Marketers, where do you even start with AI?
Most marketing professionals know AI matters. The problem isn't ability or tools, it's knowing where to begin. This article looks at why 75% of organisations still have no AI roadmap, and introduces a Google Gem built to help you find your starting point.
I remember sitting my Higher Maths exam. I opened the paper, scanned the questions, and felt a cold panic of not knowing where to begin. Everything looked way too hard.
Then, thankfully, I spotted one question I could answer. Just one. I did it, settled down, went back to the beginning, and managed. I even passed!
That's exactly where most marketing and communications professionals are with AI right now.
It's not that they lack the ability. It's not that the tools don't work. It's that when you open the paper and see the full scope of what AI can do, the sheer amount of what's possible is paralysing.
The data confirms it. According to SmarterX's AI for CMOs Blueprint, 75% of organisations have no AI roadmap or strategy. 68% provide no formal AI training. And for the fifth year running, the biggest barrier to AI adoption isn't tools or budget.
It's not knowing where to start.
The problem with most AI advice
Most AI content, including plenty I write and share, tells you what to do. Use AI for content. Automate your reporting. Build governance frameworks. Align your revenue teams.
All true. All useful. All completely useless if you're staring at the paper and can't find your first question.
The blueprint makes an important point here. The pilots that fail are almost always too broad. Teams that try to reimagine an entire workflow from scratch spend months getting nowhere. The ones that succeed pick one specific, repetitive, time-consuming task, and start there.
A Gem to help
I've created a Google Gem, a personalised AI assistant, that acts as a diagnostic tool for exactly this problem.
It doesn't give you a strategy. It doesn't hand you a twelve-month roadmap. It asks you the right questions about your business, your biggest workflow bottleneck, and your constraints, and works with you to identify one specific, low-risk pilot to start with.
If you know AI matters but the paper still looks blank, try the Gem here.