Two-thirds of UK marketers have begun utilising artificial intelligence (AI) with their approach to experimentation, according to research by digital experience platform provider Optimizely.
The study of 100 marketers (and 1,000 consumers) in the UK found that 65% of them are implementing AI to level up their A/B testing and experimentation, with 45% having adopted the technology within the past year.
The majority of marketers (87%) believe experimentation is important to achieving their goals in 2024, but 20% don’t feel their current web experimentation approach is effective, while 23% would describe their current approach as ‘unsophisticated.’
Standing in the way of effective experimentation for 43% of marketers is a lack of budget, with lack of resources, time and focus a barrier for 39%. Other challenges include a lack of effective tools or technology (25%), silos between relevant teams (25%), and the small scale of experiments (18%).
However, 89% of marketers feel that AI holds the key to them overcoming these obstacles. For instance, 70% of UK marketers believe that AI will help make experimentation faster, and 62% feel AI will make experimentation more accurate.
Nearly half (48%) plan to use AI to create more targeted and personalised content in the future, with 41% eyeing the opportunity to generate headlines, images, and calls to action at scale. Meanwhile, 37% plan to use AI to dynamically allocate traffic between test variations, and 32% will look to AI to create hypotheses for experiments.
“In an age where every business decision is scrutinised, many organisations have yet to perfect their experimentation practices to improve personalisation and drive more conversions,” said Optimizely in a press release. “By combining the power of AI and experimentation, marketers can see with certainty what type of content resonates with specific customer profiles and adapt as needed to take digital experiences to entirely new levels.”
