Enterra Solutions® entered the marketing arena in a big way when it acquired the cutting-edge marketing services group 380ai and its AI-first agency Atrium. Shortly after the acquisition, Sami McCabe, founder of 380ai and currently Enterra’s Chief Marketing Officer, wrote, “The notion that AI will profoundly change the marketing industry is hardly a novel or unique insight. But I’ve been surprised by how slowly marketers, both in-house and agency-side, have responded to the revolution that’s happening at such a breathtaking pace in our industry.”[1] What’s happening? Journalist Melissa Russell explains, “From chatbots to social media management to full-scale marketing campaigns and automation, artificial intelligence is changing the way marketers do their jobs. Routine tasks like writing copy, mining consumer data, and creating visuals that once took hours can now be done in minutes.”[2]

Although Russell is accurate in her description of what’s taking place, McCabe thinks she may have fallen into the trap that affects most agencies. He explains, “Most teams are obsessing over efficiency metrics (content speed, deployment velocity, etc.) instead of tracking what actually matters: incremental revenue and customer lifetime value improvements. The pattern is clear: everyone's deploying AI for faster content generation and campaign optimization, but when you ask about business impact, the conversation shifts to ‘productivity gains,’ not revenue growth. The real competitive advantage will go to organizations that can prove their AI investments drive measurable business value.”

AI and Value Generation

Generating value is where the merger of Enterra’s capabilities and 380ai’s capabilities really pays off. Given Enterra’s ability to generate unique insights and highly-detailed market and consumer ontologies, exploring how its technology can be applied to solving marketing problems in an increasingly complex, competitive, and noisy global marketplace makes perfect sense.

Even prior to Enterra’s acquisition of 380ai, it was laser-focused on helping clients grow their revenue. For example, the Enterra Revenue Growth Intelligence System™ (ERGIS™) systemically performs holistic revenue growth optimization (including optimizing strategic and tactical pricing, trade promotion, trade architecture, price pack architecture, media mix, customer segmentation, and assortment). And, in the area of understanding customers better, the Enterra Consumer Insights Intelligence System™ allows clients to quantitatively uncover and logically understand the inter-relationships that lead to heightened consumer understanding, hyper-personalized product recommendations, and new product innovation. As McCabe explains, “With the acquisition of 380ai, Enterra can now focus on applying its groundbreaking technology to solve marketing problems for CMOs.”

Analysts from Nielsen insist, “AI is no longer a futuristic concept — it’s here, and it’s reshaping marketing. What started as a new technology has quickly become a core strategic need for businesses worldwide. From predicting which products a customer is likely to buy next to automating the personalized delivery of ad campaigns across multiple channels, AI is transforming not just how marketers operate, but also how brands connect with their audiences.”[3]

The Need for a New Way Forward

Russell notes, “The 2024 State of Marketing AI Report from the Marketing AI Institute says AI adoption is accelerating among marketing professionals, with many saying they use AI in digital tools in their daily workflows and ‘couldn’t live without AI.’” While many CMOs tout their AI capabilities, McCabe notes, “97% of brands can't even do basic predictive customer modeling.” In fact, he says that many marketers don’t trust their AI capabilities. “The brutal truth from Cordial's new study,” McCabe reports, “is that 60% of marketers don't trust their own data.” Companies spend millions on “AI-powered” platforms yet can't predict which customers will churn next month. McCabe concludes, “This isn't a technology problem anymore. The real divide isn't between companies with AI vs. without AI. It's between companies that operationalize intelligence and companies that collect digital dust on expensive dashboards.”

Analysts from Nielsen caution, “While AI’s pervasive adoption marks a significant turning point in marketing, its evolution isn’t happening in isolation. You need to navigate a dynamic industry shaped by multiple forces beyond just AI. In such a constantly changing landscape, clarity is your strongest asset. It’s time to move beyond uncertainty and take control of your strategic marketing success.” Moving beyond uncertainty is why Enterra® developed the Enterra Dynamic Enterprise Resiliency System™ (EDERS™): a groundbreaking product designed to enable enterprises to convert macroeconomic and geopolitical chaos into a powerful competitive advantage. EDERS is built on Enterra’s Autonomous Decision Science™ platform, which enables organizations to autonomously analyze data, predict outcomes, and execute optimized decisions with high accuracy across complex business operations.

Concluding Thoughts

Analysts from IBM suggest that AI can improve brand marketing in five unique ways. They are:

• Making faster, smarter decisions. “Marketing teams that are equipped with cutting-edge AI tools can see the impact of their marketing efforts in near real-time and adjust their tactics accordingly. AI marketing platforms can create AI marketing strategies and analyze data faster than humans that use ML algorithms and recommend actions that are informed by sentiment analysis from historical customer data.”

• Benefiting from improved return on investment (ROI) from marketing initiatives. “AI marketing tools can help marketers identify actionable insights from data that is generated by a campaign in near real-time. Additionally, the same tools can help identify the right channels for a media buy and even the optimal placement of an ad based on customer behavior. Modern AI marketing solutions help stakeholders ensure that they are getting the most out of their investment in a campaign.”

• Generating more accurate measurements of KPIs. “Digital campaigns generate more data than humans can keep up with, which can make measuring the success of marketing initiatives difficult. AI-enhanced dashboards help marketers link the success of their efforts to specific tactics they’ve deployed, helping them better understand what’s working and what might be improved.”

• Creating enhanced customer relationship (CRM) capabilities. “AI technologies help marketing teams improve their customer relationship management programs by automating routine tasks like the preparation of customer data. They can also reduce the likelihood of human error, deliver more personalized customer messages and identify at-risk customers.”

• Obtaining more meaningful insights from customer data. “Today, many marketers struggle with the sheer amount of data available to them when they’re planning a campaign. AI can help by performing predictive analytics on customer data, analyzing huge amounts in seconds by using fast, efficient machine learning (ML) algorithms. It uses the data to generate insights about future customer behavior, suggest more personalized content and spot patterns in large datasets for marketers to act on.”

McCabe concludes, “Most CMOs I talk to are drowning in data they can't activate, while their more agile competitors are already running campaigns that optimize autonomously. The question isn't whether you have AI tools. It's whether your AI tools actually make decisions.”

Footnotes

[1] Sami McCabe, “Velocity & Defensibility: Why I sold my company after just five months,” LinkedIn, 6 August 2025.

[2] Melissa Russell, “AI Will Shape the Future of Marketing,” Harvard Division of Continuing Education, 14 April 2025.

[3] Staff, “How AI is redefining marketing, today and tomorrow,” Nielsen, June 2025.

[4] Mark Flinders, Molly Hayes, and Amanda Downie, “A guide to AI in marketing,” IBM, 10 March 2025.