Two-thirds of marketing leaders are planning to invest in generative AI by 2025. 

Thats according to a recent survey by Gartner, which found that 63% of the 405 marketing leaders polled are looking to invest in the new space over the next 24 months. 

Gartner’s 2023 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey, conducted in May and June 2023, also showed that the utilisation of an organisation's overall martech stack's capability dropped to just 33% on average in 2023. 

“CMOs recognize both the promise and challenges of generative AI...There’s a clear tension between investing more in the current tech stack to drive utilization, or reallocating their finite resources towards the coming crop of generative AI applications that may not suffer from the same utilization problems.” 

Benjamin Bloom, VP Analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice

Among other findings was that organisations are spending 25.4% of their 2023 marketing budget on technology. With the sharp decline of martech utilization, 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, 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.

Kevin Ruane, CMO at Precisely, said: “In today’s digital world, the pressure is on to stay competitive.

"For marketing professionals, that means timely, targeted customer outreach that anticipates market needs. Generative AI enables marketing teams to quickly produce novel and contextually relevant content, as well as to streamline tasks such as market research and lead scoring.

"However, the true power of generative AI can only be fully realised with data that is accurate, consistent, and fully contextualised. Data integrity is something that marketers are increasingly realising is necessary to produce content that is on-target and unbiased. Gartner’s recent survey reveals that the lack of robust customer data foundations is one of the top four obstacles preventing business value being unlocked from marketing technology."