Are Retailers Ready for AI Marketing?

• Position: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

A study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Emarsy, a global marketing cloud company, sought to understand if there still is a gap between the readiness of artificial intelligence (AI) marketing solutions to execute on real-time business-to-customer marketing campaigns, and the readiness of marketing tech users and business decisionmakers to adopt AI marketing technology. Businesses polled across the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Australia had revenues from at least $50,000,000 to more than $5,000,000,000.

The study highlights that marketers and business decisionmakers believe Al-powered marketing will shift the role of marketing toward more strategic work (79%) and make marketing teams more efficient (86%) and effective (85%), as well as enabling them to focus on value-generating tasks as AI automates workflows (82%) and reinventing the way that marketers work (81%).

However, it also flagged that 70% of business decisionmakers believe that their marketing team lacks the technical skills to leverage AI marketing technology, and do not necessarily understand AI marketing, which are potential barriers to mainstream adoption of AI marketing technology.

What also appears clear from the study and other reports is that AI marketing enhances personalization of omnichannel customer experiences as consumers interact with retail brands across various touchpoints. This is paving the way for retailers to leverage AI marketing to personalize the customer journey (54%) and better understand customer behaviors (53%). However, this means that nearly one in two retail brands are missing out on the personalization capabilities that AI marketing offers.

Opportunities for retail and e-Commerce organizations identified...