Monday Morning Impact – April 15

Published On: April 14, 2024Categories: Buzz

IDC: GenAI to Increase Marketing Productivity Over 40%

According to new research from IDC, using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) for a range of enterprise marketing tasks will result in an estimated productivity increase of more than 40% by 2029.

IDC modeled the work of 24 key marketing roles across five main categories of work – Management and Planning, Branding and Creative Services, Campaign and Engagement, Analytics and Reporting, and Other. Next, the analysts estimated how much of each category of work can be delegated to GenAI over the next five years. Combined with staffing levels and fully loaded cost estimates, they then calculated the productivity impact of adopting GenAI throughout a large marketing team.

“In the next five years, GenAI will advance to the point where it will handle more than 40% of the work of specific marketing roles,” said Gerry Murray, research director, IDC’s Enterprise Marketing Technology practice. “Because of the rapid evolution of GenAI capabilities, marketing leaders will have to prepare their staff for fundamental changes to roles, skills, and organizational structure.”

While the benefits of applying GenAI to marketing tasks will vary by company based on the number of individuals associated with each role and the salary ranges at the organization, the productivity gains (as a percentage of work) offer strong guidance for marketing teams of all sizes.

To prepare their organizations to take advantage of GenAI, IDC recommends that tech buyers evaluate the breadth and depth of use cases supported by vendors; focus on how effectively a vendor’s architecture, tooling, and service resources accelerate the journey down that use case; determine the level of infrastructure required to support each type of work; prepare staff for fundamental job changes; and organize their data into real-time, clean, governed data sets.

Channel Impact^®

The IDC report entitled, “GenAI Will Increase Marketing Productivity by More than 40% in the Next Five Years,” provides channel partners and their customers with insights on how various tasks could be delegated to GenAI, and the potential productivity gains related to those transitions.

Cisco: Very Few Organizations Prepared for Today’s Threat Landscape

Only three percent of organizations across the globe have the ‘Mature’ level of readiness needed to be resilient against modern cybersecurity risks, according to Cisco’s 2024 Cybersecurity Readiness Index, which also says that readiness is down significantly from one year ago, when 15% of companies were ranked mature.

The report also says that 73% of respondents said they expect a cybersecurity incident to disrupt their business in the next 12 to 24 months, 54% said they experienced a cybersecurity incident in the last 12 months, and 52% of those affected said it cost them at least US$300,000.

Companies are therefore ramping up their defenses with over half (52%) planning to significantly upgrade their IT infrastructure in the next 12 to 24 months. This is a marked increase from just one-third (33%) who planned to do so last year. Most prominently, organizations plan to upgrade existing solutions (66%), deploy new solutions (57%), and invest in AI-driven technologies (55%). Further, 97% of companies plan to increase their cybersecurity budget in the next 12 months, and 86% respondents say their budgets will increase by 10% or more.

The traditional approach of adopting multiple cybersecurity point solutions has not delivered effective results, as 80% of respondents admitted that having multiple point solutions slowed down their team’s ability to detect, respond and recover from incidents. This raises significant concerns as 67% of organizations said they have deployed ten or more point solutions in their security stacks, while 25% said they have 30 or more.

Progress is being further hampered by critical talent shortages, with 87% of companies highlighting it as an issue. In fact, 46% of companies said they had more than ten roles related to cybersecurity unfilled in their organization at the time of the survey.

“We cannot underestimate the threat posed by our own overconfidence,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “Today’s organizations need to prioritize investments in integrated platforms and lean into AI in order to operate at machine scale and finally tip the scales in the favor of defenders.”

The Index assesses the readiness of companies on five key pillars: Identity Intelligence, Network Resilience, Machine Trustworthiness, Cloud Reinforcement, and AI Fortified, which are comprised of 31 corresponding solutions and capabilities. It is based on a double-blind survey of more than 8,000 private sector security and business leaders across 30 global markets conducted by an independent third party. The respondents were asked to indicate which of these solutions and capabilities they had deployed and the stage of deployment. Companies were then classified into four stages of increasing readiness: Beginner, Formative, Progressive and Mature.

Channel Impact^®

To overcome the challenges of today’s threat landscape, companies must accelerate meaningful investments in security, including adoption of innovative security measures and a security platform approach, strengthen their network resilience, establish meaningful use of generative AI, and ramp up recruitment to bridge the cybersecurity skills gap.

CompTIA Announces AI Product Roadmap Expansion

CompTIA, a suburban Chicago-based industry association, has detailed the expansion of its certification programs accommodating the job market for artificial intelligence (AI) skills. The organization will focus on competencies in four existing job clusters: software development, cybersecurity, systems operations (SysOps) and data analytics; and two emerging job roles, prompt engineering and AI systems architects.

The series focuses on building deeper advanced skills for specific industries and job roles on top of an underlying CompTIA Plus (+) or Pro certification (Sec AI+ as an expansion to Security+, for example) allowing learners to keep up with technological advancements without re-treading skills previously acquired and frequently practiced.

“The crossing of the AI chasm means workers and companies need to quickly hone their skills-building strategies across AI domains,” said Thomas Reilly, chief product officer, CompTIA. “CompTIA’s investments in these areas confirm our commitment to delivering best-in-class competency-based learning and certifications designed for the age of AI.”

Channel Impact^®

Scheduled for release in July 2024, CompTIA AI Essentials will help learners understand the landscape of AI, the tools that are available and how they may best be applied, challenges that may arise with AI usage, how AI can enhance human work and creativity and potential future implications of AI.

Stay in the Know

Keep tabs on what’s happening in the channel and the impact it will have on the partner community by subscribing to Channel Impact communications.