AI-powered technology has edged its way into nearly every arena of marketing over the past few years. And although AI-powered marketing tools moved into the mainstream in 2021, in 2022 we're likely to get more practical applications.

As martech matures and companies become more advanced in how they apply AI, those innovations will likely move from flashy novelty to marketing mainstay. The impact is already evident in a few areas—mostly in conversion optimization and the detection of outliers.

But as the technology evolves and marketing professionals innovate in how they apply that technology, AI-powered martech will cause disruption and create growth in the following areas: long-form content creation, campaign optimization, and customer segmentation.

Progress in AI Martech

To date, artificial intelligence has mostly shown up in rapid, large-scale data analysis. AI marketing applications focus on a few key areas.

Conversion Prediction and Customer Lifetime Value

One significant area of growth is the ability to predict conversions for campaigns, both at the individual and the aggregate level. On the individual level, companies such as Salesforce have developed AI-powered lead scoring to identify and prioritize opportunities. Numerous advertising platforms allow marketers to target ads to specific people who are most likely to convert based on past behavior.

Beyond the individual transaction, similar prediction models can help marketers estimate the lifetime value of an individual customer by analyzing and predicting purchasing behavior over time. New marketing firms are even using models to estimate customer value at the company level, and applying the results to everything from decision making to corporate valuations.

Although those models have already demonstrated their value, their application is on track to grow even more over the coming years.

Trend Identification and Anomaly Detection

AI has already proven its immense value in processing enormous data sets and identifying trends and outliers. At each step of a marketing funnel, AI-powered technology has emerged to help marketers gain better insights into customer behavior and drive better decision-making.

Among the mainstream applications is Google's Analytics Intelligence, which allows marketers to bring meaningful insights to the surface and identify shifts in behavior quickly—all in ways that would never have been possible without such technology.

Similar tools have emerged for analyzing paid-ad performance and for email campaign optimization, allowing marketers to better understand their customers and make strategic decisions with deeper insights.

The Promise of AI-Powered Marketing

Though AI has already made a powerful impact on some mainstream applications over the past few years, innovations in both the technology and its implementation mean that widespread use is likely to ramp up in the coming year.

A few key areas seem best positioned for disruptive change.

Text-Gen Powered Content Creation

The speedy development of language-prediction models has enabled AI-generated long-form content.

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), for example, is a language model created by OpenAI that can produce text that reads almost as if it were human-generated. Companies such as Jasper AI have also made impressive advancements in long-form content creation.

Such programs can create marketing copy, sales emails, blog posts, and even SEO-friendly website content. They allow marketing professionals to generate content more quickly and target potential clients more precisely.

However, automated text generation still generally requires human oversight and editing, especially to detect factual errors. Although next-generation tools can produce work that sounds authentic, sometimes the text is actually too creative, inventing things that aren't true or relevant to the points being made.

However, AI-powered martech that generates text is still in its early stages and likely to improve; it's far too early to be too critical.