From automating processes and powering hyper personalisation to permanently altering the idea generation process, generative AI is poised to be a catalyst for a new age of marketing capabilities.

Imagine a world where marketers have no creative constraints. A world where they can make the right offer at the right time for the right person—in a communication that feels like a cohesive whole, rather than like some disjointed Mad Libs concoction. A world where efficiency gains from automation and automated-content generation go hand in hand with increased customer insights. A world where customers save time and effort finding and accessing the goods and services they want and need. A world where marketers can better meet and deliver customer value and focus on innovation.

Generative AI brings this holy grail of hyper personalisation at scale close to reality.

Generative AI is making it possible to revolutionise consumer marketing as we currently know it. At an individual-company level, marketing campaigns that once required months of content design, insight generation, and customer targeting can be rolled out in weeks or even days, often with at-scale personalisation and automated testing. Website development and customer service tasks are too often the bottlenecks in interactions with individual consumers. But when executed well, they can induce greater engagement and improve satisfaction. Marketers can simultaneously analyse and interpret text, image, and video data to better understand innovation opportunities. Generative AI is powering granular personalisation in ways that just weren’t possible before.

These productivity gains from generative AI are beginning to ripple across the global economic marketplace. A recent McKinsey report estimates that generative AI could contribute up to $4.4 trillion in annual global productivity. According to the analysis, marketing and sales is one of four functional groups that combined could reap an estimated 75 percent of that value. The productivity of marketing alone due to generative AI could increase between 5 and 15 percent of total marketing spend, worth about $463 billion annually.

Change is coming, and companies that sit on the sidelines risk being left behind.