The secret to smarter, faster marketing decisions with AI

The four-person marketing team at Tomorrow.io routinely outperforms competitors with teams 10 times their size. They don’t possess superhuman abilities and they don’t work 24/7. They put AI at the center of their decision-making, asking themselves how AI can improve their processes and transform how they make decisions.

Faster, more complete decision-making

Since the days of the assembly line, businesses have relied on command-and-control decision structures, funneling decisions upward through approval chains that value positional authority over front-line expertise. The underlying assumption is that those higher in the “chain of command” have more experience, judgment and reasoning tools than less experienced workers on the front line.

However, with limited time and information, every level of an organization takes shortcuts. Brainstorming is limited to the people in the room, and analysis depends on the time and data available. As a result, you often have to make decisions with incomplete information. Since there’s rarely a clear right answer, decisions can become a “battle of opinions,” where the highest-ranking voice usually wins.

AI can change this dynamic by augmenting decision-making with rich data and insights at a previously unknown scale and frequency. Integrating AI into your decision-making process allows you to make faster, more informed decisions and avoid slower, traditional methods.

Dig deeper: How AI can combat the ‘paradox of choice’ and improve customer outcomes

Expanding beyond human limits

AI’s true value lies in overcoming human cognitive constraints — or what Nobel laureate Herbert Simon famously described as our “bounded rationality.” Humans naturally face limits in how much information they can process and analyze effectively. Typical brainstorming sessions rely on limited perspectives and rarely scratch the surface of potential solutions.

Contrast this with AI-enabled brainstorming, which can rapidly generate and evaluate hundreds, even thousands, of possibilities by tapping expansive knowledge bases and historical datasets. Imagine shifting from opinion-driven debates to data-backed, insight-rich strategy sessions.

AI-augmented decision-making in action

Imagine you’re a digital marketing manager at a growing SaaS company tasked with launching a pivotal new product. Your team sets clear objectives, such as boosting initial adoption rates and user engagement. Instead of starting with traditional, limited brainstorming sessions, you ask ChatGPT to generate hundreds of potential campaign strategies. You adjust the AI’s creativity controls — its “temperature” — to stay within safe parameters or explore wild ideas.

Next, you pull the brainstorming ideas into a tool like NotebookLM or Stanford University’s Storm and instruct the AI to critically evaluate the concepts, conducting a thorough analysis from multiple perspectives. Want to understand how different segments might react? AI can quickly simulate responses from diverse customer personas, eliminating hours of debate and “what-ifs” stretched out over multiple meetings.

With these deeply analyzed, AI-vetted strategies, your team engages in richer, more informed, data-driven discussions. When inevitable questions or objections arise, the team uses AI to quickly pull information from the internet, previous campaigns, or external benchmarks.

The availability of AI tools to support human decision-making leads the team to create more informed campaign strategies in a fraction of the time.

Dig deeper: How AI makes marketing data more accessible and actionable

Humans + AI = Great decisions

This doesn’t mean that AI alone can handle decision-making. The lending industry experienced this firsthand, as documented in recent research. Loan officers were making decisions based on 12 data points, resulting in a default rate of 10.6%. When AI analyzed 70 data points, the default rate dropped to 5.2% — an impressive improvement. However, when humans and AI evaluated the information together, the default rate was further reduced to 3.1%. AI’s ability to parse large amounts of data, combined with human judgment, proved the winning combination.

AI’s ability to rapidly analyze extensive datasets, combined with human thinking, has the potential to transform how you identify opportunities and manage campaigns.

Historically, organizations have faced trade-offs between speedy decisions and thorough analysis. AI reduces this trade-off by quickly delivering more complete insights and research, freeing humans to apply deep, contextual judgment.

AI systems and humans aren’t immune to biases, particularly when trained on flawed data. However, organizations can work to identify and mitigate these issues by monitoring for biases and merging human judgment with AI analytics. In marketing, for instance, predictive algorithms trained on biased historical campaign data might amplify past mistakes unless you actively review and course-correct these outputs.

Dig deeper: Smarter AI means bigger risks — Why guardrails matter more than ever

Getting started with AI-augmented decision-making

To integrate AI effectively into marketing decisions, identify areas where AI can provide the greatest advantage. Look for places where AI can gather data, provide information or analyze scenarios that are too time-consuming to handle manually. Choose a manageable decision process that allows you to implement new approaches without disrupting your workflow.

After identifying your challenge, choose appropriate AI tools that match your needs. General platforms like ChatGPT or Claude help with brainstorming and analysis. Specialized marketing AI tools provide targeted recommendations for your industry. The goal is to enhance your team’s expertise and break out of the thinking ruts we all fall into.

Develop straightforward questions to get consistent results from AI tools. Ask for multiple approaches to specific marketing challenges. Request an analysis of campaign results to find valuable patterns. Seek contradictory perspectives about strategic decisions to broaden your thinking.

Create clear responsibilities and boundaries for decisions. Determine which areas benefit from AI input and which require human judgment for final decisions. This clarity helps teams use AI effectively without becoming overly dependent.

Monitor your progress regularly. Track improvements in time efficiency, decision quality and team satisfaction to understand the benefits. Use this information to refine your approach and gradually expand how you incorporate AI in decision-making.

Dig deeper: Balancing the human-to-AI mix in B2B marketing

AI as your new strategic partner

AI-augmented decision-making has the power to improve the depth and quality of marketing decisions. By offloading routine tasks and surfacing deep insights, AI frees you to use your unique strengths: creativity, empathy and strategic thinking.

Savvy marketers continue to see AI as their most capable strategic partner — one that constantly learns and helps them overcome the battle of opinions.

Dig deeper: Are AI tools shaping your intentions more than you realize?