Nearly 3 out of 4 Marketing Professionals Use AI to Create Content, New Study Shows Generative AI is changing the way marketers are solving their creative needs, not least in improved speed and efficiency.

Contrary to prevailing storytelling that it just arrived in the waning months of 2022, artificial intelligence has been around for decades. I won't bore you with the entire history (though it's summarized well in this article); suffice it to say that it has played a significant role in the marketing industry for decades, including in predictive analytics used in many advertising platforms. But what has recently caught fire is the use of generative AI in marketing creatives, largely because the technologies are more accessible and easier to use than ever before. Though this perhaps goes without saying at this point, the industry is at an inflection point, and businesses better learn what is going on in this space, or they will be left behind.

State of usage play

A fascinating industry research study, published in March 2023 by Botco.ai (a generative AI cloud chat communications company), surveyed 1,000 marketing professionals across 16 different industries and company sizes (from 1 to 5000-plus employees). Its results were stunning, with a whopping 73% of respondents indicating that they were already using generative AI to help create text, images, videos or other content. The weighted average among B2B companies was a 78% usage rate, while among B2C companies it was 65% (I would have guessed the reverse of that). With me being among the 17% reporting that they did not materially use AI, I figured I needed to learn more, and quickly, to stay competitive among industry peers.

Related: Artificial Intelligence May Add More Value to Marketing Than Human Brains

What's being produced by generative AI?

Content currently created by generative AI is already sweeping in scope. Botco survey respondents reported using it in email copy (44%), social media copy (42%), social media images (39%), chatbots for customers (37%), website images (36%), SEO content (35%), blog post copy (33%) and marketing/sales collateral (33%). Rationales for applying it included the desire to improve marketing performance (58%) and creative variations (50%), along with its cost-effectiveness versus traditional ways of building creatives (50%) and that it speeds up the creative process (47%). I would add the additional benefit of better personalizing content to each user, instead of applying a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing creatives.

And, to be clear, this content is across all forms of creatives — including text, images, videos and coding — in the process revolutionizing pretty much everything a graphic designer, copywriter or website developer used to do. As an example, check out this corporate video produced for my business, Restaurant Furniture Plus, by Synthesia's AI technology. It was completed in a few minutes using a simple copy-and-paste of the "About Us" website copy, without any human production or professional actors involved. That is pretty amazing, and potentially scary if such technology is not used in positive ways.

Related: 5 AI Marketing Tools Every Startup Should Know About

Most-used tools

According to that same Botco survey, the technologies/applications in this space most used by marketers were:

• ChatGPT (55%) for human-like text/chat

• Copy.ai (42%) for natural language processing

• Jasper.ai (35%) for copywriting

• Peppertype.ai (29%) often for longer article copy

• Lensa (28%) for image editing

• DALL-E (25%) for text-to-image generation

• MidJourney (24%) for text-to-image generation

I played with a few of these and would report that the text-based solutions were significantly more impressive than the image-based ones — with the understanding that we are still early in their advancement and learning curves.

Related: How to Incorporate AI into Your Marketing Strategies (and Why You Should)

How to prepare… and what happens if you don't

First, it's time to embrace the simple fact that you need generative AI and that you can't ignore it. It isn't going away. So, slowly but steadily, immerse yourself in some (or all) of the tools above — how they work and what they can potentially offer. And, if you are working with a marketing agency, make sure that it, too, is well-versed in all the advancements (if yours is not currently using AI to improve campaigns, it may be time to look for a new one).

The ramifications for non-action will be swift: You either jump on board or prepare to eat the dust of the other AI first-movers — will essentially be going into a marketing battle with one arm tied behind your back. Performance will suffer (including lower engagement rates compared to competitors), as will profits.

An eye to the further future

Will generative AI end up replacing human teams? Not likely, at least not entirely. My take is that it will make people materially more efficient, and so you may need less of them than before, but real collaboration with fellow beings will still be required for strategic direction and quality control. For example, if a piece of AI-generated copy runs the risk of hurting Google search rankings, someone will need to review it and make sure it follows good SEO practices. So, think of AI as an augmentation tool built for speed and efficiency, not as a full human replacement: You will still need to engage marketing agencies or marketing teams, but they will be doing their work in materially different and presumably better ways.

Related: How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy — A 2023 Guide