What Happened:
Last week, Hightouch's Alec Haase published a LinkedIn essay titled "The Rose and Thorn of Marketing AI," recapping a dinner he hosted with a group of marketing and data leaders.
He opened the table with a question borrowed from a family ritual: what's been your rose and thorn with marketing AI?
One marketing leader’s answer cut through the rest. Her rose: "We've tried a lot." Her thorn: "We've tried A LOT."
The line became the spine of his piece. Haase wrote that the first wave of marketing AI has produced motion without movement: copy generated in minutes, segments spun up quickly, analysts querying without SQL, but campaigns still slow to launch and cross-channel coordination still messy.
He pointed to McKinsey's "gen AI paradox," the finding that nearly eight in ten companies report using gen AI and just as many report no significant bottom-line impact.
The real bottleneck, he argued, is the coordination required to string them together. Read the full piece here.