Over three packed days at The Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo™, marketing leaders discussed the trends shaping the future of the marketing space.
While AI took center stage as a technology reshaping how marketers operate, much of the insight and research centered on other foundational drivers of growth: smarter media investment, streamlined operations, and evolving organizational strategy. Since digital advertising continues to be one of the biggest areas of spend (and impact), it was at the heart of many of these discussions.
Here are a few key takeaways that advertising operations leaders should have on their radar as we move into a new era of AI-driven automation and scalable marketing execution.
Marketers are leading the charge in AI adoption
New Gartner® research illustrates that AI will be one of the biggest investment areas across the business landscape. No surprise there. But marketers can easily overlook the opportunity this offers.
In most cases, marketers have been among the earliest AI adopters at companies of all sizes, leading the charge for AI adoption and viable use cases. Now, marketers and advertisers can apply this expertise to drive scalable, sustainable, safe AI practices organization-wide.
This means moving past the age of AI experimentation and into a new phase: standardization. AI needs to become an integrated part of your existing operational ecosystem, not something you hastily slap on top of your existing tech stack.
AI can’t be another standalone tool your team has to log into, learn, and manage. It needs to live inside the platforms your team already uses and be fully integrated into your operational workforce if it’s going to save you time and reduce risk.
This is where automation comes into play, too. Automation can act as the guardrails that keep AI outputs accurate, efficient, and on-brand. The synergy between AI and automation ensures that AI outputs are efficient, on-brand, and actionable. You can find real value from your AI investments without introducing chaos.
When done right, the integration of AI and automation delivers three major benefits:
- Repeatable campaign quality: AI enhances creativity and personalization, while automation enforces consistency and accuracy.
- Speed without added headcount: Automated workflows should increase every employee’s capacity, freeing up time without requiring new hires.
- Strategic focus: With repetitive tasks off their plates, your top employees can spend more time on innovation and impactful projects, not tedious button-pushing.
AI shouldn’t replace your team. AI should augment them so they can do their best work. This pivotal shift in how we perceive AI’s role in marketing and advertising is key to staying competitive in a landscape that constantly requires us to do more (and better) work with fewer resources.
Bloated operational processes are holding back growth
A recurring theme across sessions and conversations at the Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo™ was how difficult it is to actually streamline workflows. Overengineered processes aren’t just frustrating; they’re a direct obstacle to growth. Everyone wants a seamless, efficient system—one where teams can easily align key process workflows with valuable data to develop and scale personalized customer experiences.
But few organizations have taken the time to map their current campaign development workflows in detail.
This lack of clarity leads to misalignment at every stage, from people and approvals to execution and technology. We’re stuck reinventing the wheel with each new campaign, creating inefficiencies that ripple throughout our organizations.
Ask our friend Paul how that’s going for him:
If this sounds familiar, here’s one simple action step any advertising operational team can take: create a process map of your campaign workflows. For each step, outline:
- The people involved
- Approval stages
- Execution steps
- The technologies used
This exercise can reveal workflow and tech redundancies, highlight bottlenecks, and identify your biggest opportunities for operational improvement.
More importantly, though, it provides a plan for how to change. AI and automation have a limited impact on fragmented, convoluted processes. They are most effective when layered into clear, repeatable processes.
Identifying which manual tasks you want to pass off to technology (like AI agents or automation) will be easier once you weed out redundancies. From there, AI and automation can smooth out your workflows, creating space for teams to operate at their strategic best.
Advertising waste is a growing concern among marketing leaders
During his Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo™ session on “How to Waste Less Money on Advertising,” Eric Schmitt, a VP Analyst at Gartner, shared new research highlighting a significant shift in marketing budgets. Advertising accounts for 28% of the average marketing budget, but here’s the catch: the overwhelming majority of marketers report that paid media is increasingly harder to measure, justify, and optimize.
The causes? Poor campaign optimization, inefficient processes, and incomplete advertising reporting systems. Essentially, the AdOps tools we use aren’t delivering the ROI we need.
Advertising waste doesn’t just lead to lost revenue. As we know too well in this industry, it also burns through your team’s time and energy.
Imagine manually adjusting bids and budgets for hours…only to discover your ads aren’t being served to the right audience. The same goes for the hours sunk into compiling multichannel reports that fail to clearly articulate your team’s work.
That’s where automation comes in. By integrating automation into your digital advertising processes, you can:
- Eliminate errors: Automated systems ensure strict adherence to campaign rules and compliance (both for human teams and AI), reducing the risk of costly mistakes.
- Optimize campaigns in real time, automatically: AI tools analyze performance faster than any human team, making dynamic adjustments to improve outcomes.
- Streamline reporting: Automation pulls data from multiple sources so AI can deliver clear multichannel insights instantly without hours of manual work.
Working together, AI and automation can decrease your team’s advertising waste and drive more impactful campaigns.
Want to maximize your AI investment? You’ll need automation
It’s impossible to ignore the immense potential of pairing AI and automation. Alongside AI’s growing agentic capabilities, these two technologies act as a “digital workforce” that enables advertisers to work smarter, faster, and with greater precision.
During the Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo™, we heard several compelling examples of how this powerful tech partnership can transform marketing operations.
For instance, our data shows that major ad campaigns traditionally take a week or more to launch. Manual keystrokes, detailed asset management, and QA processes drastically slow down human teams. With AI-assisted automation, that same campaign can be live in hours.
(According to one of our clients, it’s not uncommon to “have a kickoff call with a customer in the morning and have their ads live that night,” as long as they have access to the customer’s accounts and budget confirmation.)
How?
- AI ensures your messaging resonates with each audience, while automation guarantees adherence to strategy and rules.
- AI dramatically speeds up creative ideation and adaptation, then automation scales and distributes the work across channels with infinite repeatability.
- AI can determine how to reallocate or modify budgets to maximize results for every dollar, and automation can power these budget recommendations across your entire portfolio without overspending.
This is an absolute game-changer for AdOps teams managing multiple channels and large-scale campaigns. It’s not just about speed; it’s about accuracy, consistency, and results.
Here’s how you can take action now
The insights we gained at the Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo™ are only valuable if you can put them into practice. If you want to prepare your company for the power of AI, automation, and smarter AdOps workflows, here’s where to start:
- Audit your workflow: Map out the people, processes, and tools involved in your campaign development. Identify bottlenecks, processes, and tasks that are ideal for automation.
- Evaluate your tech stack: Are your AI tools integrated within your existing systems and tools? If not, consider solutions that merge your data into one place so you can use AI in a more holistic way.
- Align your data with your strategy: Fragmented operations jeopardize your profitability. Centralize your data and ensure it’s feeding into every step of your advertising process.
- Invest in automation’s scaling efficiency: Automation eliminates the repetitive tasks draining your team’s energy, time, and resources. Free them for strategic work and watch what happens.
Closing the technology gap between today’s work and tomorrow’s needs
As the sheer volume of AI-focused conversations, sessions, and research insights shared at Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo™ proves, AI and automation are transformational and will be the backbone of future-ready marketing and advertising organizations.
But the tools alone aren’t enough. Your teams and organization need to be prepared to fully utilize everything these technologies are capable of doing. For most of us, this requires shifting our perspective on what AdOps is and what it can be.
This can be a big gap in some cases, but it’s a vital one to cross. The future of advertising belongs to those who can adapt quickly, scale with precision, and innovate fearlessly. If you’re waiting to make AI-assisted automation a reality, consider this your sign to make it happen.
