AI’s potential is much larger than mass-producing content.
While that may be part of what AI can do for you, says Jeff Day from Act-On, the possibilities on the horizon are far more impactful to marketers.
But to take advantage of AI’s near-future potential, you have to be prepared. See what Jeff suggests in this video and transcript from B2B Forum 2024 below.
Jeff is one of many presenters who reveal upcoming marketing revolutions at B2B Forum. This year there are more than 50 sessions, keynotes, and roundtable discussions dedicated to improving your B2B marketing results—and not only with AI.
To see what’s in store for the 700+ B2B marketers in attendance this November in Boston, and to get your own B2B Forum ticket before they sell out, check out the program and event details here.
AI. AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, right?
AI changes everything. It will change everything, right?
AI automates. We are marketing automation. It’s going to further automate everything we do.
It’s not going to happen next year, but it’s going to go really far next year, and it’s going to continue to evolve quickly.
Performance recommendations, we talked about this a little bit. I’m actually going to move these quickly.
I want to get to the point that what you should be doing now, next best action, which is to say:
“Hey, we’ve got performance recommendations on how you can improve your email performance, or your website performance.”
Next best action is saying, “oh, well, for that group, based on what they did, here’s what you should do next. You should send them this email. You should reach out to them in SMS. You should advertise to their company, whatever it is, based on all of the behavior data that we have and all the data signals coming next.”
And then the next thing after that, this is the big easy button, right? And I’m super excited for this.
It’s a full program builder, like, why can’t AI just do all of this for us?
We already have audience identification. We already have content creation. We already have graphical content creation.
We can do all that. Today.
We’re very close to having content like asset, CTA type recommendation based on persona and behavior, and then we just have to build up the next best action, and then it’s a, “oh, here’s who I want to market to. Go build the campaign for me. Write all the content, create all the graphical elements, build it out for me. I’ll review it, and I’ll launch it within a day.”
We’ll have this by the end of next year, and this gets us a huge step to mass personalization.
Once you have that, it’s like, “well, why do I have to segment to a group? Why can’t I just do this for almost every individual?”
So this is exciting.
What do you need to do to get ready for it?
Data, data, data, data, data, right?
AI needs data. It’s a hungry beast, so bring as much data as you can into your marketing automation world.
Of course, the contact data. Of course, the account data. All the first party data, meaning anything that they’re doing on your website or to engage with you. That intent data that’s coming from the different platforms that you have, the ABM platforms and other platforms—that’s another signal of what your prospects are interested in, and what they’re doing within your world.
And then also, custom data that you might have.
We have banking customers who want to bring in their loan rate data based on their contacts so that they know that when loan rates go low, a certain rate, they can market to those contacts for a promotion, an email, a loan promotion, or whatever it may be.
All this data will help feed the AI engine. So in the time being try to integrate these systems, bring the data in so that when the AI machine gets up and going, it gives you better recommendations.
Let’s skip this one.
We talked a lot about ABM. This is going to evolve fast. I’m already seeing it happen.
Marketo just announced an ABM feature set.
We’ve got ours, and we’re evolving it and building on it.
These, by the end of the year, my prediction is they will not be separate flows.
You’ll be able to be very complimentary. They’ll talk to each other. You’ll know what accounts your leads and MQLs are in, and vice versa.
So this is coming, too
And think about how you can start to merge the data sets of these worlds today.
Published May 21, 2025
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