CMOs Top Concerns Over the AI revolution
AI is changing how brands are segmenting and hyper-personalizing their content and the overall customer experience. Most CMOs have embraced AI and are adapting it into their tech stacks more and more. In fact, research suggests close to 80% of CMOs have adapted AI into their tech stacks in 2024 and heading into 2025. Additionally, according to Forrester, 30% of CMOs are leading the charge for their organizations to head into the AI revolution.
CMOs are also seeing tremendous ROI from AI technologies, mostly an increase in time and cost efficiencies, ad targeting, optimized customer data, and enhanced personalization.
However, there are three concerns all CMOs have when it comes to AI.
1. Data Integrity
Like anything in marketing, you need to have good data to make good marketing decisions. With AI, data flows in and out from disparate sources where AI is supposed to make sense of it all. It can create efficiencies, predict customer behavior, and personalize content down to the one to one. But many CMOs don’t quite yet trust the data or the algorithms behind them. Many AI systems have been known to hallucinate or unknowingly create systemic biases, raising ethical concerns.
2. Copyright and IP Ownership
Who owns a company’s content if their content is helping to train the model and inform future versions of the tool? This is why many CMOs are opting to bring AI in-house rather than trust third party tools with their content or data.
By 2026, 60% of CMOs will adopt specific technologies to protect their brands from GenAI-driven deception (Gartner)
3. Maintaining Brand Authenticity
In today’s market, brand building is more important than ever. What extent can AI really represent your brand so it is reflecting true brand authenticity? While there are many tools out there where you can teach your brand attributes, tone, and voice, CMOs still believe human creativity and empathy are needed to maintain brand authenticity.
Additional concerns about AI’s impact in marketing
Other concerns are AI’s impact on SEO and search. AI search is estimated to reduce organic website traffic by 50% by the year 2028 according to Gartner. If this is the case, brand activities such as out-of-home and thought leadership, as well as in-person engagement, influencer marketing, and email become more important in a CMOs overall strategy.
As brands evolve to adapt to the changing needs and desires of the customer, CMOs are adapting, but at a cautious pace. Every company wants marketing to optimize and drive more efficiency with AI, but just like any other strategy, the company has to have the AI maturity to handle it. Implementing an AI marketing strategy requires a change management process.
AI is not a one size fits all approach. It takes time, change management, buy-in, AI maturity, and a lot of experimenting to see what will work for your business.