Can we talk? How conversational data is rephrasing marketing intelligence

"Data should be your secret weapon, especially during a rollercoaster trading climate. But too often it's a mess: overwhelming, unreliable, and impossible to move at speed. Now, the next evolution in data intelligence is giving brands their edge back. In a world of economic tremors and shifting consumer trends, business leaders know that a data-driven culture and data democratization is their competitive edge. But, according to research from Adverity, 67% of their CMOs feel overwhelmed by that data. And it's holding them back."

"Research shows why: over half of marketers (52%) juggle 14 or more data sources. Nearly half (43%) admit their teams spend more time trying to get data into one place than actually using it to make decisions. And a further 43% say the real blocker to a data-driven culture is the fact that they can't get value from the data they already have."

"Then sharing this patchy data across teams can be challenging and time-consuming: it often takes a tech team time to build brittle dashboards that then aren't easy for marketers or other non-technical staff to adapt to their needs or that take too long to serve up the right insights. Worse, marketers have to know the question they need answering before they build the dashboard, so by the time it's live, the world has moved on."

Businesses face abundant but fragmented marketing data, creating opportunity and challenge. Over half of marketers juggle many data sources, and teams spend more time consolidating data than using it for decisions. Manual data wrangling creates inaccuracies and erodes organizational trust, while sharing patchy data requires tech teams to build brittle dashboards that marketers cannot easily adapt. Dashboards often presuppose known questions and become outdated by deployment. In a volatile economy, speed, scalability, and proven ROI are critical. Conversational and agentic AI automate integration, expedite insight discovery, enable natural-language queries, reduce manual errors, and restore trust for faster, data-driven marketing decisions.

Read at The Drum