From Content Creation to Decisioning

Artificial intelligence has moved much beyond simple automation and content generation in marketing. Marketing teams can now generate campaign content in minutes, analyze customer behavior at scale, and automate tasks that once required hours of manual work. Yet, connecting these capabilities into a timely, personalized customer experience remains a challenge.

A Kings Research survey highlights this disconnect:76%of organizations have integrated AI agents in their marketing workflow. But only15%of organizations are capable of capturing a customer event, making a decision, and delivering a personalized response within seconds. 

The next phase of AI in marketing is moving beyond content generation and into campaign optimization, customer data analysis, decision-making, and cross-channel coordination. The challenge is no longer simply how to produce marketing assets faster. It is how to connect customer signals to relevant decisions and coordinated action.

Investments inAI for marketing automationare expected to rise across organizations. Identifying where to direct these investments will be as crucial as the deployment of AI itself. According to the survey, corporate funding plans for the next fiscal year show high budget allocation towards decisioning and integration layers of marketing.

Note: The study covers North American enterprises across Retail, BFSI, FMCG, and other sectors, each serving over 50 million customers. Respondents included senior leaders in marketing, customer engagement, digital transformation, and marketing operations, with in-depth interviews involving CMOs, CCOs, VPs, and senior/director-level leaders across marketing, technology, customer experience, and growth.

Where is AI Being Used in Marketing?

Content creation, ideation, campaign management, data analysis, personalization, and coordination of cross-channel customer journeys are among the top applications where AI adoption in marketing is high.

Here are some common marketing applications where AI is being used:

• Content creation:Generating ad copy, emails, social media posts, images, and videos.
• Customer segmentation:Grouping audiences based on their behavior, interests, and purchase history.
• Personalization:Delivering relevant product recommendations, offers, and messages to individual customers.
• Campaign management:Automating campaign execution, scheduling, targeting, and performance optimization.
• Marketing analytics:Analyzing campaign results, identifying trends, and forecasting customer behavior.
• Advertising optimization:Improving ad targeting, bidding strategies, budget allocation, and return on ad spend.
• Customer engagement:Powering chatbots, virtual assistants, and automated customer interactions.
• Customer journey orchestration:Coordinating interactions across email, websites, social media, advertising, and CRM platforms.

How Will Marketing and Marketers Evolve with Rising AI Adoption?

The survey points toward a broader shift towards strategic roles in marketing, with marketers leveraging AI to reduce time spent on repetitive tasks. Strategic thinking, AI orchestration, experimentation, and understanding customer judgment will be crucial for marketers of tomorrow. The way marketers operate is expected to change drastically as AI becomes an integral part of the marketing tech stack.

As AI integration and adoption in marketing rises, the productivity of marketers is estimated to increase significantly. AI will not simply make marketers faster. It will change what organizations expect marketers to contribute. The value of a marketer will increasingly depend on their ability to combine AI capabilities.

Reflecting on the evolution of marketing operations, Carlos Bello, former Deputy Director, El Puerto de Liverpool, and current Director of CLM and Media Ops at Walmart de México y Centroamérica, stated

“Marketing teams are expected to get more strategic, because you have to approach the company to create a more strategic approach than being more tactical. The key that technology gives you is the opportunity to be more strategic in your day-to-day. So, it’s not about the UX people; it’s more about having more time to create initiatives or create a strategic marketing plan.”

How to Build Successful AI-Powered Marketing Operations?

Building a proper AI-powered marketing operation requires careful coordination, proper data access, strategic planning, and better decisioning capabilities. Successful AI-powered marketing is an operating-model transformation, not a technology purchase. Start with a measurable business problem, connect AI to reliable data and existing workflows, retain human accountability, and scale only when results demonstrate business value.

Here are some guidelines to follow while developing AI-powered marketing operations:

• Identification of Expected Business Outcomes:Defining clear objectives for marketing teams before the selection of AI tools is essential. Emphasis should be placed on measurable outcomes such as lower customer acquisition costs, higher conversion rates, improved retention, and faster campaign execution.
• Integrate Appropriate Data:Offering specific data to AI models that is current and relevant to the business brings out the best results from AI. Integration of CRM, website analytics, advertising platforms, sales records, and customer engagement data with AI models could be crucial in separating a successful marketing operation from one destined to fail.
• Prioritize High Impact Workflows:Use of AI in marketing starts with repetitive and time-consuming activities. Beyond that, prioritizing workflows such as audience segmentation, predictive lead scoring, personalized content, campaign optimization, and customer support determines how impactful and beneficial AI adoption is in the long run.
• Don’t Forget the Human Aspect:Maintaining proper oversight of AI operations is essential in aligning marketing with brand positioning, creative quality, factual accuracy, ethical considerations, and sensitive customer interactions. Human oversight is particularly necessary for public-facing content and consequential decisions.
• Accountability through Governance is a Must:Establishing a baseline before AI deployment is essential in ensuring properAI governancein workflows. The most practical starting point is to select one high-value customer journey, map its handoffs, identify its data and integration requirements, and evaluate the results before expanding to additional workflows.

Building an AI marketing strategy or operation for your organization?Connect with Kings Researchto get detailed insights into how organizations in your region or industry are deploying AI in their marketing operations.

Leveraging AI can save millions for organizations in terms of resources as well as human capital. To understand how AI can have a direct business impact, let’s look into how Klarna utilized AI to save on its external marketing spend without compromising on its marketing goals.

How Generative AI Helped Klarna Transform Its Marketing Workflows

Klarna, a global digital payments and shopping platform, appliedgenerative AIto marketing production to reduce costs, accelerate campaign execution, and improve operational efficiency. The company integrated multiple AI tools and AI-assisted workflows to speed up content production and delivery for its personalized campaigns.

The Challenge

Klarna needed to produce marketing content across multiple markets, digital channels, and retail occasions while managing production costs and turnaround times.

• High external supplier expenditure:Dependence on external agencies for selected creative, translation, CRM, and social media activities increased marketing production costs.
• Lengthy creative production cycles:Traditional image development could take approximately six weeks, limiting the speed of campaign execution.
• Demand for continuous content updates:Websites, applications, and promotional campaigns required a steady supply of fresh visual assets and copy.
• Limited production flexibility:Conventional workflows could make it difficult to develop and adapt creative materials quickly for seasonal events and changing campaign requirements.

Klarna’s objective was to improve creative output and turnaround times while reducing the resources required for selected marketing activities.

The Solution

Klarna integrated generative AI and AI-powered editing tools into its marketing workflows.

• AI-powered image creation:The company used tools including Midjourney, DALL·E, and Adobe Firefly to generate marketing visuals. It also used tools such as Topaz Gigapixel and Photoroom for image enhancement and editing.
• AI-assisted copywriting:Klarna developed Copy Assistant to support marketing copy production, reporting thatAI assisted approximately 80% of its copywriting.
• Faster creative development:The company used AI to accelerate image production for seasonal campaigns and digital channels, reducing the reported image-development cycle from six weeks to seven days.

Reduced reliance on external suppliers: Klarna applied AI to selected workflows involving creative production, translation, CRM, and social media, helping reduce spending on external marketing suppliers.

The approach combined content generation, image editing, and workflow changes rather than relying on a single AI tool to transform the entire marketing function.

“AI is helping us become leaner, faster and more responsive to what our customers care about, leading to a much, much better experience.”

– CMO at Klarna, David Sandström 

Klarna found a solution to overcome its content production bottlenecks and managed to save significant capital that would otherwise have been spent on external marketing agency outsourcing.

Kings Research’s survey on “Marketer Readiness for AI-driven orchestration” has highlighted content production bottlenecks as a key restraining factor for AI-driven marketing orchestration. Around58%of survey respondents reported content creation being a key barrier to scalable personalization. 

The previously mentioned Klarna case study is a testament to how overcoming this barrier and obtaining substantial cost savings is possible. Scaling one-to-one personalization is a key priority for most organizations looking to deploy AI in their marketing operations.

Proper identity resolution, appropriate customer data, streamlined content creation, and maintaining cross-channel and post-click continuity play a crucial role in successful AI deployment in marketing.

Get this report from Kings Research to assess the readiness of marketers to adopt AI in North American organizations. Need it for a different region/country or want the survey to be customized as per your business requirements? Connect with our analysts to get a fully customized report tailored specifically to your business needs.