Future of Customer Experience: Preparing for Generative AI in Marketing

This IDC Perspective looks at future of customer experience with respect to generative AI in marketing. Generative AI is now ready to be deployed by enterprises to help improve marketing effectiveness and efficiency. But it brings risks as well as opportunities, and it's important for CMOs to deploy this transformative technology carefully. Adoption across the organization will require robust change management and strong guide rails for generative AI use, or there is the risk that this technology will backfire and cause brand-degrading damage. "Generative AI's abilities to research, analyze, rework, and present text and images make it a potentially game-changing tool for marketers. It has potential to transform all parts of the marketing journey and not just the creative part of communications where attention is currently focused," says Douglas Hayward, research director, Customer Experience Services at IDC. "CMOs should already be assessing and experimenting with generative AI, but they must beware of its potential to bring chaos as well as creativity, and they are advised to work with consultancies and digital agencies that have experience of both change management and generative AI."