005 Making Smarter, Faster Decisions with AI-Assisted Insights AI-assisted insights is the latest modern application of AI that works on behalf of marketers to elevate information that supports better decision-making. While this has been called the next wave over the past few years, it’s here now — and it’s powerful. Whether the marketing budget is $1 million or $100 million a year, CMOs in central roles within the business are being asked to make performance and results more predictable. Outputs have much wider visibility, and peers are counting on marketing to deliver But in order to meet goals, smarter decisions need to happen on a more frequent basis — across the entire customer journey. The sheer scale of data in a pre-AI world has limited marketers’ ability to see opportunities and take action. But it stands to reason that if results need to be predictable, marketers need a pipeline of insights to become more predictable as well. It should be as easy to get new ideas on improving marketing as it is to browse a feed of stories on your favorite social networks. This is where AI is entering now. Across the millions or billions of rows of data marketers are expected to make sense of, AI bots are being released to find not only what’s moving and shaking in their performance, but also answering why it’s happening and what they can do about it. These are the optimization paths CMOs and their teams can use to flip that switch to always-on optimization. If dashboards help answer the questions you have already, AI helps you know what you don’t know. This introduces a new way to collaborate with your marketing technology. You provide an agenda composed of the KPIs you want to watch on an ongoing basis, and off goes your “assistant” into your data. Now, millions of data points get analyzed on a continual basis to tell you what’s driving KPI performance, in a prioritized order of impact. You might want to stay fixated on channel or campaign marketing ROI, campaign engagement or conversion rate, or campaign CPM or CTR rather than focus on the labor-intensive, manual effort of data integration and alignment that will ultimately cause you to miss critical findings in your ever-expanding dataset. Imagine a marketing world where your KPI performance could be better understood via intelligent insights that help you learn what’s actually driving your KPI performance up or down. That way you know exactly which campaigns and similar attributes are the root drivers of your marketing ROI and which are pulling it down. From executives to campaign managers and analysts, there are answers in your data that can help you hit your goals through better curated information each day. The challenge is surfacing them in time to activate them. With AI, marketers can leave less opportunity on the table — at scales and speeds that previously couldn’t be accomplished through manual analysis. Staying Sentinel AI isn’t replacing creativity or human decision-making. But it can play the role of sentinel, working tirelessly to ensure you never miss a beat. Marketing is getting a bigger seat at the executive table. This means more accountability, and more potential for impact. Marketing as a practice is changing, as rapidly and constantly as the buyer journey. AI and machine learning are rising to meet the challenges of modern marketing, providing an adaptability and ability to scale that saves marketers time — and makes them smarter. So where do AI and machine learning fit in marketing? The answer is at every step of the process. Kwanzoo