MarTech experts' top predictions for 2025

Per SAS, traditional AI to surge, GenAI hype will spring a leak, campaign management will be back in vogue and more.

CARY, N.C., Oct. 24, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- While artificial intelligence and generative AI continue to grab the headlines this year, what challenges and opportunities will marketers see next year? We asked top marketing thought leaders across SAS, the leader in data and AI, for their 2025 predictions on marketing technology (MarTech), customer intelligence and more.

Visit SAS 2025 Predictions for more trends and forecasts.

Marketers will aggressively adopt traditional AI (and GenAI too)
In 2025, marketers will move aggressively from simpler applications of GenAI focused on productivity and content generation to more advanced AI capabilities driving competitive advantage and revenue growth. Going beyond large language models (LLMs), marketers will embrace GenAI tools like synthetic data and digital twins as well as established AI technologies like machine learning to deliver personalized experiences and effective campaigns while respecting customer privacy.
– Jennifer Chase, Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, SAS

Responsible marketing will accelerate
In the next year, we will see a massive uptick in the development and use of responsible marketing approaches. MarTech solutions, including those based on traditional and generative AI, will help more and more organizations act responsibly with customer data, while providing relevant information, timely offers and agile support. Responsible marketing builds customer trust and loyalty. When customers trust a brand and see value in their interactions with it, they will more readily share personal data that powers hyper-personalized marketing efforts.
– Mike Blanchard, Vice President of MarTech Solutions, SAS

(For more, download the recent SAS-sponsored report, Optimizing the Use of Marketing Technology to Build Customer Trust, from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.)

The GenAI hype balloon will spring a leak
In 2024, the GenAI hype machine was in overdrive. Gartner's AI chief of research noted that GenAI is 90% of the airwaves but only 5% of the use cases. And our global study revealed that 90% of organizations plan to invest in GenAI for marketing in 2025, but 90% of CMOs still do not fully understand GenAI or its potential impact. In 2025, we'll see a softening of interest in and hype around GenAI, and a renewed focus on more traditional AI technologies, particularly for front-end CX applications. More and more organizations will apply natural language processing, text analytics, sentiment analytics, speech-to-text AI and good old predictive analytics to power chatbots, virtual assistants, automated ticketing and support and more.
– Jon Moran, Head of MarTech Solutions Marketing, SAS

Campaign management will be back in vogue
Author Stephen King wrote, "Sooner or later, everything old is new again." Not long ago, brands were eager to move away from the talk of campaigns to focus on journeys. While marketing campaigns have evolved into customer journeys, the segmentation and audience-creation capabilities of traditional campaign management have been grossly overlooked. As many organizations make the move to a cloud data strategy, campaign management will be back in vogue in 2025. But buyer beware; while many vendors promise customer segmentation capabilities, they aren't living up to the promise of delivering the segmentation, scalability and performance to truly power customer personalization.
– Kate Parker, Director of Markets and Growth for Global Customer Intelligence Practice, SAS

For CDPs, it will be composable or bust!
Composability, the latest customer data platform (CDP) trend, will radically reshape the CDP market in 2025. Composability is the ability to access and use data where it lives, such as in a cloud data warehouse, rather than requiring it be moved into a CDP database. Functionally, composability helps unbundle some nonfoundational capabilities of a CDP, such as data activation, and enables marketers to only use the capabilities they need. Forrester calls the composable data warehouse a top differentiator for a single customer view, while Gartner says data sharing with cloud data warehouses will be disruptive.
– Lisa Loftis, Principal Product Marketing Manager for Customer Intelligence, SAS

The rise of co-creation
While many organizations have worked with customers to create features or products, AI and GenAI are taking this to another level. In the next year, more brands across industries will share product ideas and prototypes with customers and ask them to use tools like AI-powered image generators to further develop them. While not all these concepts will ultimately lead to real life products, all submissions and feedback will give marketers valuable insights into customer wants and needs, and how they view the brand. These insights will lead to improved campaigns, more effective communication and, yes, better products and services.
– Mike Turner, Principal Business Advisor for Customer Intelligence, SAS

Organizations will embrace GenAI-powered customer service or fall behind
In 2025, more organizations will turn to GenAI-powered customer service, with chatbots and self-service channels augmenting support professionals. The result? Customers will gain more control, retrieving instant answers at their convenience to most questions without tedious queues. And brands will be able to provide the exceptional service customers expect without breaking the bank.
– Mari Nilsson Björkman, Global Marketing Lead for Telecom Industry, SAS

Marketers will go beyond "zero copy data" hype
In 2025, marketers will tread carefully around zero copy data, a buzzword for systems in the CDP space designed to avoid data duplication. Zero copy data promises direct access to cloud-based data, eliminating the need to move or copy data into separate marketing clouds. However, most MarTech still requires businesses to store certain types of data. Zero copy data creates confusion by blurring the lines between native data warehouse strategies and the rapidly expanding CDP market. While zero copy data seems promising on paper, it's important to examine how well it can truly minimize data duplication and deliver real-time insights. As the saying goes, your results may vary.
– Jennifer Pearson, Customer Intelligence Product Marketing Manager, SAS

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SOURCE SAS