Marketing and data science have historically been disparate — the latter long considered back office, the former at the front lines, various siloes sitting between.

But generative AI, as it is nearly everywhere else, is disrupting that process by joining the two functions and putting data science tools directly into marketers’ hands.

“What genAI has given marketers is the ability to perform detailed marketing science, ad science and consumer data science in a very plain language way,” Michelle McGuire Christian, chief commercial officer for ConvergeCONSUMER at Deloitte, told SDxCentral.

The global professional services organization has asserted its intent to be a leader in this area with its announcement today of an initiative combining its ConvergeCONSUMER portfolio with Google Cloud.

As McGuire Christian put it: “Marketers can drive data science decisioning into every single marketing message that gets put out across all channels in a way that historically took months.”

GenAI seems to be all enterprises can talk about these days, and it’s expected to have significant impact across every industry and enterprise category.

Global technology intelligence firm ABI Research forecasts that  the genAI market will rapidly expand at a CAGR of 162% by 2030, creating nearly $60 billion in revenue for supply chain stakeholders. Markets and Markets projects the industry will grow to $51.8 billion in 2028 (up from just $11.3 billion this year).

No doubt, the technology holds great promise for marketing, with some 70% of chief marketing officers (CMOs) using genAI in some way and 19% testing it in areas including content generation, insight generation, market segmentation and personalization.

The new Deloitte-Google Cloud integration intends to further such efforts by combining Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform with Deloitte’s proprietary consumer and market data and algorithms, McGuire Christian said.

Customers can build and train machine learning (ML) models or choose pretrained or custom models. ConvergeCONSUMER also now incorporates Google Cloud's Generative AI App Builder and Generative AI Studio so businesses can quickly develop chatbots, search engines and other tools. The suite of tools uses the Google Cloud Cortex Framework to help enterprises enhance data and generate insights about how they operate, plan and forecast.

Furthermore, the platform allows enterprises to view analytics in real time and applies BigQuery, Data Flow and Dataproc to help them use structured and unstructured data. The tools can be incorporated into existing environments and tech stacks without the need for bespoke solutions, McGuire Christian said.

“They can easily query first, second and third-party data and then action on that,” said McGuire Christian. “They can easily join data science with creativity to create messages that are most impactful and have the highest likelihood to be engaged with by their intended target.”

She emphasized that this process once required many different departments and a broad range of skillsets. AI has allowed marketers to “cross the boundary of internal business siloes.”

Marketers often struggle with knowing who their customer is across first, second and third-party data — particularly as data collection and sharing rules become more stringent and the digital world moves toward a cookieless future.

But AI and ML tools can quickly sift through data to support “not just any lead, but the highest value quality leads,” said McGuire Christian.

She pointed out that Deloitte uses third-party data that is fully vetted and doesn’t rely on cookies to allow enterprises to understand both known and anonymous customers. They can identify those with the highest likelihood to buy, engage and spend the most money. This is done at a “very granular level,” down to device, geography, individual and household.

From there, marketers can determine what products customers might want and optimize price, promotion and placement.

For instance, marketers can ask AI: “Show me all the people in a given zip code who have the highest likelihood or intent to purchase in the next 7-day period.”

For each cohort, AI can then show price and promo combinations that could drive customers to a point of purchase, whether online or in-store. They can then use the optimal channel recommended via algorithm — email, social campaign, a dynamic product page — capture the results and feed that back into the algorithm "in a way that is constantly self-training and getting smarter.”

As another example, enterprises can help merchandisers find and place certain items in stores aligned both to demand and supply chain variability and availability.

“It gives merchants the ability to sort and present products in a way that customers will want to buy them,” she said. “They can let the machine help guide their work to sell the most products and be as efficient as possible.”

AI is nothing new in marketing, McGuire Christian pointed out. Marketers have been using data science and tools such as unsupervised clustering algorithms for propensity modeling and brand affinity for several years. That has extended into areas including MLOps

Now, we’re seeing yet another step forward, notably due to the announcement of ChatGPT in late November. That rollout only accelerated desire because people could see how easy it was to query backend large language models (LLMs), said McGuire Christian.

“It’s an evolution of what has been happening in marketing over the last 3 to 5 years,” she said. “Now we can enable marketers to create more impactful campaigns, reach a broader audience and be more effective in targeting and engagement.”

Moving forward, Deloitte will continue to work with Google to align their roadmap to the “fast-moving space that is generative AI,” she said.

Deloitte has a backlog of hundreds of genAI use cases that their joint clients with Google have asked to develop, she said. For instance, generating creative imagery to drive campaigns and demand generation.

“We’re aligning our resources against those use cases and creating opportunities with Google to accelerate how marketers, merchants and store associates leverage AI to make them more effective, efficient, increase revenue, reduce cycle time,” she said.

GenAI is no doubt all over the news since the emergence of ChatGPT, but McGuire Christian asserted that Deloitte has been working in the AI and data science space for years.

“I joke that we were AI before it was cool,” she said, underscoring that, “there’s a whole new world of use of technology in a way that makes people work smarter, not harder.”