Five Big AI Marketing Predictions for 2024

These AI marketing predictions were originally made for 2024, but they are still useful as a snapshot of what changed as AI moved from novelty to working marketing infrastructure. The biggest lesson is that AI rewards teams that place practical bets, build real competencies, and improve workflows instead of waiting for one perfect tool.

In hindsight, the predictions that matter most for marketers are simple: small teams can move faster, AI keeps getting embedded into everyday tools, and durable AI skills matter more than chasing every new model release.

If you want help turning AI predictions into practical marketing workflows, see Dan Sanchez’s AI Marketing Services or read what an AI marketing consultant does.

Hey, it’s Dan Sanchez, aka DanChez, here with some bold predictions on what’s coming up in the world of AI marketing for 2024. Now, I know everyone’s got predictions flying around, so take mine with a grain of salt. I’ve only been deeply diving into AI recently, but I’ve seen trends play out before (hello, marketing automation and social media!). So here’s what I’m expecting.

1. Big Companies Will Take Big AI Bets (and Mostly Miss)

Right now, everyone—big accounting firms, food manufacturers, major marketers—are all hyped about AI. But my first prediction? Many of these large companies will place huge bets on AI and see mixed or disappointing results. Why? They’re expecting too much too fast, kind of like expecting 2024-quality iPhone photos back in 2015. Expect some backlash when those big bets don’t pan out, but don’t get discouraged; the tech will still move forward quickly.

2. Small Companies Will Win Big by Taking Small Bets

While big companies fumble, small companies, creators, solopreneurs, and scrappy midsize marketing teams are going to absolutely crush it by placing lots of small, strategic bets. Remember when marketing automation allowed tiny teams to achieve big results? Same story here. Small teams innovate faster, learn quicker, and pivot easily. Expect these smaller players to write the playbook the big guys will copy in 2025 and beyond.

3. AI Will Be Integrated into Nearly Every Tool

We’ve seen the beginnings already (thanks, Loom and HubSpot), but AI will soon be standard in virtually every tool you use daily. It won’t just be basic tasks like shortening emails—AI will significantly smooth out workflows and automate the gaps we previously couldn’t. From CRM cleanup to generating video summaries, expect your favorite tools to become smarter, smoother, and more enjoyable to use.

Of course, this widespread adoption means you’ll likely encounter more bots online. Expect “Are you a human or a bot?” to be a common question in 2024, especially during election year chaos. Content proliferation will spike, and filtering out noise will become crucial.

4. Surprising New AI Use Cases Will Emerge

Here’s the fun part—I predict we’ll see some wild and completely unexpected new ways to leverage AI in marketing. Something cool, something useful, and something we couldn’t possibly predict now. When these breakthroughs arrive, marketers will jump on them immediately. Keep your eyes peeled; you don’t want to miss these opportunities.

5. Marketers Will Start Building Genuine AI Competencies

This one might be a bit self-serving, but I genuinely believe marketers will move beyond just playing with ChatGPT. Instead, they’ll start deliberately building competencies in AI, using frameworks that can transfer across tools and evolving tech. Step-by-step skill development in AI marketing is going to become essential—and yes, that’s exactly what this podcast and show are all about.

If you’re not already subscribed, join in now. AI is moving fast, and together we’ll stay ahead of the curve. See you in the next episode!

2026 Takeaway: What Held Up?

The strongest idea here is that small, practical AI bets beat slow, oversized transformation projects. That has only become more true. Marketing teams that learn quickly, document workflows, and apply AI to specific bottlenecks are usually better positioned than teams waiting for a perfect enterprise rollout.

The other durable lesson is competency. Marketers need transferable AI skills: prompt strategy, workflow design, context management, quality control, and the judgment to know when automation helps or hurts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are 2024 AI marketing predictions still useful?

Yes, if they are treated as lessons rather than fresh predictions. They show which patterns held up and which AI marketing bets became practical workflows.

What AI marketing prediction held up best?

The strongest prediction is that small companies and small teams can win by taking focused, practical AI bets instead of waiting for large transformation projects.

What should marketers do with AI predictions?

Use predictions to choose experiments, but turn them into workflows. Pick one bottleneck, test an AI-assisted process, measure the result, and improve it.

What AI skills should marketers build?

Marketers should build skills in prompt strategy, workflow design, customer research, content repurposing, automation, and human review.

How can a team turn AI trends into action?

Start with one repeated marketing task, document the current process, identify where AI can help, test it, and turn the winning version into a reusable workflow.

Welcome to AI-Driven Marketer, in this episode Dan Sanchez discusses his five big predictions for AI in marketing in 2024. He shares insights on the impact of AI on big and small companies, the incorporation of AI into existing products, the potential for new AI applications, and the need for building competencies in AI beyond the basics. As the conversation unfolds, listeners can expect to gain valuable insights into the future of AI in marketing and how they can adapt their strategies to stay ahead of the curve.

Timestamps:

00:00 High expectations for AI despite potential setbacks.

04:08 Small, agile AI companies outpacing larger players.

06:30 Content automation and bots to increase in 2024.

hey hey welcome back to the AI microskills podcast it's just me Dan Sanchez AKA Sanchez talking to you today because I have five big predictions that I think AI is going to that's going to happen in AI for marketing in 2024 now we're at the end of the December like everybody's throwing out predictions so I was like dang I got some predictions I know I think I know what's going to happen but at the same time I've only been doing a deep dive for a couple of weeks so take this with a grain of salt but I will say there aren't a lot of people but pushing in specifically into Ai and marketing so I don't know I'll give it a shot I certainly seen these things come and go before with social media marketing automation Facebook ads

have cotton run with some waves and WordPress I called that when I knew it was going to work I didn't document it so I can't prove it but there's a number of predictions that I've made that things that were going to be big and actually think AI is going to be bigger than a lot of those things but it's really hard to see how big AI will be into the future and everyone generally anybody in Ai No matter how good they are at is this kind of like yeah I don't know what's going on behind a few years and it is hard it's hard to know exactly the rate of change has been so great that it's kind of like I don't know three years out who knows it's anybody's guess but one year out it's a little bit more known there's some things we can know we've seen the trend happen and other categories and new inventions that have come out so maybe it'll happen a little faster but who knows so

is guess as to what will happen but here are my five based on what I've seen play out before number one is a lot of companies a lot of big companies are talking about AI aggressively right now and in multiple Industries I mean we're talking like the big accounting companies of the world are talking about it food manufacturers are talking about it marketing companies are talking about it everybody's talking about it everybody's looking at AI seen the disruption happening everybody's trying to prepare everyone's trying to get ahead my prediction is number one is that a lot of big companies will take a big bets on AI this year with very mixed results I think a lot of those big bets Will Come Away with so so results or even disappointing results and actually

because it will have some disappointing results from some big players taking big bets it's going to backfire and there will be a slump in Ai and it will catch up to the hype and some people will be like you so you are using as good as we thought it would be well that's because they bet too big on it and thought it was too capable for doing something really complicated to fast it kind of it's kind of like expecting iPhones to be as good as they are now but it's it's 2015 and it's gotten a lot better since 2010 but you know the 2015 models of iPhone's were only so good at photos now like the newest iPhone phones it's hard to tell a pro photo from a amateur photo these days because it's so good at making great looking photos

so I think we're going to expect I think I'm expecting that I'm expecting some big companies takes a big swings and some big ways and AI Miss for there to be a backlash and people crying about AI that doesn't slow me down because I'm expecting that to happen I know AI is going to be big and continue to get better and better over the next couple of years even this one year so let's see what my next predictions are I think for all the big companies taking big bets all the small companies the solopreneurs the creators and the few Scrappy marketing departments at midsize companies they're gonna take a lot of small bets and there it's going to pay off big like I think a lot of a couple of like not a couple but many smaller teams and players are going to like run whole companies with AI

why do I think that because I've seen it happen before it's exactly what happened with marketing automation 10 years ago when small tools like Infusionsoft were making small business players be able to do a million plus companies with just them and their assistant or very small team it was possible because they could now automate a lot of the processes that only big companies can handle with lots of people before the same thing is going to happen with AI it already is happening with AI so it's not much of a prediction because it's already starting to look like that the AI companies that I'm talking to are like yeah my our best players are all small people that's because small independent people can innovate faster find what works quicker because there is so much more connected to the end result they're the ones working on the product talking to the customer and are making stuff happen which is why

find perfect utilizations of AI to help augment with their currently doing to make them more effective fast so I think those people will end up being the ones that write the Playbook that mid-size the bigger companies will be following in 2025 through 2026 the plays that happen this year from those players will set the stage for what happens in the next year's and then who knows there might be some big Innovations after that that end up rewriting the whole Playbook again so we'll see prediction number three a lot of AI will get incorporated into the products were already using I mean it's already getting incorporated into it like hubspot's already adopting it right now it's in kind of like small fry ways like shortening this change the tone of this in your writing and stuff but

they're going to keep pushing the envelope and they're going to keep making it useful so we're actually going to see AI Incorporated it like every tool that we use maybe not every tool this year but the majority of tech companies are playing around with this right now this year and are going to start releasing things if they haven't already this year next year and a lot of these tools are just going to get better because honestly like what AI does fills in a lot of gaps that couldn't be automated before and answer is a lot it fixes a lot of problems that we reached with Automation in general and data hygiene and being able to do basic analysis on all these different numbers and data and stuff we had coming into our CRM it's going to fix a lot of that and it's just going to make what we're doing already so much more

it's not going to invent crazy new stuff but a lot of it's just going to get way smoother like Loom automatically creating titles and summaries before every video it was a nice little touch that just made Loom so much better that's going to happen across the board on so many different tools and it's going to be fantastic it's we're all going to love it because we've gotten used to tools working a certain way and now it's going to have this AI layer on it and it's going to make things better so that's prediction number three AI gets put into everything and honestly an extension of that is not only will things be automated more but that means a lot of content is going to be automated more and there's going to be a greater proliferation to the point where we'll probably run into lots of bots next year and social media and what constantly

you have to be asking like are you a human or are you a bot that's going to be a frequent question I think in 2024 are you a human or are you a pot but that's part of AI being built into the things that were already doing it's not like a big AI prediction it's just part of it and of course content proliferation and an election year means it's going to be more weird fake content and it's going to be it's going to be funky so they're just going to be more content more needs for filtering out and this is going to be that part's gonna start getting weird but I'm not going to start delving into what's going to happen with politics because I so let's move into prediction for a few new ways are going to come up with a new ways to use AI for marketing that we would have never even dreamed of using some companies going to come out and be like look what you can do with AI I'm going to be like what the crap

you didn't even think about that it's going to like blow our minds like I didn't even think you could Autumn like use AI for that but cool and it's going to actually be helpful that's my prediction that a few new like twists on a I are going to happen and it might be this weird video thing or like augmented reality I don't know like something's going to happen that's going to surprise and Delight us and we're going to instant marketers are going to instantly gobble it up and start using it because it's going to be really cool I don't know what those things are but I'm expecting to be surprised by at least two or three different major things that we couldn't have predicted now that'll be unpredictable but they're going to be cool and we're going to as we're going to start using them so I'm just keeping my eyes open for them so when they come I'm ready to adopt him and start using them when they come so that's prediction number four prediction number

when's Leslie people will begin working towards building competencies AI Beyond just fiddling with chat GPT okay so maybe that last prediction is a little bit self-serving since that's the whole purpose of this podcast in the show and a microskills but I think it's true and I probably won't be the only one doing it trying to build step-by-step guides and learning how to use AI that are not tool specific because the tools will change in like how we use them will change all the time but we'll give people broad Strokes of how to measure where they're at and their skill set with AI and also how do you start building up so they can actually start proving their competency building the skills that will set the stage for the work for tomorrow so

that's the point of this whole show if you haven't found out already so subscribe if you aren't and stay tuned for the next episode have another interview coming up that I'm really excited about about Ai and how to automate your podcast coming up shortly