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Machine-Generated Transcript

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, we are back from MarketingProfs B2B Forum, and I believe that is our last professional public event for 2024. The calendar is already booking for 2025 and is quite full, which is great. But we wanted to take a few minutes today to talk through some of our takeaways from MarketingProfs B2B Forum because it’s one of our favorite events of the year. The food is always excellent, as Ann Handley likes to point out, as one of the few conferences that feeds you with things that will not make you immediately ill. So, Katie, let’s start with you. You and I did the workshop together. You also had your session on AI readiness, and you went to a bunch of other sessions. We all did. What were your major takeaways from the event?

The major takeaways were that despite all of the conversation about generative AI, marketers are not as far along with using it as I think they’re being led to believe. That feeling of “I’m falling behind” or “everybody’s doing it” is just not true. I think a lot of companies are still trying to figure out where AI fits. I think they’ve tested a lot of things. I think there’s been a lot of experimentation, but the sense that I was getting was that there wasn’t a lot of “okay, this is how we can use it. This is exactly what it means for us.” I think a lot of marketers are still in the experimentation, exploratory phase of using generative AI. Now, that said, a lot of software that they’re currently using just went ahead and baked it in. So there’s really no “oh, and now I’m using AI and this is what it looks like and this is how it’s different.” It’s “what do you mean? I’m doing what I was always doing and now it’s AI-powered.” So I think there was a lot of eye-opening of what it actually means to be using AI for marketers.

Yeah, it was amazing. In the first few minutes of our wor