The martech subway system now has an AI line

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.

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.

Dig deeper: Artificial Intelligence: A beginner’s guide

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.