As the recent fervor in AI hiring and investment shows, decision-makers across adtech and the broader tech ecosystem believe that we’re entering a critical period that will separate AI winners and losers. While many marketers have begun making investments in AI, fear of making the wrong move, or keeping up with a lightning-quick market, may be holding back investments.
No matter what twists and turns the AI market may hold, marketers can make the right investments for their marketing stack by prioritizing two criteria in their AI tool selection: interoperability and omnichannel connectivity.
The cutting edge of AI in marketing
Today, marketers are weaving AI into their stack in two main ways:
- Training AI on proprietary data to improve outcomes. By training AI on the vast amounts of data, AI can predict customers’ preferences and interests, leading to more relevant and engaging ad experiences.
- Reaching customers through AI-powered destinations, such as Perplexity. As consumers’ habits buying journeys further fragment around the myriad new AI destinations where they can convert and purchase, marketers need connectivity to these endpoints in order to continue reaching their customers and providing engaging experiences.
Both opportunities are real. But selecting the wrong tools — ones that lock you in, or limit your activation capabilities — will undermine performance and slow your ability to adapt.
Building for interoperability
It may be months, or even years, before we have true take-all winners in AI.
Marketers must maintain high performance now, although the future may require a completely different set of AI vendors or tools. At the same time, companies must be able to leverage their data across the range of AI use cases that are springing up — providing AI tools with the richest data signals, across first-, second-, and third-party data, will unlock the full potential of AI.
As marketers prioritize data collaboration, interoperability will help ensure that marketers are able to partner with whatever set of AI partners their future may hold. Interoperability will give companies the ability to seamlessly leverage their data across platforms, clouds, and infrastructure. By selecting interoperable solutions now, even if marketers end up switching AI vendors in the future, they’ll be able to do so with minimal interruption to their business outcomes.
AI agents’ surge in popularity adds another wrinkle that interoperability helps to address. As every company – including brands – spins up agents to maximize their returns from AI, marketers may find themselves using partners’ agents or agents they build themselves. As this slice of the ecosystem continues to evolve, interoperability will help ensure optimal performance, no matter whose agents marketers end up using.
Building for omnichannel connectivity
Similarly, we can’t predict consumer habits and how — and where — they’ll be splitting their time. Take AI agents, for example: the ecosystem is in the very first steps of seeing what conversions and purchases look like as AI agents take over part of the customer journey, completely reshaping consumers’ journey through the funnel.
Just as marketers should build flexibly in order to span as many possible partners, they should also be ready to seamlessly activate to a wide range of AI destinations to mirror their customers’ habits. Partners like LiveRamp already address this with omnichannel connectivity to a network of 900 brands, publishers, and platforms globally, helping marketers streamline activation into every destination where their customers spend time.
Through omnichannel connectivity, no matter how consumer habits may evolve in the future — including with agents, across the web, in-app, through CTV, and every other destination that matters — marketers can comfortably know that they’ll be able to create personalized, engaging experiences wherever their audiences are. While consumers may prefer an entirely different set of AI platforms in a few years, omnichannel marketing will allow you to understand their changing habits, and personalize every step of their journey.
What to do next
Inevitably, some of the AI investments marketers make today will become the go-to destinations and tools of the future. But marketers shouldn’t let uncertainty get in the way of making AI investments today.
By prioritizing interoperability and omnichannel connectivity, you can drive marketing performance now, and be well-prepared for the unpredictable ways that AI will evolve your marketing in the future.