Hot or Not? Marketing Trends for 2025 Stress Tested – Trend #1: The rush towards artificial intelligence
Are the marketing trends that everyone is talking about all they’re cracked up to be? We’ve stress tested them to see if you should be following them, or doing things a different way in 2025. In this series we look at the top five marketing trends – read on for Trend #1 and then visit our Food For Thought page for the rest of the series.
Trend 1: The rush towards artificial intelligence
The four giants of Big Tech—Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon—are well on track to spending a quarter of a trillion dollars on AI infrastructure this year, so it’s no wonder that when we analysed the most cited trends of 2025, AI was top of the list. The rapid development of AI tools over the last two years has seen businesses scrambling to figure out how to take advantage of it, and fast.
From content creation to AI-powered marketing automation, the promise of what AI will offer brands in the near future is wide-ranging. Salesforce’s 2024 State of Marketing report found that 75% of marketers are either experimenting with AI or have already fully implemented AI into their operations. As a result, brands are feeling the pressure to actively implement AI in 2025 to keep ahead of their competitors.
Stress-test result: AI will not help you differentiate, smart adoption and trust will
The question for brands in 2025 isn’t ‘How do we use AI to do more?’; the question is ‘How do we use AI to add value to our brands?’.
AI is quickly becoming key to the marketing strategies of businesses pursuing product and service innovation, differentiation and a reduced cost base. But blindly jumping on this trend and adopting AI to keep up with your competitors is unlikely to grow your business. And just like with other technology before it, in five years time AI will be a hygiene factor, not a key differentiator – think mobile apps and responsive websites.
For sure, AI is useful for removing repetitive tasks and giving us back time – but the key is to be smart with what you do with this time: use the headspace to be more creative, and think strategically about what you’re delivering.
Can trust and AI go hand in hand?
Building trust with consumers in a crowded marketplace is crucial to ensuring that you stand out. How can AI help you to do that? Don’t fall into the trap of using it one dimensionally to produce more content. Trust is a real issue when it comes to content generated by AI. Many consumers worry about their ability to distinguish between AI-generated and human-created content.
As the volume of AI-generated content increases, this will inevitably lead to questions about whether consumers can trust what they’re reading, watching and increasingly engaging with in both the digital and real world.
Evolving technologies
Couple this with AI’s role in marketing continuing to evolve rapidly—long chain workflows and agentic AI now represent the next frontier.
Workflows that chain together pre-set steps are reliable for structured activities like routing queries or breaking tasks into steps, but they lack flexibility for on-the-fly challenges.
AI agents, on the other hand, operate independently, combining reasoning and their own tool usage to adapt to live data and unexpected scenarios. This makes them better suited to nuanced tasks like refining campaign strategies or responding to shifting customer needs in real-time.
However, this adaptability introduces risks. Agents’ autonomy and black box processes can lead to errors, misinterpreting data, mishandling sensitive information, or optimising in ways that were not intended by design. Their opaque decision-making adds further complexity, raising concerns about accountability and trust as businesses start to deploy them as part of decision making infrastructure.
Brands and businesses need to walk this tightrope carefully—trust is hard earned, but easily lost.
AI is data hungry
Brands also need to be mindful of the promise of AI, unfortunately most businesses simply don’t have the data required for effective AI marketing automation. Full automation doesn’t really bear out except for big brands with a large volume of data that offers any kind of statistical significance, or the ability to generate synthetic data with accuracy.
The Large Language Models (LLMs) that power AI technology require huge amounts of data in order to ‘learn’, which has understandably given rise to a complex array of privacy concerns for brands to navigate.
“Brands and businesses need to be careful—trust is hard earned, but easily lost.” – Jon Paget
We know that consumer awareness of AI is increasing—in the UK, 7 out of 10 consumers (71%) have already heard of Generative AI, with 56% having at least some understanding of what it is, and 44% using an AI chatbot for personal or work-related purposes. But they also understand that their data and preferences are central to training LLMs and research has found this decreases customers’ purchasing intention. Spending on AI and related services has reached $235 billion, yet there’s still a significant trust barrier that brands haven’t yet figured out how to overcome.
Uncertainty about how AI uses consumer data is central to this. Research conducted by software company Syrenis found that 85% of consumers don’t know how much data is actually being collected by AI tools, while 78% find AI-data sharing policies difficult to comprehend. If we don’t understand—or have visibility of—how much of our data is being collected and how it’s used, this inevitably leads to concerns around potential abuse.
“Adding AI to your tech stack isn’t a novel addition to differentiate a product. It will become an expectation that you leverage AI in some way.” – Bethan Vincent
This is not to say that AI can’t be helpful, but taking a smart approach to how you adopt it will ensure you stand to gain the most – the trust of your consumer.
Key takeaways
1. Don’t focus on AI—focus on how you can be more creative and strategic with the time given back to you that was previously spent on menial and repetitive tasks.
2. Creating content volume isn’t the challenge, it’s about it being relevant, distributing it effectively to the right audience and ensuring it grabs attention.
3. Start simple to reduce risk. Use manual processes and basic workflows for routine tasks and add advanced applications like AI agents with autonomous remits only when truly necessary.
4. Most brands don’t have large enough data sets to leverage AI for marketing automation at scale.
5. Privacy concerns and consumer trust are essential considerations for brands thinking about how they can use AI in 2025 and beyond.
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