KUALA LUMPUR (Aug 24): More than half (63%) of marketing leaders are planning to invest in generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the next 24 months, according to a survey from Gartner Inc.

In a statement on Wednesday (Aug 23), the consulting firm said slightly more than half of respondents (56%) see greater reward than risk in generative AI.

A Gartner survey of 405 marketing leaders conducted in May and June 2023 revealed the utilisation of their organisations' overall marketing technology (martech) stack’s capability dropped to just 33% on average in 2023, marking a second consecutive year of decline (42% in 2022 and 58% in 2020).

Gartner Marketing practice vice-president analyst Benjamin Bloom said chief marketing officers (CMOs) recognise both the promise and challenges of generative AI.

“There’s a clear tension between investing more in the current tech stack to drive utilisation, or reallocating their finite resources towards the coming crop of generative AI applications that may not suffer from the same utilisation problems,” he said.

Gartner’s 2023 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey found that organisations are spending 25.4% of their 2023 marketing budget on technology.

The firm said with the sharp decline of martech utilisation, cost optimisation pressure will be unavoidable upon recognition that marketers use only a third of technology capabilities that consume a quarter of their entire budget.

By contrast, it said that for the few organisations that use more than 50% of their martech stack, they are significantly less likely to report being asked to cut their martech budget.

Gartner said that increasing an organisation’s martech utilisation is difficult: just 11% of respondents reported increasing their utilisation of marketing technology by more than 10% in 2023, compared to 12 months ago.

It said complexity of the current ecosystem, customer data challenges and inflexible governance were identified by survey respondents as the most common impediments to greater utilisation of their martech stack.

Bloom said marketers tend to acquire new technologies without a systematic approach for adopting them.

“Combined with multi-year contracts, under-utilised or abandoned technology can easily result in an unwieldy stack over time.

“CMOs should press martech teams to find opportunities to simplify so the rest of the function can flourish. Cutting underused technology within the current stack can also preserve some ‘dry powder’ for transformative applications that aren’t yet generally available,” he said.