Is Your Business Ready For AI Or Just Chasing Hype?

Forbes

15 hours ago

Tod Loofbourrow, Chairman and CEO, ViralGains.
Generative AI is rewriting the rules of marketing, and many brands are scrambling to keep up. But here's a reality check: by the end of 2025, Gartner predicts that 30% of GenAI projects will be abandoned before delivering any business value.
This is because adopting AI isn't about deploying shiny new tools; it's about aligning technology with real business problems, building the right data foundation, managing risk and, most importantly, understanding where AI can actually move the needle.
Right now, too many marketers are chasing AI for the optics, not the outcomes.
Across the C-suite, "AI strategy" has become the must-have line item, especially in marketing. Promises of hyper-efficiency, real-time targeting, infinite personalization and generative scale have leaders greenlighting AI projects left and right.
But a lot of these initiatives stall before launch. Worse yet, they fail to perform to expectations. This is because while the tech is impressive, the implementation is messy. Core questions—How will this drive ROI? Do we have the right data? Is this even the right use case?—often go unasked.
This is the danger of AI FOMO: investing reactively, not strategically. The antidote? A framework that aligns AI opportunity with actual business relevance.
If businesses want to cut through the hype, they need to ensure they have a thorough framework in place. Harvard Business Review, for example, introduced the WINS framework—a powerful lens to assess where GenAI can drive the most impact.
WINS refers to the four dominant types of work GenAI can enhance:
• Words (like ad copy, scripts and reports)
• Images (visual assets, design and branding)
• Numbers (analytics, forecasting and segmentation)
• Sounds (audio branding, voice AI and podcasts)
For marketers and advertising agencies, this should be viewed as core work. Your campaigns, strategies, insights and outputs all live squarely in this framework, which means your teams are on the front lines of AI transformation.
But there's a second, equally important layer, which is evaluating how digitized your processes already are and how urgently you need to transform. Are you still manually pulling campaign data from siloed systems? Are your audience insights stuck in spreadsheets? Are your creative workflows bottlenecked?
If your answer is "yes," you're likely in what HBR calls the "Next in Line" quadrant—where GenAI could deliver massive impact, but only if you prioritize the right foundations and partnerships.
MIT's Andrew McAfee and others have discussed the importance of using AI to augment human performance—not replace it. The goal isn't to eliminate your creative, strategic or analytical talent. The goal is to amplify it.
The real promise of GenAI lies in things like helping a junior copywriter draft 10 good ideas instead of two, letting a strategist test 50 creative variants in the time it once took to run A/B tests and giving insights teams real-time visibility into shifting audience sentiment.
This isn't about automating your team out of existence. It's about enabling them to use GenAI as a co-pilot that elevates creative thinking, accelerates iteration and sharpens decisions.
In working with large advertisers, I've seen how GenAI delivers value when combined with zero-party data—insights that consumers willingly share.
Take the case of a national bank entering new markets. Rather than relying on assumptions about brand perception, they launched interactive video ads featuring a simple, embedded question: "Which word best describes our brand?"
That single question became a rich source of insight. By applying GenAI-powered sentiment analysis to the responses, the bank quickly learned which creatives inspired trust, which messages resonated in specific regions and how to optimize the campaign in real time.
This is WINS in action—words, images and numbers working together not just to capture attention, but to deepen understanding and accelerate performance.
A common pitfall in adopting GenAI is the belief that everything must be built in-house to truly "own" the strategy. But in reality, GenAI success is less about technological ownership and more about making timely, strategic decisions that align with business goals.
Deploying GenAI effectively often requires capabilities that span data engineering, model fine-tuning, regulatory alignment and creative integration. While some organizations may choose to develop these from scratch, others accelerate progress by leveraging existing tools, frameworks or external expertise—especially when it comes to domain-specific models or ready-to-use data pipelines.
Ultimately, this is about avoiding unnecessary reinvention. Internal teams stay focused on differentiation and core value while relying on proven methods to get there faster and with less risk. The question is: where does your team add the most value, and where can others help remove friction so you can move with purpose, not just speed?
To avoid AI regret and maximize impact, I suggest that CMOs and agencies answer the following three questions:
1. Where in our marketing operation do WINS apply—and how digitized are those processes?
2. How can we use AI to augment human creativity and decision-making—not just automate tasks?
3. Where might strategic collaboration help us accelerate time-to-value without compromising control or insight?
AI has the power to reshape marketing—but only if it's tied to real outcomes, implemented strategically and grounded in the data and workflows that actually drive business value. The winners won't be those who jumped in first. The winners will be those who used AI wisely, with the right frameworks, the right partners and the right expectations.
Don't chase the hype. Find your zero bit, deploy for impact and watch the wins follow.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?