In 2017 we put together a graph to showcase the must-haves, the should-haves and the nice-to-haves of different AI applications for marketing and growth. We call it the A.I. for Marketing & Growth Maturity Chart.

A lot has changed since then though so it was time for an update. Let’s dive right in!

It’s not new news that AI in Marketing can bring a return on investment for a company’s capabilities.

There are numerous spaces where A.I. is helping marketers.

Text analysis and Computer Vision has now a much wider adoption: from copywriting and campaign optimisation, to collaborative platforms – all of which allow non-native analytics professionals to evaluate, prototype and easily communicate results to their teams.

But where do you start?

Two years and many adopters later from our first diagram, predictive modelling and clustering remain fundamental skills that a professional has to master.

Although they are mature applications, both forms of machine learning have become cheaper and easier to understand.

One of the main changes is that we downgraded recommender systems from a ‘should-have’ to a ‘nice-to-have’.

Despite being some of the most influential applications in our daily lives, the necessity of having a recommendation engine is reduced to businesses that employ a subscription-based model.

Natural language processing has consolidated its applications and status as a should-have.

This is even more powerful when it comes to improving copywriting by analysing the sentiment and personality of your customers.

The use of psychographics has raised multiple ethical concerns and data privacy regulations, forcing marketers to be more diligent with content.

The risk-return here is still unclear, and for this reason, we kept this skill as a ‘nice-to-have’.

Finally, image scoring became one of the most relevant and easy to acquire applications.

Uses cases of Image similarity showed good value as well.

These lookalike algorithms identify products that resemble each other that consumers might be interested too.

From traditional applications to the rising ones, the next coming years are promising for applications of AI in marketing.

We hope this video will help you take steps to apply artificial intelligence to your business and career.