How Market Leader Shifts From Digital To AI-Native

How Market Leader Shifts From Digital To AI-Native

There is immense pressure for integration AI by the marketing leaders into their strategies while delivering measurable business impact. The companies getting the most value from AI aren’t just replacing individual tasks with AI but are completely transforming their workflows.

Strategic Approach to Implement AI success in marketing

Content ideation: Generate email steps to include in a campaign or first drafts of creative briefs. AI can help you get to some of this first draft content or to come up with ideas in significantly less time while allowing teams to explore more creative concepts.

On-brand content creation: Provide your brand details and marketing materials to create a Brand Hub foundation for AI to build upon. This "grounding" approach ensures AI doesn't veer into incorrect or generic territory and helps generate more accurate, relevant, and trustworthy output aligned to your brand requirements.

Content scaling: Explore new content avenues that were previously limited by resources and go beyond A/B testing to include C, D, and E testing for more comprehensive optimization. Instead of focusing on one perfect piece of content, use AI to create multiple variations quickly.

There are three types of marketing leaders: first one who is worries about performance and just had enough time in leadership meeting to hear what everyone’s else’s opinion on AI, second one is who is having to firefight and has spoken to their tea about AI and the implications, and the last and third marketing leader played with some AI and use a few prompts to see if it is useful, however, there should be fourth who is planning for the future, trying to work out where AI sits in their organization and how to get ahead, so that they do not get lost and can confidently say we have an internal owner.

Challenges: AI Not Trustworthy? 

The challenge for most is, “Who do I trust enough to do a great job in pulling the department, and often the non-technical parts of the company, on the AI journey?” Over the last six months, we have seen AI transitions from a set of tools and models to help, to starting to influence the reduction of team headcounts and being responsible for hiring freezes unless you can prove AI cannot do it first.

The promise of AI is exactly what everyone is looking for: productivity gains (not starting from zero every time), cost savings (on hiring, having to rely on data analysts or agencies), and the ability to leverage competitive advantages. The return on investment of going first and early will mean you are ahead of competitors, you will quickly understand the investment case, and you will be able to calculate ROI early.

The Solutions: Strategic Approaches

1. Find Your AI Champion

You must have an owner, someone who will be there with the team and responsible for championing tech and tools and integrating them into their workflow. You need an owner for when something breaks; they take control, which is a high-trust role with a lot of status attached. The co-owners come, who are connected, who don’t like being left behind but are not confident enough to own it themselves. Last are the collaborators, the team members who want to learn from coworkers to help them develop and talk about what the tools have done and where they have likely used AI to get themselves out of missing a deadline or a situation where they have missed something.

2. Org Design/org Redesign

This include strong and forward-thinking department leader who needs to reshape your teams for adapting new technology shifts. It is immensely important to have a department head who is proactive and visionary. In order to embrace and adjust to the substantial change towards new technology, this leader must reorganize teams. Unlike most, you are not only changing to accommodate hires and skill gaps. For the next two years, you are changing.  

You need to make plans for how things will evolve over the next six, twelve, and eighteen months, including how team members will be rearranged, headcount changes, and, in this case, the introduction of new technology that would be available to all marketing disciplines.

AI Owner

Potential AI owners could come from several areas as social, search, and growth. you will be able to determine who best suits your department. But think it is probably the growth or search team. You need someone who is accustomed to unpicking shifts-someone who can communicate with engineers and product teams, comprehend technical details, and mentor their peers. This is something that top-tier SEO and search experts have had to perform for years.

How To Find An AI Leader?

A core skill to look out for in the right candidate is having the ability to understand the importance of changes for the whole business and be able to hold their own with C-Suite executives. The AI leader will have to hold strong, informed opinions based on knowledge of what is happening and how they assign budget and resources across the business. Your AI lead will be a close colleague in many important meetings, so you trusting them and being able to learn and gain reverse mentorship will be essential.