GenAI transforms marketing by boosting productivity and personalisation while addressing challenges like trust, authenticity, and security

For many marketing professionals, a key bottleneck to execution is the sheer amount of assets needed to drive campaigns across countless channels, formats, audiences, and languages. Luckily, GenAI is uniquely suited to unlock the promise of personalisation at scale through content.

Savvy CMOs and their teams need tools to help them work smarter and feed the content beast. IDC predicts that by 2029, GenAI will assume 42 percent of traditional marketing’s mundane work and, what’s more, boost marketing productivity by over 40 percent.

Those numbers are astounding. But not all GenAI strategies and platforms are created equal. Marci Maddox, research vice president at IDC, is upfront about marketers’ concerns: “Adoption is not without its challenges.” By implementing AI tools that prioritise responsibility, ethics, and security, forward-thinking leaders can take advantage of the speed and productivity boosts AI promises, all while driving both top-line revenue growth and bottom-line optimisation.

The benefits of unlocking AI

Organisations are already utilising GenAI — IDC research indicates that 79 percent of marketers are currently using it for content tasks — but it’s how they use it that will be the game changer.

“GenAI unlocks a new era of content marketing, demanding a new breed of ‘creative scientist’ roles that can leverage its power,” wrote Maddox in the paper. “These teams will need to adapt their daily tasks, transitioning from content creation to strategic storytelling, scaling capabilities across the organisation, and driving exceptional customer experience design.”

IDC highlighted three ways GenAI can immediately make a difference:

1. Accelerating production. AI can help you overcome the content avalanche. Product descriptions, social media posts, and basic ad copy are time-consuming tasks that, when fielded by GenAI, can give teams time back for ideation, exploration, and testing.
2. Content personalisation. Messaging can be tailored to specific audiences and channels for increased engagement, conversion, and customer lifetime value. This data-driven marketing takes out the guesswork and helps calibrate campaigns based on performance metrics.
3. Brand protection. A thoughtful approach to GenAI can help organisations maintain transparency and brand protection through watermarks, secure custom models, and brand-specific style kits. These functions mitigate misinformation, foster trust, and maintain brand consistency.

Challenges to overcome

The path to using GenAI ethically and creatively isn’t without bumps.

Marketing leaders have valid concerns about the following:

1. Trust. Customer interactions start and end with trust. IDC found that 22 percent of enterprises are making significant investments in GenAI, and 80 percent of organisations globally are exploring it. With a saturated market, organisations need to be clear about how they are using such tools to preserve trust.
2. Authenticity. Brands build connections with genuine, authentic customer experiences. To avoid a breakdown with indistinguishable content, leaders will need to find creative ways to use GenAI while preserving their unique brand voice.
3. Security. Building robust AI security starts at the data layer. Organisations must find a balance between the benefits of public models and keeping proprietary information safe.

“Enterprises must develop robust data governance frameworks to ensure data privacy and establish clear guardrails for using GenAI,” said Maddox.

Why Adobe Firefly is a trustworthy solution

Adobe has designed a GenAI platform that revolutionises content creation for creative and marketing teams. With generative models that are designed to solve key creation and production workflows for enterprise teams, Adobe is uniquely positioned to support businesses by transforming content creation and production across the enterprise. Solutions like Firefly Services, for example, can generate endless content variations to power personalisation, localisation, and ecommerce needs, and capabilities like style kits and custom models help teams across the enterprise safely create content while staying on brand.

“Adobe empowers broader creative thinking and streamlines the production of personalised content at scale,” Maddox wrote.

Moreover, because Firefly is trained on licensed and public domain content and designed to be responsible and commercially safe, organisations can use its generations with confidence in production environments.

Adobe is a trusted partner, and Firefly is the generative platform of choice for enterprises. IDC recommends Adobe Firefly as a responsibly developed, comprehensive GenAI platform that empowers broader creative strategy and boosts productivity.