In the age of AI, standing still is moving backward

Like many of you, the past few years for me have been all about exploring how to integrate AI into our lives. The attention economy has raised the stakes, and cutting through the noise has never been harder. For the innovative CMO, though, AI is definitely changing the game.What’s clear is this: AI is no longer just your co-pilot—it has the potential to be your strategic partner, transforming how you think, work and lead. Here are a few learnings and reflections stemming from this past year of testing and learning, along with no-brainer applications driving value now to the emerging gems set to shine. Let’s dive in.

A gateway to high-impact marketing

As marketers, we are tasked with delivering greater results with increasingly limited resources. Budgets are tight, but expectations remain sky-high. Streamlining programs and running them efficiently is no longer optional—it’s survival. This is where AI shines. 

We recently found that most marketers and creatives—about 80%—went into 2025 believing that generative AI enhanced their team’s productivity. And one in five marketing and creative leaders are already estimating that their teams save 10 or more hours a week using AI. The most effective leaders really leaned into this sentiment and put effort into identifying their workflow bottlenecks. What’s slowing the team down? Which processes feel painfully inefficient? These high-friction areas become the first opportunities for AI-focused transformation. 

Take Progressive, for example, which saw an opportunity with its ad campaigns. They turned a 16-week audio script production process into just one week using AI. The result? Personalised audio ads and a 197% lift in quote requests. This is the kind of efficiency that is showing up as a real game-changer for an organisation.  

Experimentation will drive AI excellence across teams

Carilu Dietrich, a seasoned marketing industry expert and trusted adviser to CMOs, recently emphasised that many companies are still navigating how to effectively integrate AI into their daily operations. According to Dietrich, a driving force among leaders is the mission to maximise AI's productivity while minimising the need for extensive training or in-depth context given to end users. This often translates into creating prompt libraries or AI-friendly templates that enable teams to quickly adopt and leverage AI, as well as clear, strategic direction from leadership on high-impact use cases where resources should be concentrated.

At Canva, we launched our company-wide "AI Everywhere" initiative with total focus and intention. We didn’t dip our toes in—we dove head-first, empowering 5,000+ employees with tools and training to integrate AI into their daily work. Some teams hit their stride immediately, while others took time to adapt. But the real magic happened in the knowledge sharing, with dedicated Slack channels blowing up with highly imaginable ideas. In a matter of one business quarter, we uncovered transformative ways to elevate our ways of working. For context, our AI journey has two tracks. The first one being what we can accomplish now. Second is how we build infrastructure for long-term success. While many teams already use AI in pockets, today’s priority is laying the foundation to scale those wins into the future.

Precision will redefine campaign targeting

The approach to building an effective marketing campaign is ever-evolving—and I’m seeing this as inevitable as AI becomes front and center. With so many personas, channels, countries, languages and buyer stages, specificity is non-negotiable if you want to drive meaningful ROI.

Today, the world demands agility and campaign execution is ripe for disruption. Reacting quickly to underperforming elements can make or break your results. AI is a fantastic way to analyse past campaigns to predict outcomes and optimise spend because it can give you insights in seconds. If you’re not leveraging this, you’re likely falling behind cultural and market shifts. For example, the team at Diageo is strategically leveraging AI to hyper-segment audiences into ultra-specific profiles, such as “modern male lumberjacks.” This approach enables them to address the nuanced needs and aspirations of their target audience with precision, delivering personalised experiences that make individuals feel genuinely valued. AI has also been instrumental in enhancing how my team engages customers, from their first brand interaction to post-onboarding support. 

Personalisation at scale is the new success metric

A successful future belongs to brands that make every experience feel unique without sacrificing trust. Striking the right balance between personalisation and privacy will define successful marketing strategies in 2025. With AI automating the heavy lifting, teams can instead focus on creativity and building thoughtful customer connections.

For example, HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar uses AI to generate tailored imagery for ad units and email creative, boosting conversion rates across the board. EBay takes it further, crafting 400,000 personalised email subject lines daily with AI, achieving three times more engagement. Its next goal? One million personalized emails a day.In the future, customization will no longer be optional— it will be table stakes. But scaling this for niche audiences requires a supercharged approach, and AI delivers just that.

Decode customer data to drive impact 

If you want to do personalisation well, you need to truly know your customers. But sifting through millions of data points is overwhelming for even the best marketing and data teams. That's where AI makes a significant impact.

Take fintech brand Stripe. During a Canva-hosted webinar, Stripe CMO Jeff Titterton recently shared how AI helped transform mountains of customer support tickets into actionable insights for his team and organisation overall. This information not only got to the root of customer concerns, but today it’s used to inform GTM strategies, product development and more.

Because AI can take the guesswork out of how we understand our customer, it has the potential to transform data into quick decisions. This will be an indispensable tool for marketers in the years to come.

Stretch beyond the tactical to unlock AI’s strategic advantage

But, you’d be wise not to onlythink of AI as a means to take on the minutiae of low-level tasks. Forward-thinking marketing leaders are going beyond the basics and finding ingenious ways to help their organizations thrive.

Companies like Sprout Social are using AI to discover product usage patterns and test core messaging. At Canva, we use AI to gauge campaign resonance and storyboard creative ideas. Think of it as having a focus group right at your fingertips. Yet, AI is only as good as the input it receives. If you limit it to tactical tasks, you won’t get dazzling results for strategic outputs. The year ahead will demand that teams challenge themselves to level up, train models to bend towards your organization’s goals and embrace AI’s ability to be a strategic partner on their journey. More time will mean better results, so experimentation might just surprise you.The future isn’t just approaching— it’s here. Marketing leaders are uniquely positioned to drive AI implementation, as our domain is perfectly poised for strategic optimisation. Standing still isn’t an option; it’s a fast track path to irrelevance in a rapidly evolving landscape. 

Now is the time to reimagine what’s possible.

Zach Kitschke is the global CMO at Canva, where he’s spent over a decade helping shape the company’s growth from its early days. He also sits on the boards of AdCouncil and MMA Global.