The Future of Marketing: Living Marketing Systems and the Intelligence Economy

AI is radically changing the marketing game. The key to the future: intelligent systems that bring data to life.

The Marketer’s-Eye View: Living Marketing Systems

For marketers, the first lesson of the global pivot to artificial intelligence is that data is more vital than ever. AI is only as good as the data that fuels it — which makes data quality and data management crucial, in marketing as elsewhere. To master data, in turn, requires platforms that are agile, flexible and resilient — platforms that adapt without breaking, solid yet versatile. At a business level, these capabilities mean the difference between success and failure.

In fact, to thrive in a world of pervasive AI, your data and your platform must be ready for a future of living marketing systems. A brand in the future will evolve like a living organism — because in an AI-powered world, nothing is static. The perception of your brand will depend on the data that powers those AI tools and frameworks — dynamically, even metabolically.

Swaying AI through Data Strategy

That means your marketing systems must ensure consistency in the data captured by external AI tools and frameworks, in order to shape the output they generate. You must be massively consistent in the way you manage your data — for your brand and for your customers.

Similarly, hyperpersonalization — an AI superpower for the next-gen marketer — depends directly on the data that informs it. The customer experience lifecycle will be transformed end-to-end by an infusion of data-driven context and insights — allowing AI-generated, dynamically crafted and curated messaging and transaction flows. In every instance, data will be the lifeblood of these systems.

New Tools and Human Insight

None of this makes humans obsolete. The marketer of tomorrow will pivot to providing the human insights that make campaigns more effective, the ethics and brand culture that inform them, and the emotional intelligence that brings them fully to life. This new marketer will be a complete storyteller — while being, in equal measure, a marketing system designer.

Because above all, that future marketer will need new tools — better, faster, more focused and flexible — and a clear understanding of how they work and how to use them. Without that, marketers simply won’t survive. This creative industrial revolution will feature a fusion of technologies that will shape the profile of every marketer: a convergence of GenAI, data, quantum-powered market simulations, and Web3-powered, blockchain-enabled brand trust.

Email and the Birth of Martech

Back in 1993-94, email emerged as the internet’s first killer app, giving marketers an incredibly powerful way to reach a very large audience. The initial version of the Unica marketing automation platform capitalized on that trend by taking catalog marketing electronic — and creating today’s martech space in the process. Thus was born the idea of segmentation at scale, using email to send the most prodigious campaigns cost-effectively.

Today AI, too, is a killer app for marketing — but at an exponentially higher level.

Eyeballs and Funnels and Clicks, Oh My!

Until now, marketing has been all about the attention economy, relentlessly seeking better ways to rack up eyeballs and clicks. In fact, the whole idea of a marketing funnel came from the math game that results.

But as channels, technologies and social media proliferate, people are being inundated with messages. The result is attention fatigue — and plummeting engagement, which worsens as AI-based content adds to the clamor for users’ attention. How can we resolve this dilemma?

Intelligence: The Bridge from Attention to Trust

As marketers, the goal is to build trust with customers, to earn loyalty by delivering value — in short, a trust economy. The attention economy isn't going away — but if you can build trust and loyalty with customers, attention is a given.

So how do we get there?

The bridge to trust is the intelligence economy — an infusion of intelligence and intent that cuts through noise and distraction with data-driven context and deep insights into customers’ wants and needs. Eclipsing experiences that feel generic or irrelevant, brands can use the power of intent to deliver memorable digital experiences that build trust and strengthen relationships.

To achieve that, we need platforms and tools that can capture that intent, turn relevant data into targeted insights, and make marketing workflows manageable through intelligent orchestration. AI, data, quantum, blockchain — all these technologies belong to this intelligence economy. This, in fact, is what we mean by Digital+.

Core Elements of the Intelligence Economy

As a practical matter, which core elements is the intelligence economy built on? We’ve touched on the what: the deep customer knowledge and data-driven insights that establish intent. Next is the how: the dance of engagement, the contextual customer journeys — guided by the HCL Unica+ platform and the technology stack that powers it. Then comes the why: the memorable feelings and experiences that make customers choose you over competitors.

Now, these three elements — insight, engagement, experience — rely on other key platform capabilities. AI feeds into all three in myriad ways. For example:

• insight is served by AI-driven auto-segmentation of customer data;
• engagement, by dynamically matching channels to customers; and
• experience, by crafting hyperpersonalized journeys based on deep customer knowledge.

Another set of core capabilities pertains to technology architecture. Tech architects today face a false choice between monolithic and microservices approaches. What the intelligence economy actually demands, though, is an approach that transcends that duality: a composable architecture based on packaged business capabilities (PBCs) — modular software components that perform specific business functions and can be seamlessly integrated and removed.

The Digital+ Future Is Now

Of course, the marketing platform of the future has other core attributes — data and AI, analytics, hyperpersonalization, security and scalability are all “must-haves” when implementing the martech of the future.

The key takeaway for today’s marketers, though, is simple: the platforms, tools and technologies of the intelligence economy are here for the taking. The future of marketing may lie ahead, but the Digital+ future is now.