Marketers have gone all in on AI. Now comes the awkward question: Is it actually paying off yet?
The answer is largely “no,” according to new research from the management consulting firm Bain, shared exclusively with CMO Insider.
The starkest finding from the study, which surveyed 1,397 senior marketing and finance executives: Only 6% of marketing organizations said AI is delivering significant performance impact today. That’s despite 95% of marketers saying their organizations have adopted AI tools.
“It just speaks to the fact that transformation is hard, and it takes time,” Laura Beaudin, a partner at Bain, told me.
There’s a twist, though: Companies that Bain considers “leaders” were much more likely to say they’d seen growth from AI.
Bain defines “leaders” as companies with more than 11% annual revenue growth and more than 7% annual market share growth. It calls companies with flat or declining revenue or market share “laggards.”
“Leaders” were twice as likely as “laggards” to credit AI initiatives with driving double-digit revenue growth or cost savings, though they represented only a small subset of respondents.
So, what can we learn from the leaders?
Bain said they’re centralizing their AI strategies to remove functional silos, rebuilding their workflows and restructuring teams, and pointing AI at customer-focused use cases such as using first-party data to unlock insights and make their marketing more personalized.
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“We’re just at the tip of the iceberg where people can really see that things are changing,” Beaudin said. “But it’s the knitting of it all together that is both harder, and where I think the big value will come from.”
Separate research released Wednesday from ad agency group Dentsu Creative found a similar gap between AI adoption and results. Of the 1,950 global senior marketing decision-makers surveyed, 70% said they had not yet seen major cost efficiencies from AI.
“People were very bullish on it 12 months ago, that I’m going to be able to create millions of assets for a fraction of the cost, and I’ll buy the software, and magic will happen,” Patricia McDonald, Dentsu Creative global chief strategy officer, told me.
“Now, what people are realizing is that the promise is still extraordinary, but buying the software is a fraction of the job,” McDonald added.
The disconnect between AI adoption and business results extends beyond marketing. A PwC survey of 4,454 CEOs, published in January, found that more than half (56%) said their companies had seen neither higher revenues nor lower costs from AI in the prior 12 months. Uber’s COO recently said that while the company was seeing plenty of AI productivity improvements, quantifying those into actual bottom-line returns was more challenging.
Redefining marketing roles
Many marketers are now shifting from AI adoption and experimentation to the harder work of organizational restructuring.
Bain’s Beaudin said AI means most organizations will need fewer narrow specialists and more orchestrators, who can manage across different marketing functions. That’s happening over at Wix, whose CMO Omer Shai recently told me he’s staffing up his team with “full-stack marketers,” replacing specific titles like “content writer” or “product writer.”
One CMO told Bain in the report that teams of five to 10 people can now produce what was typically handled by up to 50 people. Sometimes employees freed up by those efficiencies can be redeployed into other roles, but Beaudin said some marketers are having to make tough decisions about the size of their teams. Leaders in the Bain report were twice as likely as laggards to restructure teams and job descriptions around AI capabilities.
That shift comes amid a squeeze in the marketing job market. Research published this month by the hiring platform Indeed found that marketing job postings are 25% below pre-pandemic levels, falling faster than almost any other white-collar sector over the last five years.
“Companies aren’t hiring fewer marketers because marketing matters less,” Indeed CMO James Whitemore recently wrote for CMO Insider. “They’re hiring differently because the role itself is changing.”
Beaudin said it’s likely companies will begin to bear fruit from their AI investments as their restructurings take shape.
“We are optimistic that we will see more organizations seeing value in the next year,” she said, adding that many companies’ transformations remain “work in progress.”
