ng a look at AI’s rapid integration into marketing automation platforms

This is the first of four parts on AI’s integration into marketing automation platforms.

For martech professionals, the rapid adoption of generative AI has raised the excitement level to 11. AI-enabled enhancements to the core uses of marketing automation platforms — data management, campaign/lead management and workflows/integrations — are being introduced by Salesforce, HubSpot and other market leaders. These tools will change the tasks that marketers have to do every day and make it easier for customers to experience and be satisfied.

This is a summary of the impact of AI:

“Next-generation marketers understand that marketing must be smarter in order to provide the personalized experiences and personalization consumers want. It must be marketer + machine.

– Paul Roetzer, Marketing Artificial Intelligence

This could have been applied to mainstream adoption of marketing automation platforms, MAP as the original natural-language processing for martech. The inflection point they experienced was similar to what we see with AI today, 10 years ago. The widespread adoption of marketing automation led to an explosion in martech apps. This number grew to more than 10,000 by 2022, a 66,000% increase over 2011.

Why it is important. Infusing MAPs and AI will create new capabilities, further strengthening the foundation of organizations’ martech stack. This includes core MAP integrated into CRM. Martech leaders need to invest in finding use cases that can be modified so that new AI capabilities are available. AI-powered, tried and true best practices will bring value to 2023 and beyond.

Here are the three main uses of AI in marketing automation. Over the next year, each of these three areas will be the subject of a more detailed dive piece.

Data quality will be even more critical when our data is used to train company-specific AI model.

Personalizing marketing requires the use of data that is underpinning about prospects and customers. To describe customer interactions, the data will need to be re-focused to adapt to natural language standards in drop-downs and form fields as it grows. AI will allow marketers to better understand, process, and analyze data.

Campaigns and lead management. AI will allow for new campaign ideas within existing workflows. These approaches will be powered by Generative AI. You can choose between prompts for content AI integration or ask an AI assistant to “codify” your business processes.

Integrations and workflows. It will be tested to see if there are any limitations on the scope of operations or orchestration. It’s only a matter time before generative AI is able to help coders fix code.

Native platform integrations were the first natural language to map fields and create workflows between CRMs and marketing automation systems. Instead of asking IT teams to create a custom API, natural language software interfaces could be used to set them up.

Although AI trends are rapidly changing, reinvesting in core MAP processes can prepare your company to adapt quickly to these new AI-infused capabilities.

Part 2 of this series will be available on AI infusion and data quality.

Are you ready for more? You can see my presentation at next week’s MarTech Conference, “New School and Old School: Navigating The Current Marketing Automation Landscape .”

Looking at AI’s rapid infusion into Marketing Automation Platforms was originally published on MarTech.