The martech subway system now has an AI line

The 15th annual iteration of the Real Story Group’s martech stack vendor map acknowledges the growing importance of generative AI.

There’s a new line in the Real Story Group’s martech and it’s artificial intelligence for marketing. That would be the light blue line with the terminus Typeface.

The martech subway system now has an AI line

 

This is the fifteenth annual iteration of the map (if you need a larger version to follow along, you’ll find one here).

Selective but informative

One thing that jumps out to anyone looking at the map for the first time is that it includes a highly selective range of martech vendors, falling way short of the 5,000-plus included in Scott Brinker’s martech landscape. You’ll find the major vendors by looking at where multiple lines converge. Adobe, for example, is a veritable 42nd Street/Times Square.

Every single line representing a specific capability runs through Adobe; and through Oracle too, to be fair. That means that those platforms offer all 10 capabilities thought worth representing on the map.

The merit of this approach is that the map shows, in one visualization, the main capabilities of some of the major vendors. Salesforce is one short as it’s still not in the digital asset management game.

 

Are these AI tools really for marketers?

One thing worth thinking about is whether this new AI line really services marketing. Persado is a familiar name. It has been around for a number of years, infusing deep learning into a platform designed to generate language with mathematically demonstrable appeal to consumers — for example, in email subject lines.

That’s AI for marketers. No question.

Typeface offers a solution that generates content “for work,” aimed at the enterprise. Clearly, it’s not just for marketers — but it could be a very useful tool in a marketer’s tool-kit.

Open.ai, on the other hand? Well, just to quibble, it’s a research organization, not a solution. It does, of course, create solutions — famously ChatGPT. Can ChatGPT be used for marketing purposes? Of course, because it can be used, essentially, for any purpose whatsoever within the bounds of creative generation.

Its use is so generalized that I would hesitate to describe it as AI for marketing. Admittedly, we’ve seen it used very effectively by small businesses for marketing purposes. But for medium-sized businesses, and certainly for the enterprise, expect the adoption of solutions that incorporate ChatGPT, as well as other large language models, into a broader workflow.

If that’s a marketing workflow, then that’s AI for marketing.


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About the author

 

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

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