Adobe, Google, and more add AI features as martech landscape prepares to be upended

ChatGPT may have all of the buzz when it comes to AI platforms, but marketing technology (martech) and platforms are quickly catching up by adding a host of AI features to their systems.

An eye for design: Adobe unveiled “Generative Fill” in Photoshop last week, a feature that uses AI to extend the canvas of your design, fill in backgrounds, and more.

Adobe has long dominated with its Creative Suite, but AI image generators like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Dall-E 2 have given designers new ways to generate designs.

Google is also entering the image-generation space, and said last week it will soon add those features to Bard, its rival to ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, the public got a glimpse last week of DragGAN, an emerging imaging tool that lets users easily drag a still image and rotate it while the AI fills in the image, making it almost 3D.

Productivity boosters: Some AI add-ons are giving marketers assistants to help accelerate workflows. Acquia, for example, unveiled a chatbot within its digital asset management platform last week. The feature can help marketers find relevant images from within its asset libraries through conversational requests.

Other productivity tools are adding AI to their software:

• Airtable added AI features that help users quickly create apps, templates, and copy like creative briefs.
• ClickUp, another productivity/database/customer relationship management tool, has added AI features such as crafting prospecting emails from the platform.
• Last month, Atlassian added an AI assistant to its Jira and Confluence tools.
• Notion AI was one of the earlier companies to build generative AI features into its platform.

Our take: We predict 2023 martech spending will hit $7.41 billion in 2023, and will grow by nearly 30% over the next two years. But the pace of innovation in martech tools due to generative AI is staggering.

Scott Brinker, author of Chiefmartec.com and vice president of platform ecosystem at Hubspot, wrote that AI “has the potential to dramatically upend the dynamics of the whole industry over these next few years.”

“Will that shrink the commercial martech landscape, as more software becomes custom composed within companies? Or will it expand the landscape with a whole new generation of martech ‘products’—such as a massive wave of components that can plug-and-play into these composable stack architectures?,” he said.

“Honestly, it could go either way. But if I had to take a guess, I think it will be the latter.”

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