Generative AI To Take Over 30% Of Traditional Marketing's Mundane Tasks By 2027: IDC Report

Generative artificial intelligence will likely assume 30% of traditional marketing's mundane tasks in the Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) by 2027, according to a recent report by International Data Corporation. These jobs include search engine optimisation, content and website optimisation, customer data analysis, segmentation, lead scoring and hyper-personalisation, the report said.

According to IDC’s survey, 37.8% of chief marketing officers indicated that they have already begun implementing GenAI technologies. Additionally, 51% of CMOs said their top business objective in the next 12 months is to improve lead generation through improved quality of content marketing.

The marketing landscape in Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, is evolving towards being more data driven. With factors such as GenAI, marketing content fatigue, phasing out of cookies and a shift towards an open advertising ecosystem, CMOs and CIOs must stay updated on evolving trends and how these will impact marketing and IT functions, the report suggested.

AI will drive greater level of automation across marketing tasks, which will ultimately transform the marketer's role to leverage greater skill sets and cross-functional collaboration across teams, IDC predicted.

The report noted that by 2028, the A2000 will utilise data and AI to automate 30% of actions in the buyer journey across marketing and sales. By 2026, more than 50% of consumers will employ AI through mobile devices to discover, evaluate and purchase most of the products and services.

Pervasive sentiment and intent AI will propel 50% of A500 firms to conduct all marketing journeys as real-time, two-way conversations by 2026, improving leads-to-purchase conversions by 40%.

In the near term (2024–26), focus will be on consumer-controlled AI, value creation from zero and first-party data, more open advertising environment and intelligent journey orchestration driven by contextualised conversations. In the longer term (2027–29), there will be a shift to automation of traditional marketing tasks, employ hosted communities, quantum sensing and intent AI, expansion of marketers' skill sets and greater collaboration, the report showed.

"There will be a clear shift towards marketers expanding their skill sets to include capabilities such as storytelling, and data analytics and greater cross-functional collaboration with other teams such as IT, sales and operations towards the notion of a dream team. Generative AI will act as the enabler through greater automation of manual tasks such as SEO, content and website optimisation," said Lavanya Jindal, research analyst, CX, Martech, and Value Streams at IDC.

According to the report, by 2026, 55% of A1000 companies will adopt trust-based marketing programmes, harness greater value from zero and first-party data and improve marketing profitability by 40%.

By 2027, 30% of marketers in A1000 firms will possess a blend of data analysis, experience design, storytelling and creativity skill sets. Additionally, 50% of CMOs in A1000 organisations will be primarily measured for their ability to deliver customer value outcomes, forcing 30% to evolve into becoming orchestrators of customer value.