The gap between corporate enthusiasm and corporate pedagogy has rarely been so tidy.
A new survey of 500 marketers, conducted by NewtonX and Adweek, found that 69 percent of respondents said their companies either mandate or "strongly encourage" the use of artificial intelligence tools. Yet 43 percent of those same marketers reported receiving no formal training on how to use them — a ratio that suggests many organizations have skipped directly from the exhortation phase to the expectation phase without pausing for the explanation phase.
The findings arrive at a moment when the advertising and marketing industries are awash in AI directives from holding company executives, platform partners, and chief marketing officers who have read the same McKinsey reports. What remains less clear is whether the people charged with executing those directives have been given anything beyond a login and a blessing.
Cynthia Chen, the founder and chief executive of Kikoff, a financial technology company, represents a different approach. Ms. Chen said her company holds regular "AI Days" devoted to productivity applications as well as compliance and regulatory considerations — the sort of structured effort that the survey suggests remains the exception rather than the rule.
(One imagines the 43 percent nodding wistfully.)
The pattern is not unfamiliar. The industry has a long history of adopting new tools with more velocity than understanding — from programmatic buying platforms that arrived faster than the fraud detection systems needed to police them, to social media dashboards that multiplied before anyone agreed on what the metrics meant.
Whether artificial intelligence will follow the same trajectory, or whether the stakes this time will prompt a more deliberate approach, remains to be seen. For now, the survey offers a snapshot of an industry that has been told to run before it has been shown how to tie its shoes.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Marketers Are Being Pushed to Use AI, But Not Taught How"