A few weeks ago, whilst sitting on the sofa scrolling in silence, while my partner mirrored my rhythm like a depressing form of synchronised sport, my phone served me a post so clearly AI-generated that I jumped into the comment section to see if anyone was commenting on the implausible imagery. To my horror, they were not. Not only that, but the engagement seemed genuine and significant. Turns out, AI has already beaten the untrained eye. This realisation sparked a thought: how deeply has AI woven itself into our daily lives without us realising it? I’ve spent my career witnessing shifts in marketing, and it made me question how well we, as marketers, truly understand the potential, pitfalls, and responsibilities of the extraordinary times we're living in.
Welcome to the AI-powered revolution.
So how did we get here? It doesn’t happen often, but every now and then, a new technology comes along that redefines how we go about our days. This type of structural shift alters how consumers behave at such a scale and pace that us marketers – and the brands we support – race to evolve our strategies in order to maintain salience and leverage the new opportunities on offer. In the past 30 years, we’ve lived through a few of these moments. We’ve seen the dawn of the internet, the rise of social media, and the explosion of mobile. Now, it is the time of AI – and marketing is at the very centre of the story.
For decades, our industry has played by a familiar set of rules. We’ve used technology to ever-increasing degrees to boost our insight, efficiency and creativity, but the process has changed very little. Like Iron Man’s armour, marketing tech has augmented rather than replaced human intelligence and expertise. Today, proactive marketing leaders are simply continuing that theme - strapping themselves into AI-powered tools that amplify creativity, accelerate decision-making, and automate critical but mundane tasks. The marketing department of the future won’t be run by machines, but by professionals who, like Tony Stark, understand how to master the technology at their disposal to achieve previously impossible things.
A recent McKinsey report highlighted that marketing is the single biggest beneficiary of AI amongst all business functions, with machine learning and automation powering everything from hyper-personalisation to predictive analytics. Yet, just as every Marvel film at some point has to deal with the laws of unintended consequences, AI comes with its own risk of unintended consequences. From privacy, copyright, and algorithmic bias, to regulatory scrutiny and the erosion of human creativity, these concerns are real. They need to be considered and ultimately resolved, and it's the agencies and brands able to balance the opportunity with a strong ethical framework and a commitment to authenticity that will prosper.
In this article, we explore how AI is reshaping the world of marketing, where the opportunities lie, and how brands can use AI responsibly to enhance, not replace human ingenuity.
The current state of AI
According to a Harvard Business Review article looking at the evolution of AI, investment in marketing-related AI solutions has soared over the past five years. In parallel, a MarketingHire review highlights how AI has revolutionised marketing automation by streamlining repetitive tasks such as scheduling, lead scoring or audience segmentation. Companies that once dipped a toe in the water with small pilots are now deploying AI across broader aspects of the marketing mix with remarkable results.
From basic automation to strategic enable
Early uses of AI in marketing often centred on functional tasks, like automated email optimisation or basic chatbots. As the tools improved, so did their perceived value. For instance, the best analytics solutions can now predict the lifetime value of customers, optimise ad spend in real-time, and deliver personalised product recommendations and unique on-site journeys, all things that seemed impossible a decade ago.
At the same time, the software landscape has exploded. Platforms such as HubSpot, Salesforce and Adobe have integrated a plethora of AI features into their marketing suites, while specialised solutions for programmatic ad buying or predictive lead scoring have become more accessible and effective. As a result, a far larger proportion of organisations are learning that “AI-first” is no longer the preserve of the behemoths or tech futurists.
B2B vs. B2C
It’s easy to think of AI as a B2C consumer-focused opportunity. Although certain AI-driven marketing tactics gained prominence in consumer markets, with dynamic e-commerce experiences leading the way, B2B companies have discovered equally potent use cases. For example, a global aerospace supplier might leverage predictive analytics to identify accounts most likely to respond to a new product release. Alternatively, an industrial firm might deploy natural language processing to interpret thousands of equipment service logs and generate better customer messaging. Where consumer-focused B2C brands will emphasise individual personalisation, B2B is more likely to focus on complex account patterns and tailored messaging that resonates within narrower verticals.
Positive sentiment
According to the 2024 Wakefield Research survey, 91 per cent of marketers now use AI at work, and 69 per cent believe AI will actually create new positions rather than destroy them. However, as mentioned, challenges remain, especially regarding potential bias, intellectual property or data protection. Nonetheless, the general trend is toward enthusiastic adoption, especially as marketers see real productivity gains in routine tasks and tiresome chores that historically have eaten up countless hours.
A Forbes analysis highlights how AI is increasingly being used not just within marketing departments but across entire organisations, integrating sales, customer service, operations, and product development. AI’s ability to process vast amounts of customer, behavioural, and operational data means that its value compounds when different business functions align their AI strategies. Rather than treating AI as a series of independent automation tools, companies that embed AI across business functions are best positioned to leverage its true potential.
For example, if we look at B2B environments, AI-driven marketing insights now seamlessly flow into sales strategies, helping sales teams identify high-value leads, personalise outreach, and predict client needs based on real-time behavioural data. Meanwhile, in B2C, AI can connect marketing campaigns with dynamic pricing models, real-time customer sentiment analysis, and automated post-purchase engagement, creating a unified customer journey rather than fragmented touchpoints.
This shift toward AI as a central business intelligence layer is becoming a competitive differentiator. A Gartner report suggests that by 2026, one in five businesses will use AI-driven decision-making to flatten management structures and use AI-driven insights to inform high-level business strategies.
AI in marketing has moved on from basic targeting or automation. In recent years it's enabled smarter, more interconnected organisations, where every function benefits from real-time, AI-enhanced decision-making. Brands that fail to consider these opportunities and are unable to integrate AI holistically, may find themselves struggling to compete against those that do.
AI’s impact: Opportunities and strategic advantages
AI is already embedded in agency and brand marketing stacks but leaders have the ability to exploit the growing array of strategic tools on offer and benefit from their capabilities. From big time and cost savings to richer customer experiences and greater engagement, AI unlocks a higher gear for both B2B and B2C activities.
1. Enhanced efficiency and productivity
One of AI’s most obvious benefits is how it automates labour-intensive tasks. Whether generating email subject lines, analysing call-centre transcripts or performing audience segmentation, AI does in minutes what once took days. A 2023 piece from the Iterable and Ad Age partnership, encapsulates this by using the phrase: “less do, more think.” Instead of burning time on basic production, teams are free to ideate, strategise and test creative ideas. So, ironically, AI can make marketing more human by reducing mechanical effort
2. Hyper-personalisation
Research by McKinsey highlights that personalisation can lift marketing-spend efficiency by up to 30 per cent, particularly in competitive markets, and AI is key to this. AI’s capacity to crunch a tonne of data means it can recognise subtle patterns that humans might miss. By mapping behaviours like website visits, downloads, or event attendances, AI can better target communications. B2B brands might serve detailed case studies relevant to a niche industry or, on the B2C side of things, brands can use AI to deliver customer recommendations, based on the users' actual browsing and search intent, in real-time. The result is a user experience that feels like it's been designed for each individual visitor.
3. Advanced analytics and decision-making
AI-driven analytics tools enable organisations to make better decisions, faster. So, instead of a rear-view look at monthly metrics, AI can deliver real-time suggestions about whether to reallocate ad budget or which leads to prioritise. Some marketers use AI-based “marketing mix modelling” to test hypothetical scenarios for budgets across channels, products or segments, whilst others rely on neural-network-based forecasting to spot new pockets of demand. According to a Contentsquare-sponsored study on digital experience trends, real-time AI can reduce exit rates on key pages by diagnosing the root cause of friction within minutes, not weeks.
Think of it like having a personal risk analyst at the blackjack table, someone who can instantly calculate the odds of every card in the deck and give you an informed recommendation. It doesn't guarantee you a win, but over time, it will significantly improve your ability to walk away in the black.
4. Improved ROI and competitive advantage
AI is already delivering, with many adopters seeing strong returns. Marketers who integrate AI tools find they can manage more campaigns (or content variations) simultaneously, hitting more niches without increasing hours. They also capture deeper insights, potentially improving conversion rates. This can push the business forward at a faster clip. A Gartner report on strategic predictions for 2025, suggests that AI “high performers” in marketing can gain a meaningful advantage, especially in customer acquisition, by virtue of more accurate targeting and more compelling personalisation.
Understanding AI's ethical, regulatory, and operational risks
It's already easy to see how AI could cause irreparable harm. Like any powerful technology, there needs to be checks and balances. AI requires proper oversight and clear and robust ethical guidelines. However, despite governments and regulatory bodies paying increasing attention to AI in advertising and communications, the trends so far seem to be towards voluntary frameworks, designed to make AI's role clear and transparent, but legally binding rules will follow if deemed necessary.
Bias and fairness
When algorithms are trained on past data, they inevitably reflect the patterns and assumptions baked into that information, including the ones we'd rather were lost forever. In a marketing context, this can show up in subtle but harmful ways, like targeting ads unevenly or producing content that unintentionally reinforces stereotypes. These outcomes aren't intentional, but they're a consequence of the data we feed in, and the blind spots we overlook.
As noted by Harvard Business Review, unrecognised bias has the potential to negatively impact brand reputation and consumer trust. For B2B enterprises, unaddressed bias might result in missing entire segments of potential clients; for B2C brands, it raises legitimate questions regarding equality and inclusion. To mitigate these risks, organisations should understand and audit training data for representativeness, and ensure a ‘human-in-the-loop’ review for critical, customer-facing decisions.
Privacy and compliance
Tighter data laws, such as GDPR, have reshaped the boundaries of what's acceptable when it comes to handling personal information. For marketers working with automated tools, this means staying sharply aware of how data is gathered, managed and applied because the margin for error is shrinking.
Upcoming legislation, such as the EU AI Act, is likely to mandate greater transparency when customers interact with algorithms (for instance, clearly indicating when users communicate with chatbots) and will introduce guardrails for "high-risk" AI applications. Non-compliance could result in penalties as severe as those associated with GDPR violations.
Misinformation and deepfakes
The influx of generative AI tools, from Midjourney to ChatGPT, has driven an explosion of free-to-use options for rapidly producing content, images and video. However, 'speed' has never been akin to quality or accuracy and an overuse of these platforms dramatically increases the risk of your output being off-brand, inaccurate or downright misleading. A simple error in an AI-driven announcement could spiral into a public relations nightmare in minutes, with catastrophic implications. Equally, AI-produced creative risks damaging trust and brand reputation if it is received as 'fake'.
According to Forbes, deepfake incidents are rising rapidly, compelling organisations to establish stronger monitoring systems and response protocols. As a result, marketers should rigorously fact-check AI-generated content, employ digital watermarking or clear disclaimers for AI-produced visuals, and deploy active social listening tools to quickly identify and counter misinformation or harmful content.
Over-reliance and loss of the human touch
As the adoption of AI-driven automation accelerates, where does it end? Is there a step too far? I think there's already a clear danger of us becoming overly reliant on AI, at the risk of the erosion of the human interactions that underpin strong brand relationships. While chatbots and automated systems excel in handling simple, repetitive customer interactions, complex or nuanced issues, especially prevalent in B2B contexts, still demand the nuanced understanding and empathy only human interaction provides.
Additionally, overuse of automation may fail to adequately account for other cultural nuances, risking communication missteps or brand alienation. To avoid this type of pitfall, companies need to clearly define and enforce boundaries for tasks suitable for full automation. They need to retain skilled brand stewards who oversee content quality and consistency and continue to invest in customer-facing staff able to handle nuanced or emotionally sensitive customer interactions effectively.
Emerging regulations and governance frameworks
Beyond the European Union, other major markets including the United States, are actively exploring or rolling out new regulations on AI and algorithmic accountability. According to a Gartner analysis, the impact of AI on organisational structures could be significant, with up to 20 per cent of organisations expected to flatten their management hierarchies by 2026 as AI automates more decision-making processes. Regulators are likely to require businesses to establish clear ‘human escalation’ pathways and to prominently label AI-generated materials.
This is something that you should be thinking about already. Brands and agencies that don't stay at the leading edge of these shifting standards could quickly find themselves at risk of significant penalties, as well as incalculable damage to their own reputation. To stay ahead in this competitive world, brands will need to be proactive. They need to take a hands-on approach and consider every angle, with flexible internal structures that are able to react as the regulatory landscape evolves.
The dangers of AI overload
I’ve spoken a lot about AI’s role in brand-generated content and assets but there are similar questions being asked of the platforms as well. All social media platforms are constantly evolving to maintain their relevance and their hold on our attention span. Nothing new there. However, one of Facebook’s recent tactics is to deploy artificially generated content from AI-created profiles. Awkward, AI-driven posts engineered to spur sympathy and synthetic engagement are nothing more than content designed by algorithms to manipulate human emotions. And, unfortunately, people are taking the bait, liking and commenting in depressingly large numbers, caught in a surreal loop of algorithmically generated clickbait.
It’s not limited to Facebook either. AI-driven content is increasingly responsible for reams of superficial, misleading, and downright baffling content across multiple platforms. Even LinkedIn, once a safe haven for this type of nonsense, is becoming similarly compromised, with the platform actively pushing its users to generate AI-assisted posts that read like they’ve been created by a teenager jacked up on Monster and armed with a thesaurus and emoji addiction.
As our feeds and FYPs fill with this algorithmically fuelled spam, we will naturally reach a point of inflexion where we collectively agree that we've had enough of the synthetic, the fake, and the overly automated. People sense something deeply inauthentic in AI-generated social noise, and research confirms it: a recent Gartner study found that over 60 per cent of users distrust content once they know AI created it. The trust we once had in our online interactions is being eroded, one poor AI post at a time.
The future of AI in marketing and communications
Looking beyond today, several even more transformative AI trends are on the horizon. Some of these developments could have a dramatic impact on how agencies and brands interact with their audiences.
Deep integration of generative AI in content creation
Generative AI, like ChatGPT or Bard, is already drafting blog posts, subject lines and short videos. Over time, these systems will improve at tone-matching and multi-lingual editing, so that a single platform might churn out 100 region-specific content variants in minutes. A report by Contentsquare on user experience trends references “mass personalisation at speed,” in which advanced AI personalises experiences for every website visitor in real time. That may not be commonplace today, but it will arrive quicker than you think.
AI-driven customer journeys
As AI develops its ability to be more conversational, with better natural language processing, the entire customer journey, from prospect to repeat buyer, could be mapped and optimised by AI. For example, an AI might notice a B2B prospect has engaged with a technical white paper, then suggest a tailored email campaign plus an invitation to a relevant virtual event. For consumer brands, chatbots may evolve into virtual “customer success managers” that upsell or cross-sell based on sentiment analysis. These developments sound great but, as always, the devil is in the details and we need to have the confidence that AI is able to deal with anything, not just what the training model has taught it.
AR, VR and “try-on content”
Another area that Contentsquare’s 2025 CX trends document highlights is how AI will power augmented and virtual reality experiences. Imagine a B2B machinery supplier letting prospective clients “place” a full-scale rendering of equipment in their factory environment or a sportswear brand allowing shoppers to see how trainers look on their feet in a virtual mirror. Some of these prototypes already exist, but improvements in AI-driven 3D rendering will accelerate uptake and reduce costs.
Emergence of AI ethics frameworks
As mentioned, AI marketing grows, so will calls for standardised ethical frameworks. The International Association of Privacy Professionals predicts more labelling of AI outputs to maintain consumer trust. Some marketing teams are already forming “AI review boards” that set guidelines and review advanced use cases. Over time, we might see the equivalent of a “Fairtrade” label for AI usage: signals that a brand’s AI respects privacy, transparency and non-discrimination.
Flattened structures and new roles
Particularly in B2B contexts, AI might assume many of the data-gathering tasks of junior or middle-level employees. A Gartner forecast suggests some firms could eliminate a significant number of roles in the next decade. Yet humans remain vital for higher-level strategy and creative leaps. New roles, such as “AI trainer” or “AI strategist” could also emerge to maximise success and ensure models remain relevant and accurate
At the end of the day…
AI in marketing and communications is no longer optional. It has officially arrived and is here to stay. Its ability to handle repetitive tasks, personalise engagements, and enable data-driven decisions provides a real competitive advantage. To thrive, we must acknowledge the new reality and adopt AI at scale, but we must do so responsibly. As marketers, our challenge is clear: harness AI to help us tell better stories, but never let it drown out the voices that make brands authentically human.
Our team is here to guide our client partners through the process of building effective AI-led marketing strategies, choosing technologies that make sense, and rolling out strategies thoughtfully and responsibly. We view AI as a chance to rethink the way marketing creates genuine value and strengthens the bond between brands and their customers. Approached with creativity, clarity, and honesty, we believe AI can become a powerful driver of meaningful change and long-term growth, even as the landscape continues to shift beneath our feet.