How to reframe AI adoption to focus on outcomes, not tools

“How are we using AI to improve marketing performance?”

Marketers are coming to dread this question even as executives are asking it more often. It makes them anxious and defensive because they lack a clear story about their team’s martech maturity. They also struggle to explain the real benefits of AI. This is because it’s not easy to measure the use of AI and its impact on results.

However, this challenging questions is an opportunity to demonstrate AI’s genuine impact on customer engagement and marketing outcomes.

Dig deeper: How marketers can go beyond random acts of AI and why they should

Shifting the narrative: From tools to outcomes

Ultimately, using AI or any martech tool is not about producing more content but producing better content. That content connects with your audience. It addresses their concerns quickly and helps customers find the products and solutions they need. These outcomes have long been a hallmark of great marketing.

Instead of focusing on tools, marketers should talk about how AI drives results and elevates the customer experience. Doing this requires assessing AI’s role in your martech stack. That means understanding where it’s already making an impact and identifying opportunities for improvement.

Dig deeper: AI readiness checklist: 7 key steps to a successful integration

Understanding AI’s existing role in martech

Start by assessing whether the inclusion of AI in marketing changes the martech stack. Many marketers still use the same tools, albeit with capabilities now powered by AI for increased speed and customization. Every vendor is eager to remind us how AI has long been a part of how they solve our marketing challenges. Find out where and how AI is already contributing to your martech stack.

This helps you craft your “AI impact story,” a narrative highlighting how AI improves marketing performance and conversions. Like all marketing reporting, it should focus on customer needs and motivations. Structure your story around three key benefits:

• New capabilities.
• New customer engagement.
• New team opportunities.

AI-driven capabilities: Expanding what’s possible 

AI has been embedded in martech for decades in email, search and web analytics tools. It drives most personalization, scoring and segmentation features of marketing automation, email marketing, CRM, social media and SEO systems. 

What new capabilities does your technology provide that are driven by AI and other data solutions? Ask yourself:

• Are you able to score your prospects more efficiently or minutely?
• Do you have access to multiple data sources across platforms or systems?
• Can you now produce personalized content on the website or landing page based on first-party data?
• How often is your chatbot used and how often does that path lead to product page visits, sales demos or downloads?
• Are AI-driven algorithms predicting future behavior, populating your content map with new ideas or analyzing social sentiment?
• Are you using data from behavior in early stages (intent and consideration) to customize experiences in later stages (decision and loyalty)?
• What have you learned from A/B testing at scale?

Use historical performance data to map that out in terms of outcomes across the customer lifecycle and show incremental lift over prior years. Integrating across platforms may also provide incremental boosts in conversion and engagement metrics.

This is how you tell the story of how your marketing benefits from AI without being distracted from the core business of marketing: creating great prospects and customer experiences.

Improving customer engagement with AI

Engagement is measured at the content level: How well did each segment or persona respond to each content element? Marketers are adopting genAI to accelerate content creation and production, almost to the point of overflow. Sadly, there is too much generic, bland content. Hopefully, you have moved away from the quantity game of reach to the quality game of resonance.

We face pressure to use generative AI at every stage of production. That includes ideation and content creation to video, image generation and even avatars. Executives may appreciate how genAI speeds up work. However, remind them that human creativity is needed to develop customer-focused, data-driven strategies. Human connection is what make campaigns resonate and drive action — something genAI alone cannot achieve authentically or with trust.

That said, genAI is a powerful tool for enhancing engagement when paired with a smart strategy. It can streamline the creation of personalized assets for diverse personas and enable real-time customization, making experiences and advertising more impactful.

Ideally, you can show (using AI-powered analytics tools) that different segments have different response rates and engage at higher levels with personalized content. Not all segments have the same buying frequency or spending. That doesn’t mean lower-spend segments aren’t an important part of the mix, especially if you can convert more of them using personalized content.

Incremental lift drives marketing effectiveness and should be central to the AI impact story. Measure this lift through productivity, performance and quality metrics, such as:

• Time saved.
• Increased output (e.g., creating five variations of an asset for testing).
• Reduced costs (e.g., simple in-house image or video creation).
• Consistency in tone, style and messaging.

Enabling marketing teams with AI opportunities

Consider how AI creates opportunities for your team’s development, skills growth and satisfaction. Most of us love learning about AI and its influence, but we also don’t have much time for formal training. 

As a marketing trainer, I’ve found that people want quick, actionable snack-size bites of training. This is especially true when it helps them use tools and platforms more efficiently. Prompt writing and using AI for data analysis and richer personalization are still popular topics. Focus on where AI can enhance human creativity and productivity.

In addition to learning, AI-driven productivity and training tools can add hours to everyone’s day. I love using AI summaries of meetings. It frees up the person taking notes so they can focus on the issues being discussed. Also, they don’t have spending an hour on summarizing and organizing the meeting. 

AI assistants let project leaders focus on strategic decisions and determine next steps.

Making AI part of the executive conversation

Marketers are using AI more and more. They use genAI directly and rely on AI tools for data analysis and content customization. Gartner’s research consistently shows that marketers are increasingly adopting AI. 

Instead of fearing the question of how AI is helping us connect with customers, embrace it and make it part of the narrative in your executive reporting. Pulling AI out into the open and embedding it into your current measurements and reporting makes it less intimidating while demonstrating your commitment to staying ahead in martech.

Dig deeper: 5 ways to jumpstart AI adoption