By Tom Wozniak, Chief Operating Officer – published on Forbes on 06/04/26
Are there any marketers left who don’t think AI is well on its way to disrupting the industry (along with every other industry, too)?
Not too many, since, according to Iterable, over 90% of marketers are already using AI in some capacity within their organizations to prepare or execute marketing programs. With usage numbers like that, incorporating AI into your marketing program is a matter of when, not if.
Having been in marketing and operations for several decades, I’ve seen all sorts of technologies and tools come along to automate processes and make marketers more efficient and successful. AI takes things to a whole new level. There’s no question that future success in many marketing roles will involve becoming an expert at understanding and leveraging AI. But real success will require going beyond surface-level use of ChatGPT or Gemini to help brainstorm subject lines for your next email.
With that in mind, here are three less commonly discussed topics that marketers should be thinking about today as they look to optimize their understanding and use of AI.
1. Dealing With AI As The Gatekeeper
One of the first challenges any marketing initiative faces is simply catching the attention of the audience. The media landscape has been growing more complex and fractured for decades, and with every new communications channel, consumer attention is pulled in another direction. Standing out in that environment and connecting with your audience has been growing harder every year.
Now, AI is creating a new hurdle for marketers to overcome in the hunt for attention: the AI gatekeeper.
Various AI tools now allow people to screen and prioritize the messages they receive. Email is a great example. Users can use AI to sift through your inbox, highlight the emails it decides are important or interesting, and throw away irrelevant messages without the recipient ever seeing them. Spam filters have been delivering a version of this for years, but now AI tools can be trained and empowered by the consumer to review messages that make it through the spam filter and decide which of those messages the recipient should read.
Email marketers have long recognized that deliverability is a key to performance, but going forward, it’s not just about avoiding spam filters or promotional tabs. It’s about convincing an AI assistant that your marketing email is actually something the recipient will want to read. This presents a new set of challenges for email marketers.
How To Address The Challenge
For now, it’s about carefully analyzing your performance data and looking for changes in engagement patterns that might suggest emails that are delivered aren’t actually making it to the human recipient.
Next, it is going to require a lot of content testing to find a balance of content that checks all the boxes for the AI assistant, and then also engages with the ultimate recipient. Email content testing is going to become more complex than ever before.
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Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing, Communications, and overall Operations as the COO for OPTIZMO Technologies.
