Is Your Marketing Team AI-Ready? Top Takeaways from Octane11’s Lunch and Learns

🚗 💼 Octane11 has been on the road again with our Lunch and Learn Series in NYC, Chicago, and Atlanta! This year’s hot topic? Leveraging AI in B2B Marketing. We brought together some of the sharpest minds in B2B to discuss trends, challenges, favorite tools, and what it really takes to be “AI-ready.” Here’s a quick recap of our top takeaways:

🌎 Top Challenges, Then vs. Now:
In 2023, the biggest pain points were Attribution and Marketing/Sales Alignment. Fast forward to 2024, and now it’s all about securing One Source of Truth for marketing data (the foundation for last year’s top 2 items above) and managing Limited Budgets (hard to get budget, when you can’t show impact!). Do these sound familiar?

🤖 AI Preparedness Levels:

• Self-reported AI Preparedness: 3 out of 5 – a starting foundation, but no one is feeling confidently “AI-ready” yet. 
• Currently Leveraging AI: A slight bump to 3.3 – teams are starting to dip their toes.
• Planning to Implement: A promising 3.9 – AI adoption is officially trending up! 🌊

🛠️ Biggest AI Implementation Challenges:
Competing Priorities and Team Expertise remain the top blockers. Sometimes it’s less about what AI can do and more about discovering where it matters most for your team. Other challenges cited included a lack of internal expertise and concerns raised by data security teams.

📈 Where AI is Set to Shine:
Our attendees see the greatest potential for AI in Content Creation and Team Efficiency, areas where many marketing teams are already using advanced tools. But perhaps the most transformative AI impact hasn’t even been demonstrated yet – in areas like measurement and optimization. 

Special shoutout to some inspiring tools that attendees cited in our discussions: Claude, Jasper, Waldo, Perplexity, Langdock, Beautiful.ai, Grammarly, Notion, Midjourney, Storytell.ai, AdCreative.ai, and Synthesia.

🔍 Octane11’s Playbook for Data AI-Readiness:
At Octane11, we’re helping B2B marketers adopt AI more quickly, for more use cases, and with more control. We believe that true AI success starts with a solid data foundation. Here’s a quick look at our AI-readiness playbook:

1️⃣ Data Governance – Establishing accountability, access controls, and data consistency. (It’s like laying the foundation before building the skyscraper.)
2️⃣ B2B Data Integration – From Email to CRM to Programmatic to Social, connecting the dots across the entire marketing stack.
3️⃣ B2B Account Enrichment – Combining data sources, enhancing account insights, and connecting with CRM for a 360-degree view.
4️⃣ B2B Marketing Synthesis – Standardizing metrics across platforms for apples to apples comparison.
5️⃣ Visualization & AI Insights – The fun part! Applying Gen AI to normalized datasets, dive deep into campaign and account insights, and leverage advanced tools for “explainable” attribution.

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us! Whether it was to share insights or soak up knowledge, we’re grateful to be on this AI journey together. Here’s to using data and AI to drive smarter, more impactful marketing – one campaign at a time! 💪

To learn more about how Octane11 can drive your B2B marketing efforts forward, schedule a demo at www.octane11.com/book-a-demo today!