'GenAI is no longer a future consideration' - marketing teams ecstatic about AI as a paltry 7% of CMOs in a research say they don't see an ROI (www.techradar.com)

A new SAS and Coleman Parkes study finds GenAI moving from experiment to everyday tool in marketing: more than eight in ten marketers globally report active use, CMOs cite a 93% ROI and marketing teams 83%, with EMEA averaging 85%. Common applications remain chatbots and content generation, but use has broadened to trend analysis, customer‑journey mapping and emerging experiments with synthetic data, small language models and digital twins. Respondents report concrete gains—94% see better personalization, 91% improved handling of large datasets and 90% time/cost savings—while nearly nine in ten report improvements in predictive accuracy, customer loyalty and sales. Investment follows: 93% of teams plan GenAI budgets through 2026, prompting firms to embed models into daily workflows and push toward more autonomous marketing operations. For the AI/ML community this marks a clear inflection point: GenAI is being operationalized at scale, raising demand for production-grade MLOps, model governance, monitoring and interoperability across multiple AI tools. Technical implications include greater use of synthetic data (with privacy/regulatory tradeoffs), exploration of smaller, task‑specific LLMs (efficiency and edge deployment), and the need for robust ROI measurement and bias/ethical controls. The survey’s strong self‑reported outcomes are promising but warrant cautious interpretation—long‑term sustainability, consistent performance across contexts and rigorous evaluation frameworks remain critical.