In December 2023, as many of us reflected on our hopes for the new year, I shared my excitement to witness how forward-thinking marketers would leverage AI to drive innovation and elevate the marketing landscape. As we went through 2024, we saw that AI is no longer a futuristic dream in marketing – early adopters are already seeing incredible results, from personalised customer journeys to hyper-efficient campaigns. In 2025, AI won't be a nice-to-have; it will be the key to staying competitive, meeting consumer expectations, and unlocking the full potential of marketing teams.
But what does AI implementation really mean in 2025? From moving beyond isolated experiments and strategically weaving AI into the fabric of your marketing organisation, to analysing the results of pilots and identifying the most impactful AI solutions, 2025 is the year marketers become truly AI-powered. Here are three learnings I’ll take with me into the new year.
2024’s AI experiments have yielded a wealth of insights. Now it's time to turn those insights into tangible results.
We've experimented, we've learned, and now it's time to make a real impact. In 2025, marketing teams need to analyse their AI pilots, identify the most effective solutions, and integrate those into their core workflows.
In India, the Android marketing team ran a pilot to speed up creative production, leveraging Pencil Pro to create over 100 highly contextual video ads in near real time from a longer livestream video. As a result of the pilot, the team was able to save over 200 hours on creative production time and approximately 70% in cost. However, the pilot also provided valuable lessons about the limitations of AI and the importance of human-AI collaboration.
The team learned that while AI excels at quickly identifying and cutting relevant clips from long videos, human oversight remains crucial for detailed editing, adding animations and transitions, and ensuring brand consistency. Challenges with music rights and the AI model's ability to process lengthy videos meant that human intervention was still a necessary part of the process.
These learnings highlight the need for a nuanced approach to AI implementation. In 2025, we'll integrate these learnings into our creative workflows, using AI to accelerate tasks like video editing while retaining human oversight. By understanding AI's strengths and limitations, we can design workflows that maximise efficiency while retaining human creativity and control where needed.
Equip teams with the right AI tools and empower them with the knowledge to use them effectively.
In 2025, marketers need to shift their focus to practical applications and unlock the true value of AI. This means identifying the one or two key AI tools that directly address the most pressing marketing challenges and equipping your teams with the knowledge and support to leverage them effectively.
After exploring a wide range of AI tools across 2024, we created the AI Marketing Toolbox, a single platform that provides access to the most impactful AI solutions for each stage of the marketing funnel. This one-stop shop empowers marketers to tackle various tasks, from copywriting and image generation to research and idea generation, with efficiency and ease.
That’s not to say that every marketing team needs to build a sophisticated platform. The key takeaway is consolidation: Create a central hub (whether it's a simple website or even a shared document) that provides easy access to your essential AI tools. This will streamline workflows, reduce confusion, and empower your team to leverage AI effectively.
Effective AI implementation requires more than just powerful tools; it demands robust knowledge management. One tool we found particularly effective is NotebookLM, an AI-powered knowledge hub that transforms how marketing teams access, share, and learn from information.
For example, one of our regional teams piloted custom “Project Autobots” created with NotebookLM to address the challenge of scattered information. They consolidated their go-to-market strategies, insights, and best practices into a single, easily accessible repository. This not only saved time on research but also ensured that accurate information around consumer insights was readily available across the team, empowering deeper learning across teams.
In 2025, we’ll be scaling NotebookLM across other teams as a foundational tool for knowledge management. By streamlining access to information and empowering deeper learning, NotebookLM is a game-changer for AI implementation in marketing, enabling teams to work smarter, make faster decisions, and ultimately, drive better results. Try it for yourself here.
Expand Your AI Ecosystem: Collaborate and Co-Create
Finally, it’s important to note that successful AI implementation is not a solo endeavor. To truly unlock the transformative power of AI, we should embrace our broader partner ecosystem. By collaborating with agencies, technology providers, and even your customers, you can tap into a wider range of expertise, accelerate innovation, and drive greater value.
Experimentation should not be confined to the walls of our marketing organisation. Some of our most innovative initiatives have come from collaborating with external partners. Take, for example, this year's Cannes Lions Festival, where we challenged five of our top global agency partners to push creative boundaries and develop seemingly impossible ads using the power of Google AI and Gemini. The results were pure marketing magic.
One unforgettable example saw a humble PODS container transformed into the world's smartest billboard, a dynamic display that tapped into real-time conditions – location, time, traffic, weather, even subway delays – to generate hyper-localised messages.
This wasn't just about creating a clever campaign; it was about empowering our agency partners to become true Google AI evangelists, spreading the word about what's possible when creativity and cutting-edge technology collide.
Closer to home, our Japan team conducted a series of workshops with key agencies like Dentsu on using Gemini in the campaign planning process. These workshops not only upskilled agency teams on using Gemini but also fostered collaboration and co-creation. The partnership is now paying off. For instance, this fall, the Japan team and Dentsu co-created a Gemini campaign focused on Senior Day in Japan, aiming to encourage older demographics to embrace AI. This campaign, run as an experiment comparing AI-powered and traditional approaches, demonstrated a significant reduction in planning time — condensing a typical three-month process down to just one month.
These initiatives highlight the power of knowledge sharing and collaboration in driving AI implementation. By equipping both internal teams and agency partners with the knowledge and tools to leverage AI effectively, we can unlock new levels of efficiency, creativity, and innovation.
As we step into 2025, the message is clear: AI is no longer a futuristic vision for marketers; it's a present-day reality. This year, we've witnessed the power of AI to transform marketing workflows, boost efficiency, and unlock new levels of creativity. But the true potential of AI lies not just in isolated experiments, but in strategic implementation, continuous learning, and collaborative innovation.
By embracing these principles, marketers can become truly AI-powered, driving exceptional results and shaping the future of the industry. Here's to 2025 — the year we move beyond AI experimentation and unlock its true potential to achieve extraordinary things!
