Teams not ‘skilled or confident enough’ to use AI tools, say a third of marketing leaders

Research by martech companies continues to highlight how a lack of training could prevent the effective adoption of AI-powered tools in marketing teams.

Dotdigital’s CMO Tracker includes a survey of 750 marketing leaders across the UK, US, and Australia, all of whom said they were using AI, largely, as the report puts it, due to martech providers swiftly incorporating the tech into their platforms.

Yet despite this widespread uptake by businesses (nearly half the sample cited AI-powered marketing automation as a top investment priority), a third said they feel their teams are not ‘skilled or confident enough to effectively use AI tools’.

More than a quarter of respondents (28%) said that this lack of understanding of platforms and tools was their top concern.

The report references 2023 work by the World Economic Forum, which itself cites Korn Ferry research into potential future talent shortages and states that “technical limitations are no longer the main impediment to realizing the impact of many emergent, game-changing technologies,” rather, “it is the constrained ability to grow the supply of skilled talent to meet the demands for these technologies.”

Similar warnings have come recently from the EU in the European Commission’s latest update on its Digital Decade initiative, which began in 2021 and set a series of 2030 targets for citizen digital skills and business capabilities. The Commission’s analysis finds that, “the collective efforts of Member States will fall short of the EU’s level of ambition” with gaps identified “in particular in the areas of digital skills, high-quality connectivity, uptake of [AI] and data analytics by enterprises, semiconductor production and start-up ecosystems.”

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Are organisations properly preparing their marketers for the AI era?

Some of the most striking findings on AI within martech company research came from a Salesforce survey at the end of 2023. ‘The Promises and Pitfalls of AI at Work’ survey found that:

• 62% of desk workers said they don’t believe they have the skills to effectively and safely use generative AI.
• 67% of desk workers said they expect employers to provide generative AI training.
• 69% of desk workers say they haven’t received such training.

The report also linked the issue of AI tool adoption to the fact that “the majority of companies haven’t articulated to employees whether or how AI can be used in the first place”. Only 21% of respondents in Salesforce’s study said their company has provided approved tools or programmes, despite this ranking as the top factor amongst desk workers for effective and safe use of generative AI.

This inertia on the company side has led to 55% of desk workers using unapproved tools and 40% using tools explicitly banned. A rise in so-called ‘shadow IT’ creates a whole host of new questions around data security and ethics.

Amidst all this uncertainty, and the many debates about whether the genAI hype in the market is justified, Salesforce makes a compelling case for the maturation of enterprise AI in the introduction to its recent Trends in AI report. It lists key success drivers led by trust, including “data security, data privacy, and safety and ethical guardrails,” as well as the need to focus on “the highest impact use cases that address bottlenecks, pain points, and performance improvement opportunities.” The report highlights “turnkey AI use cases” as the fastest and lowest-risk path to understanding the automation opportunity, often using CRM data as a starting point.

However, the report goes on to claim that upskilling a workforce for AI is “not a ‘one-and-done’ exercise, but rather a continuous cycle of learning as AI evolves.”

The question for marketing leaders may be whether they can afford to invest in this new AI martech without also investing in data and AI literacy through workplace training.