From the groundbreaking AI breakthroughs of GPT-4, DALL-E 3, and stable diffusion video, to the explosive surge of generative AI products flooding the market, 2023 was quite an exciting year for AI and its potential for marketers. If 2024 lives up to its potential, the excitement is just getting started.

Here at SilverTech, we spent all of last year watching, testing, and implementing these new AI technologies in the interests of solving tough challenges for our clients. Through this process, we gained valuable insights into their capabilities and limitations.

As 2023 came to a close and we kickstarted the new year, we took a moment to reflect on the lessons learned and anticipate what the future holds for AI in marketing for the year 2024. We spoke with individuals around the company to hear what they believe the top trends for AI in marketing will be this year.

Gen AI will find its way into everything.

Gen AI is poised to permeate every aspect of our lives. If 2023 was hailed as the year of generative AI, then 2024 is destined to be crowned as the year of seamless generative AI integration.

Initially, we will witness this integration through software add-ons. Content Management System (CMS) solutions will offer on-demand summarization or generate image thumbnails, while photo editing software will enable the replacement of image elements with simple text prompts.

However, as the year progresses, developers will ingeniously embed this new technology directly into the core software of products. We will witness the automation of tasks that were once solely handled by humans across various domains. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, for instance, may eliminate the need for manual data entry and augmentation by automatically processing and comprehending business communications. Additionally, advertising technology platforms will incorporate generative AI to effortlessly create and deploy ad creatives.

Smart marketers are already collaborating with their teams and agencies to brainstorm innovative ways in which generative AI can drive operational efficiencies and achieve business objectives. To thrive in 2024, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of why, where, and how to leverage these new features. By doing so, you will be well-prepared to swiftly capitalize on their potential as soon as they become available.

AI Marketing hype will fade.

As AI becomes ubiquitous across technologies, the value proposition to include AI in messaging products and services will fade. Over the last year, we have been bombarded with AI messaging from every technology vendor across the marketing technology landscape and beyond. Even your McDonald’s drive-through order is now powered by generative AI.

With thousands of new technologies hitting the market, promising to solve every problem better than existing technology, it’s understandable if this has all become noise. Over the next year, these new technologies will shift the value proposition to results over hype.

Smart marketers remain true to long-term business objectives and are not influenced by short-term marketing hype. To succeed in 2024, continue to evaluate based on a software’s business value over its buzz, but be careful not to see a lack of buzz from a lack of value.

There will be a tectonic shift in the top marketing software companies.

As AI becomes ubiquitous across technologies, the value proposition of including AI in messaging products and services will fade. Over the past year, we have been bombarded with AI messaging from every technology vendor in the marketing technology landscape and beyond. Even your McDonald’s drive-through order is now powered by generative AI.

With thousands of new technologies entering the market, each promising to solve problems better than existing technology, it's understandable if it has all become noise. In the coming year, these new technologies will shift the value proposition to focus on results rather than hype.

Smart marketers remain true to long-term business objectives and are not influenced by short-term marketing hype. To succeed in 2024, continue to evaluate software based on its business value rather than its buzz. However, be careful not to mistake a lack of buzz for a lack of value.

AI agents will change every industry.

Across tech chat rooms and messaging boards at the moment, data scientists and engineers are all buzzing about the concept of AI agents. AI agents will operate similarly to the way ChatGPT does but within a narrower focus.

Agents will possess specific industry or company knowledge. Imagine the power of having the combined knowledge of your industry or business's proprietary data at your fingertips.

This idea is in its very early stages, but companies such as OpenAI with GPTs, Google with their Gemini models, Microsoft with Co-pilot, and Agent.ai will bring this idea to the market in 2024.

Smart marketers know that using technology to augment human ability is a competitive advantage. To succeed in 2024, marketers must move quickly in their partnership with technology teams to build bridges between their islands of data and form a holistic view of their business knowledge to train their own AI agents before their competitors do.

Generative AI created personalization will dominate.

One of the largest challenges marketers have faced when implementing personalization strategies has been the volume of content required to deliver the scale necessary for success.

Generative AI will remove these content creation barriers, creating infinite iterations at near-zero cost and delivering messaging and images truly unique to each customer.

2023 was a transformative year for AI in marketing, with the the rapid development of generative AI products such as GPT, DALL-E 3 and others. As 2024 progresses, we anticipate continued focus on the integration of generative AI into software solutions as well as new tools to enhance productivity and creativity. Here at SilverTech, we’re excited to embrace these coming changes as we continue to focus on tangible results over hype, and leverage AI to create impactful marketing experiences across channels for our clients.