Our second annual survey of leaders in marketing about their use of AI shows that they are currently most often using it for creating content today. Looking just two years ahead, they expect the top three uses to be revenue planning, customer value analysis, and recruitment. In addition, notably fewer marketing leaders this year said that AI talent was too hard to find.

Executives across functions indicate that AI is rapidly becoming a part of daily business and is being measured for its contributions like any other investment.

Across functions, it’s still hard for companies to find the AI talent they need. As leaders seek to use AI for a broadening range of tasks and projects—eventually rewiring business processes across the enterprise—we expect high demand for AI-specific expertise at all levels to continue for three to six years. 

In the long run, it seems likely demand will follow a pattern similar to that in earlier waves of computing innovation, from personal computing to cloud, in which specific technical expertise was in high demand during the transition, but then declined as the relevant knowledge became a part of every person’s role. In other words, we expect that basic working knowledge of AI will be as fundamental an expectation for senior leaders as being digitally savvy is today.