Josh,
1. It's not that Marketo is lagging behind compared to any product, but Marketo is lagging behind compared to the technology that's already available - in Adobe Sensei, for example, there's already some AI implemented and the technology has been available for the last 3-4 years at least. Marketo is still leading the charge in its segment.
5. I've been working in marketing automation for the last 7 years and in my opinion, AI will be critical to the continuing success of any marketing automation platform in the nearest future. An existing one or a new one, which actually makes AI part of its core functionality, that's left to be determined in the nearest future. Really hoping Marketo is working on something like this for future releases - the Marketo-Adobe alliance should help some new technologies trickle down. Just to give an idea of what AI really means for marketing automation - right now you have to build reports to find answers to some basic questions:
- how are my different marketing activities doing in terms of driving MQLs, overtime?
- What should I spend more money on to get more bang for my buck?
- What events gave me the most in terms of ROI and what is their predicted impact next year?
Not only do you have to set the whole thing up manually, you also have to *analyze it yourself*: read every single line, analyze every single event, which greatly limits the capacity of how much information you can actually digest and get actionable insights from. With the technology available now, it's like driving a horse cart while a Volvo drives by. Yes, you can do that and the Amish still do that, but should you? AI would analyze all main data points and provide you with some suggestions to work with but without the hassle of setting up a bunch of reports and without the loss of time associated with actually reading through all these reports.
The same works for a lot of activities in Marketo. Testing different types of copy for emails should be happening in the background and the user shouldn't have to set up different test groups himself - Marketo already has all the data, that the Admin would use - so Marketo should be able to do it with minimum training and should be able to educate itself based on previous experience. Moreover at some point it should be able to tell us what we are doing wrong/should be doing right - like poorly chosing the time to send emails to people in Australia when we are in EST or failing to communicate to a group of leads for more than 1-2 months. Marketo already has all the data in activity log, but doesn't really educate itself with that data and what it actually means for business so as to become more self-driving rather than remain a platform fully dependent on both, human activity and human analysis, for further action.
In the end as the matters stand in 2019 (and that's true for all marketing automation platforms, I'd say) if you are servicing a great deal of customers unless you have a dozen people working in marketing automation alone, you end up spending most of your time *doing manual stuff* and *reading stuff about stuff* just to get to the bottomline - thinking through actionable ideas - whereas AI would allow us to spend less time on ops and more on marketing. Don't get me wrong, it's not like any product can fill that void at the moment - I love Marketo, but the technology is already there and has been there for quite a while and the potential specifically for marketing automation can't be overstated.
As for why we are all tech people now - well, the industry itself is changing. A yet another digital revolution is approaching with 5G making a global hit in the next couple of years, expect everything to go online: all the things in your house, in your car, the house itself, the car itself. Which means more data to consume for a marketing automation platform and even more data to work with - without AI it would be impossible to process such an amount of data. To be a marketeer today is radically different from what it was 7 years ago, as you well know, but tomorrow it would also require to be at least partially a tech guy who understands what's under the hood to be efficient. Just my 0.02, sorry if I'm rambling a little bit, I've been thinking about this for quite a while.
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