While I’m personally a fan of shifting AI’s focus from business-centered initiatives to home-related tasks, there’s no denying the value the technology brings to organizations. With that in mind, I’ve rounded up some of the most recent AI-focused research reports to provide tangible insights into AI adoption and implementation. Make sure to bookmark this page and check back frequently, as I’ll be updating as new research is released!

Majority Of AI Adopters Hail From Small Businesses

Small businesses are spearheading the AI charge, as 42% of respondents at companies with 10 employees or less use AI, according to the “State Of Sales & Marketing Report 2023/2024.” Comparatively, 37% of folks at medium-sized companies and 23% of employees at large companies reported a reliance on the technology.

The research — conducted by Pipedrive, a sales CRM for small businesses — revealed that sales professionals are embracing new AI technology to connect, understand and respond to changing customer needs. Specifically, the report found:

• AI tools are used by every third respondent in the survey, but the share is even higher among smaller companies, which are more likely to be interested in solutions that save time;
• Bigger companies seem to need more time to adopt and onboard new tools, as 38% of respondents indicated that AI will have the largest impact on their work in the future;
• 76% of marketers are optimistic about AI’s future role in supporting their professional activities;
• Concerns around AI causing team reductions are minimal, with only 8% expressing such fears; and
• 83% of respondents believe AI will play a role in business, but not replace areas where the human factor is key. 

“This past year has been unprecedented, marked by economic challenges and breakthroughs in AI technology,” said Dominic Allon, CEO of Pipedrive, in a statement. “As we stand on the verge of a new era, we have already seen AI-driven innovations boosting business growth with remarkable accuracy and efficiency. Our latest sales and marketing report, based on insights from sales professionals, founders and CEOs, highlights the resilience and adaptability of sales teams across industries. Despite the rise of AI, the importance of human relationships, value-based selling and other essential skills remains paramount in the industry. We hope this report provides actionable insights and inspires you to leverage technology for your business success.”

Businesses That Adopt AI Are 7X More Likely To Meet Or Exceed Expectations

Sales and marketing teams are rapidly adopting AI, as 95% of businesses already use or plan to adopt AI before 2025, new research revealed. ON24, an intelligent engagement and webinar platform, released “The State of AI in B2B Marketing in 2024,” a research report that uncovered and discussed AI’s impact on business performance.

Specifically, the research found that teams who already leverage AI are 7X more likely to meet or exceed their organizational goals, while those that have yet to adopt it are 3X more likely to miss their targets.

“AI is more than a trend: It’s a business imperative, and our research shows that those that don’t adapt will get left behind,” said Sharat Sharan, Co-Founder, President and CEO of ON24, in a statement. “That’s why we’ve put AI at the center of our platform innovation, empowering our industry-leading customers to innovate with intelligent engagement and drive cost-effective revenue growth.”

Nearly 100% Of Marketers Currently Or Plan To Leverage AI

Revenue marketing consultancy Demand Spring released “AI In B2B Marketing,” which focused on AI implementation and how companies are using it to inform future strategies. The report doubled-down on the sheer volume of AI adoption, as 96% of respondents are either actively using AI or acknowledging its potential. Other key findings include:

• Marketers are prioritizing AI for its ability to improve productivity (76%) and enhance customer engagement (52%);
• 63% of respondents said they lack internal AI expertise, particularly in data analysis and interpretation; and
• 43% indicated that they are establishing ethical guidelines for AI use to address potential biases in algorithms, data privacy concerns and manipulative marketing tactics.

“B2B marketers are already actively utilizing AI for content generation, data analysis and marketing automation tasks, and this is only going to grow as more organizations embrace the technology and learn how it can help them to find efficiencies within their marketing teams,” said Mark Emond, Founder and CEO of Demand Spring, in a statement. “It’s an exciting time and certainly a turning point for those B2B marketing organizations who choose to embrace AI adoption.”

77% Of Practitioners Believe AI’s Moved Beyond The Hype

To provide some color around the specific benefits of AI adoption — and illustrate the technology’s move from hype to reality — business software and services review website G2 released the “2024 State Of Buyer Behavior,” which revealed:

• 77% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that software companies have genuinely advanced AI technology in their products beyond merely capitalizing on the AI hype;
• Of buyers who said their organization had purchased an AI platform within the last three months, 83% already reported positive ROI from that purchase; and
• Employee productivity was the No. 1 method (44%) for measuring ROI from AI software or AI-powered software investments.

“Today’s software buyer is not willing to wait to see value,” said Chris Voce, VP of Market Research at G2, in a statement. “These rising ROI expectations are coupled with slowed deal velocity, increased buying cycles and extra scrutiny on software investments by executive leadership. For software and services vendors, the added pressure and intensity of this landscape means understanding today’s buyer and their context is essential to navigating the turbulence and achieving growth.”

Learn More

• To get more insights into the latest AI trends, download “The State of AI in B2B Marketing in 2024”.
• Check out the full “AI In B2B Marketing” report now.
• Uncover more about B2B buying behavior in the “2024 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey”.
• To learn more about how sales and marketing professionals really think about AI, check out “The State of Sales and Marketing 2023/24“.

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Interestingly, despite its favorable view, concerns still persisted around AI, with respondents indicating there are still unknowns about how the technology will be applied, which social media platforms are using it most effectively and whether it will result in more accurate targeting or reduced costs. Specifically, the report uncovered:

• 59% of participants saw AI as the greatest influence on the future of advertising;
• 56% of agencies and advertisers expected their budgets to increase in the next year;
• 48% of respondents said strengthening their national advertising is the top priority for 2024, followed by 26% whose top focus was improving local advertising; and
• 45% of professionals anticipated a change to their media mix because of third-party cookie deprecation.

More Advertising Spend Projected In 2024

After several lean post-pandemic years, most advertising and agency executives reported budget increases for 2024. Digital advertising is expected to constitute around two thirds of total ad spend among advertisers, while social media is the most desired allocation of spend for brand-focused advertising, with search engine marketing and social media tied with the lead for performance advertising.

Cookie Deprecation Only Draws Moderate Concern

With the end of third-party cookies looming, advertisers believe they are more prepared than previously anticipated. Many are already shifting to embrace first-party customer data strategies. Other emerging approaches include contextual and cohort-based targeting, machine-learning systems and CPC/CPA models.

“It’s no surprise AI has emerged as the key theme on advertisers’ minds in this study,” said Jackie Cutrone, CMO of NewtonX, in a statement. “We’ve harnessed the power of AI to gather and analyze this data, and along with our partners at Material, we’re committed to leveraging AI technology to provide business insights that help advertisers and brands navigate the challenges of 2024 and beyond.”

To learn more about the findings in the “The Digital Lead: 2024 Advertising Insights & Tech Trends Report,” check out the full report now.

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The crux of demand generation is about forging genuine connections and peeling back the data layers to reveal the human needs and emotions underneath. AI allows us to predict trends, personalize communication and streamline mundane tasks, boosting efficiency. However, the human touch — our capacity for empathy, creativity and understanding — breathes life into our campaigns, making them resonate on a deeper level.

Our challenge, then, isn’t to choose between human insight and AI’s analytical prowess but to weave them together harmoniously. It’s about leveraging AI to enhance our understanding and reach while ensuring our strategies are infused with the authenticity and creativity only humans can provide.

Embracing AI isn’t just about staying ahead of technological curves — it’s about ensuring that in our quest for innovation, we don’t lose sight of the human connections that are the beating heart of the business world.

The AI Revolution In Demand Gen

As generative AI technology advances, it’s becoming less of another tool in our kit and more of a superpower. Imagine being able to sift through mountains of data, pick up on subtle and niche consumer behaviors and even predict trends before they hit the mainstream. These are all current capabilities of AI — and they’re getting stronger.

For demand gen marketers, guiding buyers through the sales funnel is like narrating a story from awareness to decision. It’s crucial to hold their interest in every chapter. However, in today’s fast-paced world, dragging people through a lengthy process can cause them to lose their attention fast.

This is where AI steps in as our co-pilot: It helps us create content that’s relevant and genuinely engaging, making the whole journey smoother and quicker. By optimizing the sales funnel and personalizing content, AI ensures that our narrative keeps our audience hooked till the end.

Importantly, AI tools also help us automate the mundane but essential tasks that demand gen marketers must do to be successful, such as updating data sets, lead scoring and more. AI tools boost efficiency, freeing up our time for the real magic: Human creativity and connection.

Keeping It Real: The Human Touch

While generative AI can help us make our communications more relevant and personal, it’s the human touch that turns those messages into genuine connections. To successfully keep buyers engaged with our content and brand, we must craft stories that resonate, spark memorable conversations and, most importantly, build trust. No AI can fully replicate the warmth and authenticity of human interactions… at least, not yet.

The question, then, is how can we use AI technology to build better connections with humans? For starters, it’s about integration, not replacement. We use AI to enhance our understanding and reach, but we never forget that the human element makes our campaigns compelling.

AI’s role in demand gen is primarily about data — collecting it, analyzing it and providing actionable insights that we humans can use to plan campaigns and create messaging that will connect with our audience. It can parse vast amounts of data and make recommendations, helping us to make quicker, more well-informed decisions. We leverage AI to get to the heart of what our customers care about and then use our creativity to engage them in ways that matter.

Navigating Challenges With A Human-AI Partnership

Facing the complexities of today’s demand gen landscape, it’s clear that going at it alone — relying solely on human effort or AI — isn’t the answer. The challenges are too many, and the stakes are too high. But together, human insight and AI’s analytical prowess can tackle everything from understanding intricate buyer journeys to creating content that cuts through the noise.

As we lean into the future, let’s embrace the possibilities that AI brings to the table. Let’s experiment, learn and iterate. But we must ensure that we never lose sight of the human connections we are working to build. After all, business is about people engaging with people — and that’s something AI can’t fully replicate.

Danna Tongate is the Demand Generation Manager for Televerde, a global revenue creation partner supporting marketing, sales and customer success for B2B businesses worldwide. A purpose-built company, Televerde believes in second-chance employment and strives to help disempowered people find their voice and reach their human potential.

The post Rethinking Demand Gen To Find The Human In The Machine appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The new platform is designed to compare content against multiple top AI content detection systems to provide an aggregated confidence score to help users determine if the content appears to be human or AI-written. Key features include:

• Integrations with eight leading AI content detectors;
• Aggregated confidence scoring;
• A native WordPress integration;
• Sentence highlighter for sentence-level checking;
• A web app for flexible content checking; and
• Checker analytics and history.

“There’s a clear need for robust AI content detection as generative AI becomes more advanced and harder to detect,” said Andrew Kirkcaldy, CEO and Co-founder of Content Guardian, in a statement. “Just relying on one AI system is no longer enough: With Content Guardian, you get the full picture. With eight integrated detectors, Content Guardian offers businesses the confidence to tackle this new landscape, providing an essential line of defense against AI-generated content risks.”

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RevAI is built to support the workflows and use cases of all revenue-critical employees by automating work and empowering them with access to AI. The recent enhancements include:

• Ask Clari, which allows revenue teams to ask any question of their Clari Copilot call recordings and instantly generates answers based on customer and prospect conversations;
• Smart Follow Ups, which instantly generates emails in Groove Actions based on formatted call summaries, next steps and suggested actions;
• Smart Chapters that provide visual, time-stamped representations of all major topics discussed in each call; and
• Smart Feed, which aggregates call and meetings snippets into a single feed.

“RevAI is everyday AI for revenue teams – infused into their workflows to enable exponentially greater productivity, impact and job satisfaction,” said Rohit Shrivastava, Chief Product Officer at Clari, in a statement. “When sales reps and revenue leaders are more productive, revenue increases. That’s why our RevAI portfolio is purpose-built to eliminate tedious, administrative work and unlock their vast potential.”

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Sailebot 2 is designed to manage tasks from data lookup and email validation to content generation and email responses while mirroring the individual personality and sales style of each rep. Specific features include:

• “Advanced” natural language comprehension, neural networks and multiple transformer models;
• A Sales Cognition feature that seeks to enable more precise prospecting actions and improved language comprehension; and
• Multi-layered intelligence through the aggregation of several AI models.

“Salespeople used to spend six hours a day selling and two hours updating their CRM,” said Nick Smith, Founder and CEO of Sailes, in a statement. “They were told it was inefficient. Now, salespeople spend six hours a day in platforms and dashboards and not nearly enough time selling. They’re not doing what they love, they’re not doing what they were hired to do and less business is being closed. Sailebots are digital extensions of salespeople, mirroring their personalities and sales styles and do the prospecting work hands-free. It’s a real-life solution to the age-old problem: ‘I wish there were two of me.’”

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You can’t have any conversations in modern marketing without someone bringing up artificial intelligence (AI) and/or data — or using one to inform the other.

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The announcement comes as Photoroom launched its first foundation model tailor-made for product photography, Photoroom Instant Diffusion (Photoroom ID), which is trained to master product photography to ensure that images from different sources look consistently styled.

“The foundation model is the next step in empowering businesses to create amazing product photos without the need to be an expert at prompt engineering or photography,” said Matthieu Rouif, Co-founder and CEO at Photoroom, in a statement. “Our model has been trained to excel at product photography and can quickly adapt to user needs and feedback. We are not only increasing the speed of our model, but also optimizing for quality, through higher resolution, more detailed images and a larger training dataset than ever before. As a user-centric AI company, we designed the architecture to make sense for our users.”

Additionally, the company is launching a suite of new AI photo-editing tools, which include:

• AI Backgrounds, formerly known as Instant Backgrounds, that generate AI backgrounds for product photography;
• AI Expand, to realistically expanding the scene around an existing image;
• AI Images, which allow customers to create custom images from scratch using text prompts;
• AI Fill, which customizes an item or area of an image;
• Auto-Rotate, which corrects the camera angle with AI for more professional images;
• AI Upscale, which enhancese resolution of images for higher quality photos; and
• An Image Editing API that helps businesses use Photoroom’s API to generate and edit hundreds of images in seconds.

The post Photoroom Secures $43M In Series B Funding; Releases Suite Of AI Tools appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

BoostUp

Shriber joins BoostUp with nearly three decades of experience in the technology industry, where he held leadership positions at companies such as Siebel Systems, LinkedIn and Oracle. Most recently, Shriber served as CMO of Ontra, an AI-enabled platform transforming the legal technology sector, where he helped better establish the company. 

“As one of the first product leaders in the CRM space, Justin helped shape the technology that has become table stakes for most businesses today,” said Joydeep Bhattacharyya, general partner at Canaan and investor in BoostUp. “His industry experience, proven track record of go-to-market success at some of the world’s most successful tech companies, and strategic vision make him the perfect fit to lead BoostUp into its next phase of growth. We feel fortunate to have Justin at the helm of BoostUp and look forward to incredible success in the coming years.”

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But marketers haven’t jumped in with both feet yet, as a staggering 67% question whether their company’s data setup is equal to the task. While large datasets offer massive opportunities for marketers, they also present huge data privacy risks, and not every company has the vendor partnerships and technology they need to keep customer data safe.

Think of generative AI as a brand-new Lamborghini Huracán. Do you have the license and driving skills to handle such a powerful machine safely? Do you have a destination mapped out? Because if you don’t, you could spin out of your lane and end up facing oncoming traffic.

It’s a dilemma because there’s a sense of urgency. Revenue officers are expecting huge results, customer expectations are high and it’s imperative to take customer data privacy seriously. But there’s also no time to lose because 2024 is the year gen AI will finally make it possible to create omnichannel journeys and personalized experiences in the moment. So, as you buckle up and get ready for the ride of your life, keep the following tips in mind.

1. Define The Perfect Customer Journey

You wouldn’t take a long road trip without a destination in mind, and the customer journey is no different. The old rules of the road don’t apply in the age of generative AI because there are so many functions you couldn’t perform just a couple of years ago that are now possible, such as:

• Real-time creation of highly personalized outreach like product offers; and
• Recommendations delivered via text messaging and email marketing.

According to research cited by Forbes Advisor, personalized experiences like these encourage 46% of customers to buy more. So, it’s time to create an omnichannel journey for your customer that perfectly matches your product set and the brand values you believe in. Now that gen AI is here, it’s ready to help you deliver the perfect customer journey.

2. Get Your Data & Tech Stack Right

Are you confident about the origin of all your customer data? Did the customer share it, did it flow into your company via APIs or did you buy it? Are you sure you have customers’ permission to use it? Has the chain of custody been secure? Are you sure your cybersecurity policy covers martech data mishaps?

A terrifyingly high number of data exchanges still happen via email, and processes are only as safe as the personal workarounds people create, such as spreadsheet downloads. Cross-reference your customer journey against your existing vendors and tech stack to make sure you have the expertise and platform you need, including secure and compliant data management that answers all these questions.

3. Start Your Engine & Drive

Marketing technology is moving so fast that you don’t have the luxury of waiting until everything is perfect to rev up campaigns and customer outreach with generative AI. Get on the road as safely (and quickly) as you can and start anticipating customer needs and personalizing messages at scale as only generative AI can. You can start now and build your capabilities at the same time, perfecting your tech stack, vendor relationships and datasets while you’re underway.

Remember how data was going to change everything? To be fair, it did. But until the advent of generative AI, marketing technology was merely scratching the surface of what’s possible with data.

Now the moment marketers have been waiting for is here, so it’s time to start executing on your biggest and boldest brand vision — safely and imperfectly. With generative AI and the right vendors and technology to handle your data, you can make it happen.

Welcome to 2024 — it should be a fun ride.

Tara Kelly is the Founder, President and CEO of SPLICE Software, a customer engagement company that specializes in using big data, small data and AI to create messages that drive customer engagement and the desired call to action.      

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