Three Ways AI is Disrupting Martech

The annual Adobe Summit conference, which took place this year in Las Vegas in April, is like the Super Bowl for companies like Knak.

It attracts thousands of marketing leaders, digital strategists and technology professionals, who gather to network, learn and explore the latest in digital marketing, customer experience and all the related technologies.

Not only is it a hugely important event for our company – about half of our customer base attends, and I can save myself more than a dozen business trips by connecting with clients and prospects there – but it is also critical in helping me understand what’s trending in martech. The organizers always offer fantastic content, and I learn a lot.

If you’re surprised when I say that AI is top of mind for me this year, you haven’t been paying attention!

Artificial intelligence has been impacting martech so fast, last year’s conference seems like it took place several lifetimes ago.

Here’s my take on the state of our industry post-2026 Summit – plus some thoughts on where I see things heading.

1. Forget ideation; it’s all about production now

I was in California recently talking to some of the biggest players in AI – companies that are also our clients – and I had an epiphany. (I’m Chief Evangelist – I’m entitled to epiphanies!)

What people want from companies like Knak has changed since the arrival of AI. In fact, you could say there’s a before and after.

Before, people wanted help with ideation.

Now, they want help with production.

These days, thanks to AI, marketers don’t start with a blank sheet. They use AI to generate ideas and concepts. AI is great at creating high-level messaging, punchy titles, draft documents and the like.

So what we’re finding is that many of our customers come to Knak with a list of ideas already roughed out. Those ideas might not be ready to be put into an email, and they might not be ready to be executed as a campaign, but our customers are not starting from scratch anymore.

What those companies want help with now is executing those ideas – putting them into production. Our customers want us to assist in producing emails and landing pages and campaigns, not help in imagining them.

That’s an important shift in expectations for companies like us. What our customers and prospects need now is not a place to create, but a place to make things real.

As a result, we’re becoming a production platform, not an ideas generator. People are telling us, “Help me get this into a format that is best practice for an email.” They say, “Help me take this idea and make it a reality.”

A lot of this shift in mindset has happened very recently – over the last year, as AI has become more powerful and more present.

We need to be mindful of that shift and make sure we’re able to act on it.

2. People are figuring out where humans fit into the AI landscape

The other thing I have noticed, at the Adobe Summit and elsewhere, is that people are grappling with the issue of where to place humans in the AI landscape.

On the one hand, I see companies eager to automate as much and as fast as they can. If they can use AI to do an entire marketing campaign, from ideation through to production, they will. Bye-bye humans!

And on the other, I see companies that resist taking that approach. They are happy to automate some parts of their workflow where it makes sense to them. But they are adamant they want humans as part of the process, at the very least to keep an eye on quality. These people are worried AI may not produce quality material.

So there’s a spectrum of opinions about the level of human involvement in marketing.

I want to know where clients and prospects sit on that spectrum, so I’m making sure I ask about it whenever I meet with people in the industry.

What I’ve heard so far is that few people are saying no to AI. However, they are grappling with the level of human involvement. What’s the right mix?

The critical realization for us is that we need to enable our customers to work at either end of the spectrum and everything in between.

For me, it’s a throwback to Knak’s earlier days, when we were all about doing away with the need for coding so that marketers could be creative without technical constraints.

We called it the democratization of creation.

Back then, a lot of our customers and prospects weren’t ready to make the leap all the way across the spectrum. Many wanted to work in between, using Knak to speed up some things but centralizing other processes because they wanted more control.

We got it. We worked with them to give them what they needed. And we will continue to work with customers now so that they can get the AI/human balance they’re comfortable with.

3. People are figuring out where AI works – and where it doesn’t

There’s a flip side to the problem of figuring out where humans fit into the process, and that’s figuring out where AI isn’t a good fit.

That is also something I’m paying close attention to.

We’ve sometimes joked that at Knak, AI is not just an acronym for artificial intelligence, it’s also an acronym for “all-in,” which is Knak’s attitude to the whole business.

But the reality is that not everyone is as enthusiastic about AI as we are. If we want to serve our clients well, we need to be mindful of the fact that there’s a range of different attitudes towards AI.

I see three different approaches:

• One group can’t or won’t use AI.
• Another wants to but is unsure how to go about it.
• The rest are all-in, like us.

The first group includes companies that either aren’t interested in AI (yet) or that face constraints in their ability to use it.

For example, one of our clients is a big U.S. bank. Banking is a highly regulated industry, and highly regulated industries can’t just jump into AI with both feet.

We can’t afford to leave that group of companies behind. In fact, we wouldn’t want to; it’s just now how we operate. We will be helping them move into the future, their way, with the constraints and regulations they have to deal with.

As we do, we will be paying close attention to how regulations evolve, so that we can give regulated industries the best service possible whatever their situation. Is AI in their future? I want to know. If it is, great; and if it’s not, we’ll make sure we provide them with the non-AI services and tools they need. Or maybe they will find a way to use AI in some parts of their business, and not others.

A second group includes companies that want to use AI but are unsure how to go about it.

After the California trip I mentioned earlier – the trip where I met with companies that were all-in on AI – I travelled to Boston for another round of customer meetings.

I quickly discovered that the people I was meeting with there fell into a whole different category.

They’d all been told by their leadership that they should embrace AI.

But they had no idea how to use it, let alone what to use it for. They didn’t know which AI tools were available to them, or how they could leverage those tools.

I mentioned in passing that I had just come from meetings in California with some of the big players in AI, and their faces lit up.

That’s all they wanted to hear about. They were dying for information about how other people were leveraging AI to help with their processes.

That’s understandable. AI is so new, there’s no history of how to go about it, no game plan to follow.

So we’ve got to be ready to help people understand AI and how to use it for their benefit.

The third group of companies includes those that are forging ahead in the AI world. They are hard at work reinventing processes around AI.

The challenge when working with companies in this group is making sure we’re operating on their level.

And because no one really knows how this is all going to play out, I want to be especially mindful about what these companies think the future holds.

With this group, I really want to understand what they see as the end game, where they think they’ll be five years from now.

I want to know this because we want to help them get there.

Parting thoughts

I was in learning mode at the Adobe Summit, validating my assumptions and sniffing out any other trends that impact Knak and our industry.

These are exciting times; things are changing incredibly fast.

As ChatGPT told me after I asked it for some funny AI acronyms, AI can also be an acronym for ‘automation invasion,’ ‘always iterating,’ and ‘augmented insomnia.’

Oh, and ‘always immersed,’ which is how I feel about AI right now.