This readout of the Humanized Growth in the era of AI study frames 2025 as a pivotal AI year for consumers and marketers alike. It works through four parts: the pivot itself, the move from brand to business growth, the CMO as AI change partner, and a call to action.
The central claim is that the efficiency work of 2024 produced no long term competitive advantage, and that the exception is brands that used AI to amplify an advantage they already had.
Key findings
- The study places marketing on a three year arc: discovery in 2023, experimentation in 2024, and adoption in 2025.
- The experimentation year was about efficiency. The uses named are synthetic research, economical creative, efficient localization, and workforce rationalization. None of it delivered long term competitive advantage.
- The CMO mindset flipped. Where 2024 is characterized as reactive, only 5 percent now regard AI predominantly as a risk against 95 percent who regard it as an opportunity, which the deck labels a proactive 2025 mindset.
- The capabilities most often expected to deliver competitive advantage score almost identically across the groups compared, which the deck reads as table stakes rather than advantage. Measurement and insight sit at 77 and 81 percent, media and personalization at 85 and 85 percent, and creative and content at 82 and 80 percent.
- Where AI is expected to build brand growth, four routes are named: driving new brand consumption, improving brand experience, expanding brand solutions, and driving brand innovation.
How the study was built
The evidence base has four strands: an AI meta review of published reports about AI, more than 25 expert perspectives on marketing and AI, more than 50 practitioner CMO experiences, and an online survey of more than 300 CMOs and C-suite leaders. Revenue growth overperformance is used as the comparison lens.
What CMOs put first in 2025
The priority list is drawn from 188 marketing senior vice presidents, CMOs, and C-suite leaders. The named priorities are data architecture, brand safety, brand differentiation, reaching consumers, team and process implications, and ethics.
The pivot the study asks for
The deck treats 2025 as a marketing pivot rather than a continuation. Having established that efficiency uses create no durable edge, it returns twice to the same question: what does it take to win.
Its answer moves the conversation from brand to business growth and casts the CMO as the change partner for AI inside the company, closing on a call to action.
Scope and limitations
The figures come from different bases. The priority ranking rests on 188 respondents while the survey strand is described as more than 300 CMO and C-suite respondents, and the competitive advantage percentages are presented in pairs without the deck naming the two groups on the slide.
Source
This page summarises Humanized Growth in the era of AI, by IRG, Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative, ANA Global CMO Growth Council, 2025.