Unleashing Your Marketing Team’s Potential With AI

Inbound

December 16, 2024

Unleashing Your Marketing Team’s Potential With AI

When it comes to AI and marketing, Atlassian’s CMO Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir brings a perspective that's truly one-of-a-kind. As both a Ph.D. in speech processing and a marketing leader, Ozdemir know show to connect the dots between AI's technical capabilities and its practical marketing applications.

At INBOUND 2024, she sat down with The Next Wave podcast hosts Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lands, to share how marketing teams who are struggling with AI can effectively integrate it into their workflows.

THE STATE OF AI IN MARKETING

If you're wondering whether AI has truly taken hold in marketing, the numbers speak volumes. According to Atlassian's recent survey of 500 U.S. marketers, 89% use AI regularly, with 62% engaging with it daily. Even more telling? Marketing leaders are at the forefront of this transformation.

"95% of leaders said they use AI regularly," Ozdemir revealed. "Clearly leadership teams, marketing leaders are very much into AI."

This widespread adoption spans companies of all sizes and includes marketers at every level, from individual contributors to senior leadership, showing that AI's impact is truly horizontal across organizations and signals a significant shift in how marketing teams approach their work.

REFRAMING AI: FROM JOB THREAT TO CREATIVE PARTNER

While the "AI is coming for our jobs" narrative may persist, Ozdemir countered that perspective with an interesting data point: 79% of marketers don't view AI as a threat to their jobs.

Instead, they understand AI's collaborative power, treating it as a creative partner that opens new doors rather than a replacer of human capabilities.

I partner with AI as my secret creative agency and then I actually look at the output and I still modify it, but it gives me a lot more avenues of creativity to think through that I wouldn't come up with myself.

This partnership mindset is already delivering results. When asked about AI's primary benefit, marketers were split: 51% said it makes their work better, while 49% said it speeds things up. The key is using AI to elevate, not just automate. This balanced approach helps teams focus on using AI for both efficiency and quality improvements.

HOW MARKETER'S ARE PUTTING AI TO WORK

According to Atlassian's research, marketers are leaning on AI in three main areas:

Research and knowledge discovery
Content creation
Ideation and brainstorming

"We're just inundated, we're just surrounded with knowledge, content, information. And it's getting increasingly difficult to actually make that knowledge work for us," Ozdemir noted.

This challenge is exactly where AI proves most valuable, helping marketers digest and utilize vast amounts of information more effectively. At Atlassian, they're using AI-powered agents to instantly access customer insights and create content in context, demonstrating how AI can be seamlessly integrated into daily workflows.

BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS TO ENTRY

Despite high AI's growing popularity, some teams are still hitting a few roadblocks on their way to adoption. The top barriers include:

Company policies around data privacy
Lack of leadership guidance
Uncertainty about use cases

For leaders, the key is staying tuned into practical applications and helping teams integrate AI into their work.

Ozdemir suggests starting small and personal: "Make your interaction with AI a very personal thing so that it can actually really hit the spot for you... figuring out what actually moves the needle for you personally is a really good starting point."

She shared how one of her team members uses AI to generate weekly accomplishment reports. It's a simple, personal use case that not only saves time but also highlights AI's potential for the whole team. Small wins can lead to big organizational change.

THE FUTURE OF MARKETING WITH AI

AI's future is looking brighter (and smarter) than ever before. Ozdemir envisions a world where personalization is taken to new heights.

In an ideal world I would love to land in a place where every single person that we're marketing to has a very personalized message... and there is a way to actually let AI make on-the-fly decisions to make our content more relevant.

But things don't stop at personalization. She sees a future where advanced image and video generation capabilities will revolutionize visual storytelling in marketing.

Within the next five years, she predicts AI will seamlessly be woven into every corner of marketing. AI is expected to become more fluid in our workflows, improving everything from visual content creation to real-time decision-making.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR MARKETING LEADERS

For marketing leaders looking to do more with AI, Ozdemir offers three essential tips:

Focus on finding personal use cases that resonate with your specific needs
Think of AI as a partner that enhances human creativity rather than replaces it
Use AI to raise the baseline quality of your team's output by leveraging organizational knowledge

"The role of AI in actually tirelessly answering your questions is that you can tirelessly ask AI questions," Ozdemir reminded the audience. "You don't have to be shy about learning new skills."

The teams that succeed with AI won't just use it to work faster; they'll use it to grow, adapt, and learn.

Watch Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir's full session here for more takeaways on how AI can boost marketing teams.