AI is forcing marketers to question decades of accepted best practices as the assumptions on which those practices were based evolve, according to new research.
An article in the Marketing Strategy Journal states that AI is changing the way decisions are made on both sides of the market. Businesses delegate marketing decisions to AI systems, while buyers use AI to research suppliers, compare products, and make purchasing recommendations. Decisions once made solely by humans are more likely to be the result of collaboration between humans and AI.
This is a “degradation of knowledge”. This is when marketing knowledge becomes less useful because the environment it was designed for no longer functions in the same way. AI accelerates this by changing the way information is created, evaluated and used throughout the purchasing process.
Your policy does not expire. Your playbook is.
The article, authored by Professor Rajan Varadarajan of the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, draws an important distinction between marketing principles and marketing tactics.
Some ideas survive major technological changes because they are ingrained in human behavior. Customers always want solutions to problems. Brands still need to differentiate themselves. Trust always matters.
Tactics based on these principles are another story.
Take SEO. For years, marketers optimized pages based on how people searched on Google. Now they also need to think about how AI systems retrieve, interpret and summarize information. Or think about the traditional B2B buying journey, in which marketers assumed prospects would visit a website, download content, attend a webinar, and eventually chat with salespeople. If AI agents increasingly search for products before a human reaches a supplier’s site, this familiar journey begins to seem less universal.
The article describes these enduring ideas as conceptual knowledge and the playbooks built on them as instrumental knowledge. The first often survives technological changes. The second has a shorter lifespan because it depends on the functioning of the markets at a given time.
Four questions for marketers
The report says marketers need to ask themselves these four questions:
- “Who is your customer?” »
- “Who is your customer?” »
- “Who is the marketing decision maker? »
- “Who is the marketing decision maker? »
This is a stress test for marketing hypotheses. They allow you to test whether what you think still matches how customers buy.
Consider an SEO strategy built around generating clicks to your website. If a shopper gets an AI-generated comparison before visiting your site, is this strategy still measuring success in the right way? With B2B lead generation, if an AI agent researches suppliers, shortlists, and recommends products before a human enters the buying process, is the buyer’s journey still what your funnel assumes?
The same exercise applies to all marketing. Each framework relies on assumptions about who collects information, who evaluates options, and who makes decisions. As AI takes on more and more of these roles, marketers need to ask themselves if these assumptions still fit the market they are trying to reach.
If a strategy assumes prospects research products, compare vendors, or evaluate marketing messages themselves, it may no longer reflect reality. Likewise, if campaign planning assumes that marketers make all targeting, budgeting, or creative decisions, it risks overlooking the growing role of AI in execution.
The problem is not that people disappear from the process. That’s because AI is influencing decisions that marketing executives have traditionally considered entirely human. The report suggests reviewing these assumptions before revising the tactics based on them.
10X your SEO with Semrush for business.
The world’s most powerful SEO platform, built specifically for businesses.
@media (maximum width: 768 px) { .headline-responsive { font-size: 30px !important; line-height: 1.3 !important; } }
The new competitive advantage
The article compares AI to earlier developments such as the Internet, e-commerce and social media, each of which has forced marketers to rethink accepted practices. The difference is that AI is simultaneously changing marketing execution and purchasing behavior, shortening what the authors call the “knowledge relevance lifespan” of many accepted practices.
For marketers, the lesson isn’t to throw away everything they’ve learned. It’s about becoming more skeptical of assumptions that once seemed permanent. The next competitive advantage may come less from adopting the latest AI tool than from recognizing that yesterday’s best practices no longer describe how customers actually buy.
“The Dawn of the AI Age in Marketing Strategy and the Twilight of the Conglomerate Era in Business Strategy: Knowledge Degradation, Lifespan of Knowledge Relevance, and Creation of New Knowledge.”“, by Prof. Rajan Varadarajan, University Distinguished Professor and Regent Professor, Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, maybe downloaded here. (No registration required)
The position Your best practices may already be outdated appeared first on MarTech.
