The initial hype of AI is dying down.

In fact, according to Gartner’s Hype Cycle, we’re now in what it terms ‘the trough of disillusionment’ with regards to marketing’s adoption of AI. The enthusiasm for Generative AI has waned, the initial flush of anticipation at what could be achieved has subsided, and now we’re left to ponder the reality.

The truth is that the excitement has given way to a degree of wariness around the true value of Generative AI in marketing. The outputs, while flashy and impressive, don’t yet measure up.

Despite this, over 70% of marketing AI budgets are still being allocated to content generation tools. That’s not a huge surprise — after all, it’s human nature to be drawn to the most visible, most talked about, and most striking aspect of any burgeoning technology.

The downside is that this fascination with AI’s creative application has caused several challenges.

1.      Market saturation — AI-generated content is no longer a novelty, which greatly lessens its impact.

2.     It’s tough for businesses to integrate Generative AI tools into existing workflows, and this creates inefficiencies.

3.    Most importantly, it’s proving incredibly difficult to measure Generative AI’s value in terms of tangible business outcomes.

The question remains — why is an application that isn’t delivering returns still dominating marketing’s AI spend? The reason is fairly simple. You can immediately demonstrate the appeal of Generative AI. Showing an AI-generated ad, even if it’s not perfect, is still relatively impressive. Executives see it, and thoughts naturally turn to savings in time, cost, and resource. The potential is obvious, but it obscures the limitations.

So, what is the alternative? Brands that are seeing the greatest uplift from AI in marketing are tapping into what we term ‘operational AI’. Instead of utilizing AI for content creation, operational AI is about unlocking efficiencies throughout your marketing systems, processes and decision-making frameworks, allowing for more effective, impactful execution.

And while operational AI may not have the immediate punch of Generative AI, what it offers is more meaningful and (crucially) measurable impact for your business.

Operational AI delivers:

·      Content intelligence and management

o   Automated analysis and tagging of content assets

o   AI-assisted briefing across channels and markets, aligned with campaign activation strategies

o   Driving production efficiencies by finding and recommending the right content for every briefing requirement

o   Culturally relevant AI-driven localization of assets 

·      Compliance and quality assurance

o   Automated review for brand, campaign, legal, and regulatory compliance

o   Consistency checks across multichannel assets

o   Proactive identification of potential issues before campaign launch

·      Personalization and optimization

o   Dynamic content composition using audience data and insights

o   Enabling personalization at scale across all channels

o   Measuring and managing creative effectiveness through ongoing optimization

·      Data integration and orchestration

o   Connecting data and content across the content ecosystem and production lifecycle

o   Consolidating and remediating data to enable effective data-driven actions

o   Building the foundations for advanced analytics and insights

Generative AI is trying to solve a challenge that doesn’t exist. Marketers are not short of great creative ideas — what’s lacking is the resource to execute those ideas with intelligent content across an increasing number of channels and markets, with the relevance that’s needed to engage discerning modern consumers.

Operational AI addresses those core challenges that plague marketing departments. Efficiency throughout increasingly diverse and siloed operations, consistency and brand compliance when executing across multiple channels and markets, personalization at scale, and measurement of content performance.

Solving these instantly recognizable issues not only reduces costs and speeds up content delivery, but also frees headspace for truly creative thinking. As humans, we get so bogged down in the boring, repetitive manual tasks, that the creative side of the job — the part that we really love — can easily be neglected.

Great marketing is still driven by meaningful human connections. What AI is currently unable to do is to capture that intangible spark — the content or campaigns that don’t rely on data or even logic, but tap into something deeper in our subconscious.

Take Nike’s ‘Just Do It’, or L’Oréal’s ‘Because You’re Worth It’. There’s nothing there that necessarily relates to the function of either brand, nothing that tells us what they do, no immediate logical reason why they should have left the lasting impression that they have. And yet, they’re known around the world, and are absolutely synonymous with those brands. Could AI dream up those campaigns? Certainly not without human intervention.

That’s the point here. AI shouldn’t be replacing our role in the creative process. What you may gain in time or cost, you lose in authenticity and impact.

Humans know how to connect with humans. The power of operational AI is that it takes the heavy lifting off our plates and solves the challenges that we face every day — the inefficiencies that leave us too preoccupied to focus on creativity.

At its best, AI is a tool that enables people to do more of the work we love, work that matters, work that smashes through ceilings and propels brand growth. Let’s not forget that.