AI continues to push the marketing frontier forward, fundamentally transforming workflows, redefining advertising norms, and reshaping consumer engagement. From AI agents deciding what gets clicked to the rise of hyper-personalised video campaigns, marketers must adapt swiftly or risk falling behind. Here’s a concise dive into today’s most important developments and what they mean for your strategy.
AI is Redefining Marketing Roles and Workflows
Marketing is becoming increasingly AI-native. Automated systems are handling tasks from content creation to consumer insights with greater efficiency, freeing marketers to focus on high-value strategy. An estimated 86% of marketers are saving an hour a day thanks to AI, with 68% noting positive ROI from adoption (HubSpot).
New roles such as prompt engineers and AI campaign analysts are surfacing, while AI governance and training policies are gaining traction across mid-to-large marketing teams.
AI Agents as Ad Consumers: Optimisation is Changing
AI agents like OpenAI’s Operator and Google Gemini 2.0 Flash are now autonomously navigating digital spaces, browsing, clicking, even purchasing. This marks a fundamental shift: marketers are no longer just addressing human audiences but also machine agents capable of interpreting and engaging with content.
Optimising for these non-human participants requires changes in SEO, ad copy, tracking systems, and customer journey design—ushering in an era of “AI Experience” (AIX) alongside UX.
Generative Video and End-to-End Suites Go Mainstream
AI-generated video content is exploding—brand adoption rose from 18% last year to 41% today. Integrated platforms like Canva’s Visual Suite are providing AI-powered creative workflows from planning to production to real-time performance tracking.
This not only reduces production costs and timelines, but also sparks scalable personalisation across channels. As adoption grows, marketers are being urged to formalise AI usage guidelines and upskill content teams accordingly.
Personalisation in Digital Advertising Reaches New Heights
AI-driven hyper-personalisation is now spanning both content and ad delivery. Platforms such as Meta for Business are offering sophisticated targeting tools including predictive analytics, dynamic creative assets, and lookalike audience automation.
Omnichannel personalisation, powered by real-time data insights, is enabling a seamless customer journey across touchpoints — from social to on-site to email. AI not only improves relevance, it automates ongoing refinement.
AI-Native Platforms Are Disrupting Traditional Search and Ad Models
AI-powered search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are challenging Google’s dominance by offering more conversational, fast-response results. These environments pose new engagement formats and ad opportunities.
Marketers must now consider how content is indexed by AI-first platforms, rethink keywords, and test AI-native ad placements. As these interfaces grow in popularity, mobile-first behaviours may be replaced with prompt-first expectations.
What This Means for Marketers
– Reassess your workflows: Identify repetitive tasks in campaign production, analytics, and reporting that can be automated immediately with AI tools.
– Develop AIX strategies: Update your optimisation approach to account not just for human users but AI agents that now influence purchasing.
– Prioritise video personalisation: Use AI-enabled platforms to scale video content tied to behaviour, audience segments or stages of the funnel.
– Start AI SEO experimentation: Optimise content for emerging AI-native search engines like Perplexity, and monitor shifts in web traffic sources.
– Update your team structure: Consider what AI-specific roles or upskilling may be needed for content, data, and optimisation talent.
The future of digital marketing is undeniably AI-centric. Staying competitive means turning awareness into action—fast.
