As the digital world continues to shape and consume the physical world, the scope of digital transformation within businesses keeps expanding. We are in an era of unprecedented opportunity, and much of the growth we experience over the next decade will be driven by artificial intelligence. In fact, PwC predicts that AI will add $15.7 trillion to global GDP annually by the year 2030.
Artificial intelligence is already a key driver of digital transformation across a wide range of sectors, from insurance to manufacturing and the automotive industry. The potential of this technology to shift business strategy to a truly customer-centric model remains largely untapped, but CMOs everywhere are increasingly aware of the need for an “AI-first” approach.
The reasons for this are self-explanatory. With more data at our disposal than we have ever known, and more effective technologies allowing us to make sense of it all, we can start to deliver better experiences for the modern consumer’s needs. AI provides a scalable, highly efficient way to deliver on this promise.
A recent survey from BrightEdge (my employer) revealed just how central AI is within the strategies of senior marketers in 2018:
The top three responses, which account for 75 percent of the total, are all related to artificial intelligence.
It is simply impossible to separate the practice of digital transformation from AI.
We need to dig deeper to unveil the specific AI applications that will have the biggest impact on digital transformation. Marketers are aware of the benefits AI can bring; the key now is to put it into practice within digital transformation strategies.
Any successful digital transformation effort is driven by a shift in mindset within an organization. To effect this change, new internal structures are required to allow people to collaborate across functions.
This new structure should allow departments such as marketing and IT to work together seamlessly, for example. For its part, IT becomes more than a separate company function and is instead ingrained within every level of the hierarchy, both vertically and horizontally.
As digital moves from being a project toward a core business value, the level of technological sophistication grows, too.
Every department is responsible for understanding the role that AI plays in this tech stack, but many are still unaware of AI’s presence within their marketing software. Returning to the survey we fielded, we can see that 17 percent of respondents are unsure of whether their technologies use AI, with 13 percent stating that theirs do not and another 42 percent answering that fewer than 25 percent of the technologies they use employ AI.
There are some clear lessons to be taken away here.
Digital transformation depends on new structures and new ways of working, but CMOs should also investigate their existing technologies to uncover the potential AI applications they already have at their fingertips.
All businesses focus on their customer, to a greater or lesser degree. Many will claim to be “customer-centric,” but that term requires a significant effort before it can be applied accurately.
