4 steps marketers can take to embrace AI and ease the pressure

If your marketing to-do list feels longer, your KPIs seem loftier, and your budget doesn’t go as far as it used to, it's not just you. Marketers’ jobs are more stressful than they used to be. 

When we surveyed 300+ professionals for the 2025 AI and Marketing Performance Index, nine out of 10 said that the pressure to achieve better results in less time has increased significantly in the last two years. 

So if your workload is overwhelming and you wonder if you’re keeping up, you’re not alone.

This rising pressure isn’t due to just one factor, but this much is clear: Artificial intelligence, with all of its versatility, superpowers, and unknowns, plays a starring role. This tech that’s changing faster than anything we’ve seen before has increased the expectations placed on the marketing team. But AI is also a marketer’s best chance of rising to the occasion. 

Let’s explore how we got here, what’s holding marketers back, and how AI can help them navigate these obstacles — hopefully sooner than later, so marketers can get some sleep.

What’s keeping marketers up at night

It’s no secret that marketers are in the hot seat to prove return on any marketing investment, improve the performance of every campaign, and do it all ASAP. That gets even more challenging as consumer tastes and needs change, forcing marketers to adapt to meet their expectations. 

Consumers aren’t the only ones demanding more, either. “Do more with less” seems to be the C-suite’s constant creed to every team, and marketing is no exception. So it’s unsurprising that our data also saw a disconnect between what executives and non-executives believe are the biggest marketing challenges. Execs most often cited macro-level challenges like manual processes and limited automation. Meanwhile, marketers most often pointed to tactical roadblocks like delayed approvals and budget constraints.

These factors were already at play before the most recent AI wave, fueled by new generative tools and agentic potential. But now that it’s here, AI is turning up the heat, even as it acts as a forcing function to ensure that marketers do progress. Investors are intrigued by the revenue potential of AI. The C-suite expects marketers to use AI to do more in less time. Competitors are using AI, which means marketing teams need to find new ways to use it so they can keep up.

No wonder the pressure’s up. 

Here’s the silver lining: AI has undoubtedly raised the bar for marketers, but AI is also the ladder they need to reach that bar. It offers the firepower to help them achieve big goals and solve their most pressing and stressful problems.

AI benefits match marketers’ biggest bottlenecks

If marketers are being asked to move faster and produce better results, what’s slowing down their marketing cycles? Three of the top bottlenecks marketers cite are:

1. Data analysis and insights (53%) - Manual customer data analysis for marketing has historically been incredibly time-consuming. Marketers know their efforts need to be data-driven, but accessing and activating data is a huge obstacle.

2. Campaign development (47%) - Campaign creation combines the art and the science of marketing, fusing creativity with strategic insights. Done well, it’s also highly collaborative across channels and marketing functions, which can prolong timelines and approvals.

3. Audience segmentation (40%) - True personalization is the ultimate marketing gold standard, but it has long seemed out of reach. It requires not just highly targeted audiences, but also pinpointed campaign timing and messaging that anticipates needs.  

These are huge mountains to climb day-to-day, so it’s no wonder they’re some of marketers’ biggest blockers. But those we surveyed see a light at the end of the tunnel. These bottlenecks are also the top three areas where marketers believe they could most benefit from using AI: 66% say data analysis, 52% say campaign development, and 44% say audience segmentation.

How data provides the missing piece

Why are marketers’ biggest obstacles also AI’s biggest opportunities? These challenges all have one key element in common: data, one of marketers’ most powerful assets and the essential ingredient for AI implementation. 

Marketers aren’t always experts at creating AI-ready data sets, but those on the data team are. If you’re not already collaborating with them closely, it’s time to start. Their partnership is pivotal in helping you drive revenue impacts with data and AI, and they already know firsthand the goldmine that exists within your company data. 

It’s time for the marketing team to become true collaborators with the data team so they can work closely to unlock that value together. Then, they’ll be primed to use AI to overcome the bottlenecks that currently slow them down:

• AI can analyze an entire body of data at scale, surfacing big-picture patterns about audiences — all in a fraction of the time it would take an entire team to do so manually.

• AI can suggest well-timed, strategic campaigns to win back, retain, or convert your next best customers. It will also accelerate iteration, learning from prior performance to make recommendations for the next campaign.

• AI paves the path to personalized and even one-to-one marketing, delivering the right message to customers in the exact right moment, and suggesting additions and refinements to the audience based on incoming insights.

This is all just scratching the surface. Whatever is holding your team back, there’s likely an AI solution or agent to help ease the pressure.

Where we’re headed: The day-to-day future reality with AI

If AI is on the fast track to easing the bottlenecks that slow marketers down today, what will a day in the life of a marketer look like (not too far in the future) when they fully unlock the power of AI? 

I believe the unlocks come from three key areas: research, workflows, and understanding.

Marketers are already starting to tap into research now, primarily at a surface level. They might be using foundational LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude to quickly find details about their audience or the market. Or maybe they’ve even trained their own agent to help them research faster. This will only deepen as AI-powered data analysis becomes second nature for teams.

Next, agentic AI, in particular, will drive incredible speed for our workflows. The savviest marketers are already using AI in this way. They leverage AI to help them complete day-to-day activities more efficiently. This might include brainstorming ideas for content, automating tasks like posting, editing videos, or gathering insights from a conversation with a subject matter expert.

Understanding is the final frontier. This is where marketers combine research and workflows, and step into using AI for analytics, evaluation, and iteration. As AI (and our usage of it) keeps advancing, this technology will prompt them. It will evolve to look for what marketers want to understand and ask questions to help them be more strategic.

As a marketer, my job is always to understand my customers more deeply. Agentic AI can now prompt me with ideas, questions, and insights I didn’t know I wanted or needed to learn. It can show me what I need to understand to be successful in my role. 

Until now, the heavy lifting of that work has been squarely on our shoulders as marketers. The future is an AI collaborator that asks us what we need to know and helps us learn it.

4 steps to reach the next stage of AI implementation

Today, marketers are in the messy middle. We see the huge potential of AI, but we still feel urgent pressure to learn, adapt, and move quickly, on top of the existing pressure to perform. 

What steps can we take to move closer to the promised reality of AI relieving day-to-day stress instead of heightening it? Here’s the path I see.

1. Start with your data

If your data sets aren’t ready for AI, your marketing efforts aren’t ready for AI either. You might be able to use AI on a case-by-case basis, but you won’t be able to maximize its potential. And you’ll likely still struggle with some of the marketing cycle bottlenecks we discussed here. 

Before leveraging AI for in-depth analysis and true personalization, you need to deepen the partnership with your data team. They’re your best allies to centralize your data on the cloud and ensure you have a single source of truth. Then, you can give your AI tools all the data they need to support your best marketing efforts. 

Continue to lean on that partnership over time by telling the data team what you want to achieve and figuring out how to accomplish it together.

2. Manage up expectations

Executives envision how AI can help the business become more efficient, agile, and competitive. But their expectations might not always match reality — marketers can do more in less time with AI, but it won’t happen overnight.

Adopting new tools is only part of the process of embracing AI. To become AI-native is to undergo wide-scale organizational change that shifts how teams work together to make the tools useful, all of which takes time. 

Marketers play a critical role in adjusting the C-suite’s expectations of AI-powered results. In these early stages, marketers need to fail often, learn fast, and move forward to adapt to AI. Manage up by encouraging leadership to support this risk-taking and explaining why the risks are necessary: It’s the best and fastest way to reach the hoped-for AI future.

3. Create an AI roadmap

The AI-related pressure on marketers is high now. But that pressure should begin to ease as teams move from point use cases to implementation across every process and workflow. Set a direction for your marketing org by building an AI roadmap that defines what the marketing team will achieve in every phase of adoption. 

This helps your team create its own definition of success, and it also shows the C-suite exactly what they can expect marketing to achieve with AI going forward. Both of these outcomes can start to relieve some of the AI-driven pressure.

Your roadmap could look like some version of this:

• Phase 1: Invest in data and collaborate with the data team to ensure marketing has what they need to leverage AI.

• Phase 2: Learn about the AI advancements of the tools you already use, including how they can fill gaps you have now.

• Phase 3: Transition to an AI-native team that leverages AI capabilities in nearly all existing workflows.

• Phase 4: Evaluate progress so far and show increased performance, while making a plan to iterate from there.

Defining AI phases lets you show that you’re setting your own fast pace and that you have a plan for what’s next.

4. Stay nimble and curious with AI

If marketers are going to embrace AI wholesale and use it to alleviate their bottlenecks and blockers, we need to start with constant curiosity. What tech exists? What new prompts will help us get better results?

We also need to assume that “AI can do it for us,” no matter what “it” is. When you default to believing that AI can help you with any task as a new way of thinking, you’re primed to look at your work differently as you explore to find new paths to results. You’re also more likely to fail fast and often, so you can reach the next level of successful iteration with the technology. 

Keep moving, brainstorming, and innovating in partnership with AI at all times. The quickest path to stagnation is to assume you already know what’s out there or the best way to get results. But when you constantly try new things, there’s no telling what you’ll achieve.

Marketers will rise to the occasion as they always do

In many ways, the AI era is uncharted territory. We now have capabilities and speed that were unheard of just a few years ago. At the same time, marketers have had to embrace world-changing tech transitions many times over since the dawn of the field. They’ve had to learn all-new channels, understand changing consumer needs, and rethink entire strategies; it’s part of the job. 

Tensions are high now, but I’m excited about all that this evolving technology will help us to do. AI is helping marketers gain incredible value from data, their most valuable asset, and it’s perfectly positioned to help them rise to whatever challenge comes their way next.