Over the last few years, a growing number of MarTech companies have begun to augment their platforms with artificial intelligence. But while we’ve seen some big announcements and some very prominent product marketing talking up this technology, the deployment of AI within the marketing industry has remained in its infancy. Or in other words, there are many areas that AI has yet to transform. However, several factors point towards the enormous potential of AI within MarTech being gradually realized, observes Stephen Marcinuk, co-founder of Intelligent Relations.
 The rapid evolution of AI in intelligent text generation, customer segmentation, and campaign optimization should help the technology cross the threshold from a fringe novelty into an indispensable aspect of your marketing operations.
The Evolution of AI Marketing Solutions
While MarTech AI has been in its infancy up till now, we’ve still witnessed large improvements in this technology over the last couple of years.Â
 AI and machine learning systems have helped create prediction models that can process large datasets. This has allowed marketers to develop more meaningful predictions around aggregate data and individual user behavior that can predict the likelihood that any individual would convert based on a pattern of their past activity or purchases.
 Anomaly detection is another area where AI has become a tremendously powerful tool that has helped companies identify outliers to meaningful data sets. This lets marketing firms know what customer data they can safely ignore when planning future campaigns while also potentially lifting the veil on previously hidden patterns.
 The prevalence of chatbots is another promising development, as they can help marketing teams with customer service, respond to FAQs or even market products and make sales to consumers. Chatbots are also valuable tools to lay the groundwork for retrieving initial information from a new client or sales partner.
In 2020, more than 41 percent of consumers said in a surveyOpens a new window that they would purchase an item through a chatbot, compared to just 17 percent the year before. That illustrates how important conversational AI has become to marketing teams and how quickly the demand grows for AI-powered products once users are exposed to them.Â
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How AI Marketing will Improve
While we’ve come a long way with AI in marketing in a short time, there are a few burgeoning areas that are poised to experience exponential growth and improvements.
Content creation
Though AI is considered to provide the most value when deployed to data-specific use cases, such as ad spend optimizations, we are discovering various creative use cases for AI.Â
 The rapid evolution of language prediction models and software, including generative pre-trained transformer 3 (GPT-3) is making AI-generated long-form text content a reality.
Some companies like Jasper AI are already making significant leaps forward when it comes to long-form content creation. Whether it be sales emails, marketing copy or general website content, these tools can help marketers to create written materials faster than ever.
 And there is clearly a demand for these types of tools. According to a recent surveyOpens a new window of marketing professionals, the vast majority report being under more pressure than ever to create campaigns as quickly as possible. Those using AI to produce content reports can function and come up with results ten times faster.
 While text generation tools are on the right track, improvements are still needed to ensure 100 percent accuracy and to ensure that copy is written to a native speaker standard. But given the fact we’re only at the very beginning stages of this technology, we will soon arrive at a point where AI-generated copy is indistinguishable from that written by a marketing professional.
Campaign optimization
As we all know, managing and tracking metrics on marketing campaigns is time-consuming, tedious and vulnerable to errors. Fortunately, AI-powered solutions are set to continue their advance in this area.
Adobe’s recent research showed that 89 percentOpens a new window of marketing teams received higher conversion rates on their ads when using AI and machine learning technologies.
AI can handle the day-to-day aspects of campaigns like budget monitoring and analyzing metrics. This will let the marketers themselves focus on more urgent priorities that aren’t as tedious, like finding ways to attract a larger customer base.
 Major players like Google and Amazon are already deploying machine learning technologies that optimize their marketing strategies by accurately predicting campaign outcomes and conversion rates. In the near future, it will be time for smaller marketing shops to leverage these same types of AI platforms that can help them find their audiences and create better budgets.
Customer segmentation
Lastly, AI-powered personalization at scale is coming and can make a meaningful difference in areas such as personalized email campaigns and personalized PR outreach. Marketers will soon have more opportunities to leverage data based on customer preferences, attributes, and activity history. Using AI tools, they can use that data to personalize marketing materials at scale.
Today, there is room for improvement when it comes to accurately and effectively targeting audiences. As teams have more data to feed into these AI solutions, the technology can spot opportunities in new channels or segments that humans may not see.
 This is where the strides made in anomaly detection can come into play going forward, allowing teams to better analyze audience data and find potential targets that they’re otherwise missing out on. Again, the demand for this type of product should be substantial, considering that a quarter of marketing budgets are being wasted on targeting the wrong audiences, according to Rakuten MarketingOpens a new window .
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AI Marketing Gets Real
These are only a few areas where AI is bound to leave its mark on MarTech. As machine learning technologies rapidly evolve, they’ll allow marketing agencies of all sizes to optimize business processes and free up employees’ time to focus on higher-value assignments.
 Ultimately, we’re on the cusp of a new tide of AI-powered MarTech. Those companies that don’t hop on board now risk getting left behind.
How can ML be incorporated better in creating meaningful marketing moments? Tell us what you think on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!