Amanda Cole, CMO of Bloomreach, shares how AI revolutionizes marketing, boosts productivity, and addresses misconceptions about AI’s role alongside marketers.
Amanda Cole, Chief Marketing Officer at Bloomreach, has been at the forefront of integrating AI into marketing, leading transformative initiatives that enhance efficiency and innovation. In this interview, she shares her journey of implementing AI-powered marketing tools and how they have significantly improved operations at Bloomreach.
From adopting Glean Chat, an AI knowledge management tool, to deploying JasperAI and 6Sense technology for content and outreach, Cole provides insights into how AI has saved time, enhanced productivity, and redefined the marketing landscape. She also addresses common misconceptions surrounding AI in marketing, emphasizing that AI should be viewed as a strategic partner, augmenting human capabilities rather than replacing them.
With AI playing an increasingly important role in understanding customer behavior and predicting future trends, Cole highlights the immense potential AI offers marketers to make data-driven decisions and scale their efforts for greater impact. This conversation explores how AI is revolutionizing marketing and why it is crucial for modern marketers to embrace these technologies.
Excerpts from the interview;
At Bloomreach, you spearheaded the integration of AI-powered marketing tools. Can you share an example of how this has enhanced your marketing efforts?
The entire Bloomreach organization has embraced AI adoption. Nine months ago, we introduced Glean Chat, an AI-powered knowledge management tool, to our 1,000+ employees. The results have been nothing short of transformative. With over 70% adoption across the organization and 77% within the marketing team, we’ve seen over 45,000 Glean chat messages sent. Employees use it to find company resources and information faster—game-changing in a virtual work setting—and for bigger requests like copywriting or data analysis.
As for the marketing team, we’ve saved hundreds of hours of valuable time with AI over the past two months alone. We’ve deployed thousands of AI-generated emails using 6Sense conversational email technology, helping us reach more prospective customers. We’ve also integrated JasperAI into our content marketing workflows, which generated about 331,000 words over the past three months. We’ve saved over 200 hours of manual work with these platforms.
We are constantly seeking innovative ways to make our teams more efficient. We’re not afraid of how AI can help us meet our goals and exceed our expectations, and that’s what I’m most excited about.
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What are some of the biggest misconceptions about integrating AI into marketing, and how would you address them?
A misconception I often hear is that AI will be able to do everything automatically. That’s not the case for a few reasons. For starters, AI is intended to augment human capabilities, not replace them. AI can handle repetitive (often time-consuming) tasks and data analysis, freeing marketers to focus on their strategic goals and what matters most.
AI is only as good as the data it is trained on and thrives on large amounts of data. Poor or fragmented data quality can lead to inaccurate insights and ineffective marketing strategies. Ensuring your team has high-quality, accurate data before experimenting with AI is essential for the technology to provide valuable and actionable insights and results.
And lastly, AI needs that human touch and expertise, and it’s crucial for marketers not to rely entirely on AI. AI should be seen as a strategic partner that complements human creativity and decision-making, not a replacement. Over-reliance can lead to a loss of the human perspective necessary in our field and essential for creating authentic and engaging marketing campaigns and experiences.
What key factors should marketers consider when selecting and integrating AI tools beyond data quality into their martech stack?
Ease of use immediately comes to mind. The AI tools should be user-friendly, especially for those without a technical background. Today’s marketers should not have to depend on IT for daily operations. Instead, with AI, they should be able to work independently and navigate the platform without too many technical hurdles.
Another important aspect of integrating AI is scalability and flexibility. The tools should be scalable and flexible enough to adapt to your team’s marketing needs should they shift and change—especially if your teams are growing. This includes handling increased data volume or complexity without requiring a complete tech overhaul.
And as a CMO, I always think of the costs and ROI. Evaluating the AI tools’ cost-effectiveness and potential return on investment is important. Are the tools your team is integrating going to help you meet your KPIs for that quarter? Are you considering both the initial implementation costs and ongoing operational expenses? These are all things to remember as you introduce AI tools to your marketing team.
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Could you elaborate on how AI enhances customer insights and informs marketers’ strategies?
AI enables marketers to work at a speed and scale they couldn’t before. For example, today, a lot of manual work can involve sifting through customer data and building reports that identify customer trends. With the right AI and a good data source fueling that AI, marketers can identify those trends and complete those analyses in minutes, if not less. AI will do the time-consuming work of parsing through data to understand how customers engage, what’s working, and what isn’t. In arming marketers with that information, AI enables marketers to quickly pivot and build strategies informed by what their customers want—in that moment, not days or weeks, or months later.
AI can also help them use that understanding to predict future behavior. Our Loomi AI, for example, can predict future customer behaviors such as purchase likelihood, churn probability, best communication channel, and optimal send times. This allows marketers to make data-driven decisions and tailor their strategies to maximize ROI.
Some marketers fear AI will replace them. How do you see AI evolving the role of marketers in the future? Will it create new opportunities or require different skill sets?
AI will revolutionize the marketing landscape, without a doubt. But it’s not about “replacing” anyone—it’s about changing the purpose of marketing altogether. That’s a hopeful story!
What would your day look like if you didn’t need to spend hours on copy variants or going back and forth with creative teams to fix minor images? How much revenue could you drive if you could put out hundreds of campaigns in a week rather than needing a few weeks just to build one? You can strategize at a much higher level when you’re not focused on the time-consuming tasks you face today.
I see so many new opportunities as a result of this—more strategic marketing roles that play a bigger part in business growth, more data-driven roles as we train AI, and more detail-oriented roles that can optimize and refine AI outputs. There’s a lot to be excited about.
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Can you share any advice for young professionals interested in exploring the intersection of marketing and AI?
I’d offer a few pieces of advice:
- Stay updated on industry trends: AI in marketing is rapidly changing and evolving daily. Whether you follow industry blogs, attend webinars, or even experiment with AI in your own time, so many (free) resources can help you stay in the know about AI and this industry.
- Develop your data literacy: AI relies heavily on data analysis skills. Growing this part of your professional toolkit will help you understand how to leverage AI to better understand your customers and campaign optimization.
- Experiment and practice: My team and I are constantly doing this. Hands-on experience is crucial, and because most of the AI tools out there are so new, you can’t go wrong with experimenting and figuring out how those tools work and which best suit you. Learning and experimenting will set you apart in your marketing career, especially as we integrate AI into our work.
