The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day, “Inspire Inclusion”, establishes a poignant tone for fostering authentic change. It perfectly mirrors the dynamic landscape of marketing, where change is the only constant.

The last third-party cookie has finally crumbled, privacy laws are tightening, and now, Generative AI is quickly ushering in a new era of innovation and adaptation.

With mounting research demonstrating that gender-diverse teams outperform their peers time and time again, we turned the conversation over to the exceptional women thought leaders who are at the forefront of shaping the narrative surrounding Gen AI and marketing.

Lisa Gately, Principal Analyst at Forrester

Gately has 20 years of experience in B2B technology content, communications, events, and services marketing. She helps Forrester clients build and optimise their B2B content engines and transform them into competitive differentiators. Lisa is an evangelist for audience-centric content strategy, content marketing, and content operations.

“During the past year, we’ve seen Gen AI capabilities appear in the martech stack along with a rise of multimodal capabilities, where AI models can understand, interpret, and generate content across multiple formats like text, images, audio, and video. It can be overwhelming to understand which systems do what tasks and to determine which ones to embrace. However, making time to learn about these capabilities is important. Gen AI brings more power to content creation, audience engagement, and personalisation. Content use cases aren’t only a practical entry point for scaling Gen AI adoption; they also represent a large part of an organisation’s activities and offer enormous potential for enhancing the customer experience and speeding time to market. Acting now is essential because the pace of change for Gen AI will only accelerate”.

Julie Shainock, Managing Director Travel, Transport & Logistics (TTL) at Microsoft

Shainock is responsible for developing Microsoft’s point of view and future strategy for our WW Travel and Transport Industry. She is focused on leading the airlines, hospitality companies, cruise and freight logistics, and rail companies to drive innovation that will enhance the customer and employee journey while increasing productivity and cost reduction through the use of Microsoft’s technology and its ecosystem of solution partners.

“Generative AI is set to revolutionise the Travel, Transport, and Logistics industries by delivering unprecedented levels of personalisation, efficiency, and innovation. It’s not just about automation; it’s about creating intuitive, seamless customer experiences and unlocking new levels of operational efficiency. For organisations to tackle the full potential of Gen AI effectively, establishing a clean data foundation and a clear strategic vision for desired outcomes is critical”.

Adiela Aviram, Cookieless Marketing Transformation Practice Leader at Deloitte Digital

Aviram is an award-winning digital marketer and a Senior Manager in Deloitte Digital’s Advertising, Marketing and E-Commerce offerings. Beyond her career, she is a dedicated Fellow at The Black Wealth Club (BWC), actively contributing to the group’s mission of wealth generation and community reinvestment.

“The only thing constant in marketing, much like in every field, is change. Reflecting on one of my initial roles as a search marketer, I can draw some parallels. I had no formal training in search marketing, and the idea of learning an entire system to advertise on search engines seemed bizarre. Now, much of that same field is supported by generative AI. I’m excited for all the things Gen AI will enable for marketers. It will allow us to focus on more strategic, less repetitive, and energizing areas of our work. However, marketing will always need the human element. Customer experience, by its very nature, is human, and Gen AI will not stand in the way of that”.

Joyce Gordon, Head of Generative AI, Amperity

Gordon leads Amperity’s generative AI product development and strategy. She’s also worked on the product development for many investments across the ML and ML Ops spaces, including launching Amperity’s predictive models and infrastructure used by many of the world’s top brands. “Gen AI is only as good as the data that powers it. And since customer data is notoriously complex, it takes a different AI process to unify it into accurate, comprehensive profiles that can feed your Generative AI tools to get the best results.

Customer data tools can use AI to power critical processes behind the scenes, including data unification, insights, and predictions, so you can answer the questions, “Who are my customers? What did they do? And what should I do next?”

In a world where the same Generative AI tools for activation are available to everyone, the data you feed into your Gen AI systems will be a key competitive differentiator since it determines the quality of the output. In short, it’s not enough to have AI tools at the last mile—they need to be part of your approach from the first step”.

Teresa Sperti, Founder & Director, Arktic Fox

Sperti is a highly seasoned and regarded digital and eCommerce leader with over 20 years of experience working with and for leading brands, including Coles, Officeworks and World Vision, among others. Since establishing Arktic Fox four years ago, Teresa and her team have been partnering with leading brands and scale-up retailers and CPG | FMCG brands to drive eCommerce adoption and capability build, to enable better utilisation of data to enhance experience and deliver better omnichannel experiences and supported brands to utilise and invest in tech to underpin their strategy.

“There are pivotal moments in the digital era that fundamentally alter the trajectory of the industry—the birth of social media and the launch of the iPhone were some of those moments. I believe the launch of ChatGPT is another one that really lit a match to the adoption of Gen AI”.

“In the tech world, we are already seeing strong adoption of Gen AI within marketing platform interfaces to automate creative development and support and enable smarter decision-making. However, it is still very much the early days for Gen AI, and I think we’re just scratching the surface. Brace yourself for a whirlwind of change in this space over the next 12 to 24 months”.

The Future of Gen AI in Marketing

The female leaders in marketing have spoken, and their insights demonstrate the importance of embracing Gen AI not only as a tool for innovation but as a fundamental pillar for cultivating growth and establishing meaningful relationships within the rapidly transforming marketing landscape. Let’s make 2024 the year we harness Gen AI to its fullest potential and unleash lasting, genuine change for the better.