The rise of AI, and particularly gen AI, has potential for impact in three areas of marketing and sales: customer experience (CX), growth, and productivity.įor example, in CX, hyper-personalized content and offerings can be based on individual customer behavior, persona, and purchase history. Would you like to learn more about our Growth, Marketing & Sales Practice? What does gen AI mean for marketing and sales? 2 Cliff Saran, “Stanford University finds that AI is outpacing Moore’s Law,” Computer Weekly, DecemRisto Miikkulainen, “Creative AI through evolutionary computation: Principles and examples,” SN Computer Science, 2(3): 163, March 23, 2001. Vast, and growing, amounts of data are now available for foundation-model training, and since 2012 there’s been a millionfold increase in computation capacity-doubling every three to four months. This has led to an explosion of “usable” data (data that can be used to formulate insights and suggest tangible actions) and accessible technology (such as increased computation power and open-source algorithms). 1 Nestor Maslej et al., “The AI Index 2023 annual report,” AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, April 2023. Furthermore, venture capital investment in AI has grown 13-fold over the last ten years. In addition, new frontiers are opening with the rise of gen AI (see sidebar “What is generative AI?”). Our research suggests that a fifth of current sales-team functions could be automated. It is becoming increasingly easy and less costly to implement, while offering ever-accelerating complexity and speed that far exceeds human capacity. Thus gen AI represents an enormous step change in power, sophistication, and utility-and a fundamental shift in our relationship to artificial intelligence.ĪI technology is evolving at pace. In contrast, “traditional” AI is trained on a single task with human supervision, using data specific to that task it can be fine-tuned to reach high precision, but must be retrained for each new use case. Gen AI can be trained, for example, to predict the next word in a string of words and can generalize that ability to multiple text-generation tasks, such as writing articles, jokes, or code. FMs are pre-trained on massive datasets and the algorithms they support are adaptable to a wide variety of downstream tasks, including content generation. To do this, gen AI uses deep-learning models called foundation models (FMs).

This is the great power of generative AI, or gen AI: it utilizes algorithms to generate new content-writing, images, or audio-from training data. Many of us are already familiar with online AI chatbots and image generators, using them to create convincing pictures and text at astonishing speed. Step changes are occurring in digitization and automation Winning companies-those increasing their market share by at least 10 percent annually-tend to utilize advanced sales technology build hybrid sales teams and capabilities tailor strategies for third-party and company-owned marketplaces achieve e-commerce excellence across the entire funnel and deliver hyper-personalization (unique messages for individual decision makers based on their needs, profile, behaviors, and interactions-both past and predictive).

While they still desire an even mix of traditional, remote, and self-service channels (including face-to-face, inside sales, and e-commerce), we see continued growth in customer preference for online ordering and reordering. Omnichannel is table stakesĪcross industries, engagement models are changing: today’s customers want everything, everywhere, and all the time. This is the result of shifts in consumer sentiment alongside rapid technological change. How AI is reshaping marketing and salesĪI is poised to disrupt marketing and sales in every sector.

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