AI Predictions that Could Impact Marketers in 2025 [Trending Data & Expert Insights]

AI has gone mainstream.

Although the technology is still evolving, it’s already changing how we work. With the help of AI-powered tools, us workers can automate a variety of tasks, from drafting email subject lines to understanding search performance.

If you’re curious about where AI is going — and how you can leverage it — I’ve listed 7 of my AI predictions for 2025.

1. Efficient and specific use of AI will give companies a competitive edge.

Our 2024 AI Trends Report found that 53% of respondents think fully implementing AI/automation at their company will bring unprecedented growth.

I agree with this opinion, but to take it a step further, companies that will achieve this growth in 2025 will be the most strategic and efficient implementors of AI.

The AI-powered processes and tools they use will be specific to their business needs, which is a stark contrast to when the proverbial AI boom started, and many were using it in any way they could (which made sense because it was so new).

How to Stay Current

There are so many AI tools out there, so how do you narrow your focus and choose what works best for you? Here’s my advice:

• Catalog the processes that help your business run and identify areas that can be streamlined and improved with AI, and areas where implementing AI will give your employees time back to focus on critical parts of their role.
• Give the tools you use a ‘testing period’ to ensure they work for the processes you want them to work for and that they’ll perform as you need if implemented.
• Create clear use cases, outline where and how AI should be used, and provide general guidelines for usage so employees know exactly how to get the greatest benefit and use AI to their full potential. A great example of this is creating an AI prompt glossary.

2. Personality-driven and human-led content will win.

I’m not surprised that AI has entered the search space; it’s helpful. AI-powered search engines and AI overviews (AIO) in Google results have already changed how search works.

But while AI is helpful (and despite how I’ll later talk about AI as a secret weapon for SEOs), businesses in 2025 have to remember that people still want to hear from humans, and personality-driven content will win.

Take me, for example. I read AI overviews, but I scroll past them for more information. I want a first-person perspective or experience to really help me make a decision.

How to Stay Current

I think this quote from Holly Bowyer and Julie Neumark, partners at Media & Marketing Minds, said it best: “Don’t get so seduced by [AI’s] shimmer that you neglect ‘human intelligence.’ You need to be at the helm in order to maximize the efficiency AI brings.”

My best advice for meeting this need is to follow Google’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (EEAT) framework to create content that AI tools can’t replicate.

Understand the true intent behind consumer searchers, and use your subject matter experience and expertise to create helpful and useful content that answers what they’re looking for.

Your content should be filled with your personality and first-person perspective that can’t be found elsewhere (or replicated by AI). All of this helps you build trust, and trust inspires people to come back.

Some other things to do:

• Conduct original research and offer thought leadership that establishes your site as a primary source for new information.
• Write for other websites to build up your authority
• Create content around follow-up queries that dig deeper into subject matters so you can truly flex your expertise.

3. AI will give content marketers a significant lift.

Artificial intelligence isn’t close to writing the next New York Times bestseller (although I feel we’re due for a scandal like this sometime soon), but it can streamline many content marketing tasks.

Next year, I predict that content marketers will become even more empowered by AI, which will help them execute repetitive tasks like coming up with ideas, writing rough drafts, and summarizing large amounts of data.

For example, the algorithms behind AI tools can do a lot of the legwork in gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information from across the web.

How to Stay Current

My advice:

• Use AI tools to research your market, target audience, and industry to make data-backed decisions about the type of content you should create and the channels you should create it for.
• Overcome the creative blocks that many of us content marketers are troubled with and use AI to find and brainstorm content ideas that align with your content strategy.
• Use AI-powered analytics tools to understand the performance and effectiveness of your content marketing. These data-driven insights will help you understand what went right and what to optimize for better results in the future.

If you use AI as part of your content marketing strategy, don’t forget what I mentioned before: consumers still want a human perspective.

Using a gen AI tool to write a blog post and then publishing that post without any edits or personalized insight isn’t the best way to service your audience. Leverage it as a first-step tool, and always input your perspective and insight.

4. Consumers will demand more personalization, and AI will deliver.

78% of marketers say personalization has a “strong” or “extremely strong” impact on customer relationships.

While creating these experiences with older marketing techniques and technology was once extremely difficult, AI has opened the door to more pinpointed personalization opportunities.

We’re already seeing heavy AI personalization in the marketing industry. For example, many tools allow brands to send marketing emails with names and personalized information based on contact list information.

In retail, consumers regularly get emails or e-commerce recommendations for certain products based on what they’ve recently viewed or purchased.

In 2025, businesses will use AI to take personalization a step further, especially for solid one-to-one personalization.

How to Stay Current

AI is definitely used to help us “get things done,” but it can also help scale, personalize more, and find target audiences easily.

Here are some ways to stay up on this trend:

• Use AI to build in-depth buyer personas and ideal customer profiles that help you understand exactly who your customers (and potential customers) are and how you can best reach them with outreach strategies, dynamic content suggestions, etc., that directly align with their interests and needs.
• Process customer data with AI in real-time, such as pages visited or products viewed, and adjust marketing content, messaging, and recommendations based on these insights on a customer-by-customer basis for an individualized experience.

5. Responsible AI is a requirement.

Talking about using AI for personalization is a perfect segue into my next prediction for 2025: companies embracing responsible AI practices and prioritizing privacy.

AI systems rely on data to make decisions, and the data comes from various sources, such as social media posts, online databases, public records, and general online activity (e.g., posting a review on Yelp). Sure, this process seems harmless enough, but it reveals a lot about a person’s life.

So, any time you collect customer data (especially individualized customer data), you need to be careful. Customers trust you to use (and store) it safely, responsibly, and exactly as you promised.

The data these AI systems rely on can also be biased because society is biased. The data it has access to likely isn’t representative of entire populations, so it can produce results that uphold these biases.

To boil it down, consumers are wary of AI, especially about how businesses use it to process their data, and you’ll have to stay aware of that sentiment.

How to Stay Current

Things you can do include:

• Be transparent about how you use AI for your customers. If you use it to analyze their data, make that clear and easy to understand. If opting out is an option, make that clear.
• Be clear about how you’re using AI to service your customers.
• Train your AI tools with diverse data sets to ensure outputs are representative and inclusive.
• Prioritize customer safety and data protection to make sure any data you have about your customers is used and stored safely.
• Educate yourself and your employees on responsible AI use and enforce your safety practices. When people know how to use AI, they’re more likely to do so safely.

6. AI will become a secret weapon for SEO strategists.

AI can automate necessary but time-consuming tasks for SEOs, like keyword research, competitor analysis, and website optimization.

Those using it for this have already seen the benefits: Campbell’s Soup started to use AI-powered SEO automation to compress 75,000 images in a single day. This helped the brand rank on page one of SERPs for 4k keywords within a few weeks.

Because it benefits web traffic and results, I expect investment in AI-powered SEO tools to grow.

How to Stay Current

To stay current and use AI in your SEO strategy, you can use tools to:

• Monitor search data to uncover trends and topics
• Conduct keyword research and understand search volatility, search volume, and level of ranking difficulty for keywords
• Understand keyword success and pages with positions you can improve
• Detect and fix technical issues to optimize page experience and UX (technical audits)
• Analyze site metrics like page views, clicks, and bounce rate
• Generate structured data and schema markup

A new element to SEO optimization is ensuring your site appears in LLM search engines and AIOs. Our new AI Search Grader can help you do exactly that by analyzing your site to see how visible it is in AI-powered search engines, how it’s being talked about, and where you can improve.

7. AI will fit naturally into the daily lives of all workers, not replace them.

People were worried, and some still are, about AI leading to a reduction in human-led jobs. The more than likely reality, going into 2025, is that it will fit more naturally into the daily lives of all employees, not replace them.

It will complement the work we do and supercharge the skills we already have. I’m not alone in this belief: 60% of our survey respondents say that, in marketing, they see AI working in conjunction with marketers and assisting them in performing most of their job duties.

How to Stay Current

Those who embrace this technology — and integrate it into their workflow— can maintain a competitive edge while saving time in the process. Here’s how you can stay up in a world where AI is more embedded in our daily work requirements,

• Build a baseline understanding of how AI works and helps us do our jobs, regardless of industry.
• Learn from others’ experiences with AI and how they’re applying it at their jobs, or how similar businesses to the one you work at are adopting it.
• Think about how it will benefit you, specifically in your current role, and how you get things done.
• Test out and try different AI tools and how you can leverage them in your day-to-day role to help you supercharge your abilities.

As John McCarthy, one of the fathers of AI, once said, “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.”

Back to You

It’s 2024, and AI has gone mainstream. There’s no denying its potential to transform a variety of industries, and marketing is no exception. It can help companies create more, scale faster, and build more personalized experiences.

But to pull it off, marketers must stay agile as they embrace and innovate with AI.