Goodbye, Marketing Dashboards. The Future Belongs to AI Decision Engines

When marketers need answers and insights to make the most well-informed decisions, they turn to their marketing dashboards. But are their dashboards truly working for them? Increasingly, the answer is “no.” Marketers deserve better – and through advanced AI, “better” has become a reality.  

In a car, the dashboard is where you monitor speed and fuel levels and see service alerts – all key indicators of the driver’s overall performance. In the dashboard of a marketing tool, marketers can monitor campaign performance – traffic, engagement, conversion metrics, and more, ideally at a glance. 

Of course, any modern marketers will tell you their dashboards fall far short of that ideal. Dashboards require marketers to search and search to discover the right insights for the moment. Marketers need solutions that deliver those insights. And AI is making this transformation to a new model possible. AI’s potential here is so great that it’s allowing marketers to move beyond dashboards – and to put the power of a decision engine in their own hands. 

AI Is Heralding the Next Generation in Marketing Decision-Making 

So what changes in a marketer’s day-to-day life when they adopt a decision engine model? In short, they gain agility, efficiency, and focus. More broadly, marketing teams are given an opportunity to revamp their operations overall. Dashboards are built to monitor. Decision engines are built to guide the marketer, enabling them to be proactive and customize their approach through intelligent and responsive systems.  

With the continuous expansion of marketing channels to monitor comes immense volumes of data. Marketers need to leverage that data to decide what actions to take next. But in a traditional dashboard, that’s often an awkward and time-consuming proposition. The interface often feels both static and old-fashioned. These are your charts, but which are the right charts? These are your metrics, but what patterns do they suggest? More to the point, what should we do next to succeed? 

Also, “dashboard fatigue” is real. A recent Gartner study revealed only 38% of CMOs believe their dashboards actually empower them to make better decisions. Teams commonly abandon dashboards, too. BI and dashboard tools have an adoption rate of only 20%, according to BARC. 

Don’t Think Charts. Think Partnership 

Marketers today need more than charts – they need a decision–making partnership. Next-generation AI tools can provide that partnership – answers to questions, relevant alerts, and more. Here’s what an AI-powered decision engine does for the marketing team: 

• Delivers insights to you directly. Marketers receive timely alerts and updates about new trending patterns across KPIs, rather than needing to search manually. 

• Speaks to you like a human. Rather than clicking and filtering to get highly specific insights, marketers can simply ask generative AI a question in conversational language and get a clear answer right away. 

• Delivers insights within your business’s workflow and communications tools. Instead of logging in, marketers can now embed analytics into their workflow by choosing to have them delivered straight to email, Slack, project boards, and other tools where marketers do their work. 

• Forecasts future trends and recommends decisions. Dashboards tell marketers what already happened. Decision engines illuminate what will happen next and how to best meet those trends. 

How the CMO of Real Estate Giant JLL Put AI to Work – and Succeeded 

We’re seeing leading businesses adapt to today’s business realities, innovating and investing for the future, and succeeding in the marketplace. Case in point: Commercial real estate giant JLL needed to reassess the effectiveness of their dashboards in 2023. Global CMO Siddharth Taparia recognized the limitations in the older dashboard models JLL was relying on. His proposed solution? A proprietary large language model, which JLL would custom-develop to serve the company’s specific needs.  

The LLM they built, JLL GPT, totally reimagined their marketing operations. New efficiencies abounded. For example, where the process of drafting partnership memoranda used to take four to six weeks to complete, now it took less than five hours. The difference between their previous methods and new methods? Their old dashboards served more as reporting tools, but the new tools acted more like decision engines. The efficiency and effectiveness of JLL’s innovations inspired 400 of their marketing professionals to adopt AI and begin reaping the benefits of intelligent systems.  

Modern Marketers Need to Demand Better – and Define “Better” 

Now is the time for marketers to take action to find the tech they need to thrive today and into the future. Here’s how to start moving away from dashboards and toward AI-powered decision-making: 

Conduct a full dashboard audit. Ask your team and any other relevant stakeholders: Which of these current tools do you actively use? Which are important to your decision-making? Which help you understand real ROI? And for those that are not delivering value, how can they be cut or consolidated? 

Test agentic tools. Gartner forecasts that 30% of new applications will use AI for proactive decision recommendations by 2026. Now is the time to test AI tools and evaluate whether they’re helping the marketing team. Marketing leaders should choose an AI assistant, alerting system, or conversational analytics tool to test. It’s an important part of keeping a competitive edge. 

Demand better from your tech partners. McKinsey research tells us businesses that embed AI in their decision-making process are more than 2x more likely to “outperform peers in marketing effectiveness.” The imperative for marketers is to seek AI-powered solutions that uncover and deliver insights that impact their own goals and objectives, and that recommend next steps. 

Connect insights to real actions. Harvard Business Review research shows that turning data analytics into action is a challenge for 72% of companies. Any AI-powered decision engine must provide measurement to fill in that gap, understand the real value of the tools, and improve performance meaningfully. 

In today’s marketing landscape, the growth and the momentum is in tools that enable and even encourage deeply informed decision-making, agility, flexibility – and in the end, success for the marketing team that boosts the whole business’s bottom line. AI is making this finally happen – and demonstrating marketers really have outgrown the old dashboard model. To find out more about how and where Mod Op sees AI rising to the occasion and supercharging B2B marketing, reach out to us today.