Marketers double AI usage in 2024

Our new AI Trends for Marketers Report shows AI is helping marketers drive growth with fewer resources.

Two years ago, few marketers were even thinking about AI. Today, 74% are using at least one AI tool at work, up from 35% last year. 

With adoption on the rise, we surveyed more than 1,000 global marketing & advertising professionals to uncover their attitudes toward AI and how it’s reshaping the way they work. Here’s what we found:

For marketers, AI optimism is high

The majority of marketers agree the potential of AI is positive. They say it’s improved the trajectory of their company (68%), helped personalize experiences for customers (69%), and has enabled better cross-team collaboration (70%).

When it comes to daily work, over 7 in 10 marketers are spending less time on manual tasks and more time on the important parts of their roles—68% even say it’s improved their personal career growth.

And marketing leaders agree: nearly 7 in 10 leaders who invested in AI report seeing a positive ROI on their investment in terms of employee productivity and effectiveness. They say AI delivers value not by replacing their team, but by enhancing it. They say AI/automation tools:

• Make employees more productive (45%)
• Help employees make data-driven decisions (39%)
• Help employees share data with each other more effectively (39%)
• Make employees more effective at their job (34%) 

To drive adoption, marketers need to unify AI with existing tools

Nearly 3 out of 4 marketers are using some kind of AI tool at work. The most popular use cases seem to have one thing in common—unification. Seventy-four percent of marketers say that the addition of AI capabilities to the tools they already use (particularly CRM and productivity tools) has increased their AI usage.

And when it comes to execution, the five most-popular AI tools marketers used this past year were:

• Chatbots for quick, personalized responses (35%)
• AI-enhanced CRM and marketing tools including HubSpot (25%)
• AI-enhanced productivity tools to streamline daily tasks (23%)
• Visual AI tools to generate images for assets (23%)
• Text generation tools to create high-performing content faster (22%) 

Content is queen: Marketers lean on AI for content generation

In a world where new marketing channels are the norm, using AI to tackle content creation (43%) takes the top use case for the second year in a row. But marketers aren’t ready to give up total control: Among marketers who use AI to make written content, 86% make edits before hitting publish.

Image generation (47%), writing copy (45%), and content QA (44%) were among the top content creation tasks, with emails and newsletters (47%), social media posts (46%) and blog posts (38%) as the most popular outputs.

“AI is becoming a productivity multiplier for marketers. They’re using it to create more content, navigate more channels, and generate more leads–all while increasing quality and personalization,” said Nicholas Holland, VP Product and GM, Marketing Hub at HubSpot. “Marketers who lean in and collaborate with AI to make their own work better are the ones who will win.”

From increasing productivity to optimizing emails, explore all the findings from HubSpot’s 2024 AI Trends for Marketers Report.