see a noticeable transition from AI as a ‘co-pilot’ to AI as a ‘co-worker’—with different AIs carrying out tasks independently of individuals, though still far from true AGI capabilities.
Specifically, in the marketing landscape of this era, we may witness:
- The rise of intelligent platforms: Agentic models that connect a range of independent data sets and applications into one probabilistic system. These systems can begin to function largely independent of human intervention, liberating individuals to elevate above and build additional data sets and capabilities on top.
- From assets to streams: The generation of text, images, video, and code will occur at a frame rate, enabling real-time production tailored to individual IDs and their consented signals. This allows for remarkable levels of intuitive personalization, resulting in marketers shifting from signing off on assets to approving streams (highly engineered, context-dependent prompts).
From AI as a co-pilot to AI as a co-worker – with different AI carrying out tasks independently of the individual.
Marketing Executive Functions in the Era of Elevation
In the Elevation Era, the impact of generative AI on various executive functions becomes more pronounced. The transformation of the Generating function will have largely been completed by this era, with only 20% still believing that function will be replaced by AI – indicating that the new role for practitioners will be focused on working with and refining the output of AI. Again, this has enormous implications for the skill set of this next generation of talent.
However, the Judging function sees the most significant impact, with 36% of respondents believing generative AI will replace this function for people working within marketing by 2030. This suggests that AI-driven decision-making will become the norm, with human intervention shifting towards supervising and augmenting the AI with new data sets and tech integrations.
Although the bulk of the changes to the Actioning function happened in the previous era, there is expected to be a continual requirement for training as we move into the Elevation era (33%) as advertisers and agencies use a range of new AI-enabled software and tools to automate and streamline administrative tasks.
This will allow them to focus on higher-value activities – as, even in this advanced era, 27% of respondents believe generative AI will enhance the Actioning function, indicating that human input will remain vital for implementing marketing plans – caused mainly by the requirement to bring a whole range of different technologies and data capabilities together when building out complex activation activities.
At this evolved stage, the Visioning function remains relatively resilient to generative AI’s impact, with only 18% of respondents believing generative AI will replace this function. As an executive function, this is uniquely human – defining a vision based on an observable need is not necessarily something AI will do, at least without a prompt, as AI does not have needs.
Throughout this journey, the importance of human skill development and collaboration with AI will remain paramount. Marketers who proactively adapt and acquire the necessary skills to leverage generative AI effectively will not only be well-positioned to thrive in this new era of marketing but will emerge fully equipped with the traits to thrive in a post-AI marketing landscape.
The Future Elevated Marketer
By 2030, the role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the discipline of marketing will have undergone fundamental shifts due to the experimentation and acceleration of generative AI. As a result, the CMO’s role post the era of AI Elevation will comprise fundamentally different core competencies
1. Owner-Operator of an Organization’s LLM
Rohan Tambyrajah, Chief Strategy Officer, PHD EMEA – Interviewed June 2024
The success of a future CMO will hinge on their ability to build an enterprise AI cloud platform equipped with large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models. This platform will act as the engine driving highly personalized marketing experiences, with AI-powered intelligence helping new marketing team members quickly understand the business and improve their intuitive sense of what matters most to stakeholders and clients. Although few organizations will have developed this level of intuitive AI, those that do will gain a significant advantage in creating greater alignment among individuals working in and around the business.
2. Collaborative Visioning with AI Assistants
Gone are the days of solitary brainstorming. Generative AI offers CMOs a powerful tool: AI assistants. These assistants function as intellectual sparring partners, helping CMOs develop and refine their vision. Through collaboration, they can explore a wider range of possibilities and arrive at more impactful marketing strategies.
These AI assistants will evolve from cognitive aids that provide informed perspectives to proactive strategic guides that observe, coach, and shape the CMO’s vision. They will also assist with decision-making by providing probabilistic judgments and updating them as market conditions change.
3. Orchestrators of Marketing Streams (As Opposed to Campaigns)
The Future CMO will work alongside their agency partners to orchestrate the new dynamics of marketing creation and consumer engagement. Traditional marketing concepts like “campaigns,” “assets,” and “channel plans” will be replaced by “streams” – highly engineered prompts that generate brand-suitable, multimodal assets tailored to individuals and evolving through reinforcement learning based on metrics that indicate profit growth. For example, a commerce “stream” trained on product data, competitive activity, and cultural analytics could create generative ads and, in some categories, generative creative products.
4. Fueling In-Housed AI Through Creative Collaborations
The future marketer will oversee ongoing updates to the generative marketing platform, organize additional data partnerships, and develop aspects that cannot be optimized by AI. This may include contracting creators, influencers, and experiential manifestations of the AI-generated campaign or negotiating with content owners and producers to integrate the brand into their content through character script integration or generative product placement. It is likely that the Developing capabilities and services will grow significantly, leading to a range of new mini-industries and marketing services organizations.
Specialized marketing services organizations will emerge, offering expertise and services specifically geared towards developing and implementing these next-generation marketing campaigns. These organizations will bridge the gap between cutting-edge technology and real-world application.
5. Oversee Compliance and Governance
With much of the marketing happening autonomously, there will be a greater requirement for governance and compliance across the marketer’s output. CMOs will rely on strategic AI co-pilots to guide them at each junction, incorporating the perspective of a Chief Ethics Officer or a sophisticated algorithmic component to ensure compliance with AI governance standards and ethical considerations.
Matt Henry, Innovation Lead, AMV BBDO – Interviewed June 2024
Taken together, these core competencies will be connected through a closed-loop system in a continual state of optimization. CMOs’ collaboration with AI will free up cognitive space, allowing them to focus on cultivating personal relationships within their organizations and improving team culture. They may even find themselves leaving the office at a more reasonable hour.
Navigating the Eras of Change
The winds of change brewing on the horizon promise to reshape the marketing landscape over the coming years. As we navigate these three distinct eras, embracing an experimental yet responsible approach to AI integration will be crucial.
Therefore, organizations should prioritize experimental initiatives and aim to fully utilize these advancements within the next two to three years.
Concurrently, a dedicated team should be tasked with capitalizing on the substantial opportunity to elevate the business and product services through AI, enabling the organization to achieve what is not presently possible.
Adopting this three-stage approach—based on the eras—will provide a comprehensive focus for an organization’s AI agenda.
Of course, this approach will necessitate a sequence of specific adaptations and investments, which we will delve into in The Flood.
