MIT Sloan Management Review Article on When AI Investments Pay Off in Marketing

From content creation to software coding and customer segmentation, artificial intelligence deployment fever is real. But amid a great deal of media, analyst, and executive speculation about how AI will impact enterprises, it’s still not easy to see where organizations are reaping the results. To get new insights into what is currently happening with AI deployments in marketing and the associated payoffs, The CMO Survey asked a sample of 316 marketing leaders at for-profit U.S. companies to rate how the use of AI in marketing has affected outcomes. The marketing leaders, 95.6% of whom were at the vice president level or higher, reported gains in three key areas: a 6.2% increase in sales productivity, a 7% increase in customer satisfaction, and a 7.2% decrease in marketing overhead costs.

About the Author

Christine Moorman is the T. Austin Finch Sr. Professor of Business Administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is founder and director of The CMO Survey and former editor in chief of the Journal of Marketing. Colleen Hickey is a class of 2024 MBA candidate at the Fuqua School of Business and a research fellow for The CMO Survey.

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