As marketers race to build their AI capabilities, gaps in the fundamentals of marketing remain a problem, with new Marketing Association of Australia data suggesting the industry risks overlooking the skills needed to make the most of the technology.
Over the past year, there has been no shortage of AI courses for marketers, and marketing leaders have understandably been racing to make sure their teams are not left behind. AI has moved from experimentation into everyday work extraordinarily quickly.
Our own research found 75 per cent of marketers were already using AI tools at least weekly, while only 29 per cent had undertaken AI training.
The urgency is real, but so is the competition for investment. The latest US CMO Survey puts training and development at just 3.8 per cent of marketing spend, down from a pre-pandemic high of 5.8 per cent. At the same time, Gartner reports CMOs are allocating an average of 15.3 per cent of their marketing budgets to AI initiatives, with 70 per cent saying becoming an AI leader is a critical goal for 2026.
None of that suggests we should invest less in AI capability. Quite the opposite.
But when training dollars and time are finite, we need to be very deliberate about what we prioritise. In the rush to close the newest and most visible capability gap, have we inadvertently allowed another, more fundamental one to widen?
Because when we look at the growing body of data coming through the Marketing Association of Australia’s Capability Compass, some of the biggest gaps are sitting right under our noses.
The gaps are surprisingly familiar
The Capability Compass gives us a growing view of both the skills marketing leaders consider important for their teams and how capable their people currently are in those areas.
When we look at the skills leaders prioritise most, the list includes consumer behaviour, business results, brand assets, positioning, marketing goals, objective setting, strategic priorities and briefing. These are not new or particularly fashionable disciplines, but they are the fundamentals of good marketing.
And the gaps are significant.
Just 44 per cent of marketers assessed are at the desired level for connecting marketing to business results. For briefing it is 43 per cent, strategic priorities 41 per cent, consumer behaviour 35 per cent and positioning just 29 per cent. Only 24 per cent are at the desired level for customer feedback, the ability to collect and interpret customer input and use it to adapt marketing strategy. That should give us pause.
We spend a lot of time as an industry asking what marketers need to learn next. The data suggests we also need to pay much more attention to what marketers still need to learn well.
But it would be equally wrong to look at those numbers and conclude we should stop worrying about AI and simply get back to the basics. The challenge is more complex than that.
It isn’t fundamentals or AI, marketers need both
I think there are now two capability strands that marketers need to develop together.
The first is deep competence in marketing itself: understanding customers; finding genuine insight; setting the right objectives; developing strategy; positioning brands; writing briefs; judging creative; making intelligent channel choices; connecting marketing activity to commercial outcomes.
The second is knowing how to use AI to perform those things faster, differently and, ideally, better. It is not a choice between classic marketing capability and AI capability. Increasingly, they are interwoven.
There is little value in becoming highly proficient at prompting or using the latest AI tools if you do not have the marketing expertise to judge what comes back. Equally, being a brilliant marketer while ignoring the tools fundamentally changing how the work gets done is unlikely to be a recipe for long-term success.
Our AI research supports this. When marketers were asked where they needed help adopting AI, their answers included collaborating effectively with AI tools and workflows, writing effective prompts or creative briefs, applying AI to strategic marketing goals, and linking AI activity to business and financial outcomes.
These are not purely technology challenges. They are marketing challenges being executed through technology.
If you ask AI to find an insight, you still need to know the difference between an insight and an interesting observation. If it develops a positioning, you need enough expertise to recognise when the answer is generic. If it writes a brief, you need to know whether that brief is genuinely clear and single-minded. And if AI suddenly allows you to create twice as much marketing activity, someone still needs the commercial judgement to determine whether any of it is creating value.
Marketing competence tells you what good looks like. AI capability gives you powerful new ways to get there.
Teaching the two together
This idea has shaped the way we have developed our newest courses at the Marketing Association of Australia.
We started with the gaps the Capability Compass was revealing, looked at how those skills naturally connect in the work marketers actually do, and then built the learning around that process. AI is not treated as a separate discipline added to traditional marketing. It is woven through the way marketers now apply those skills.
‘Insights, Strategy, Action!’ for example, follows the process from understanding customers through to actually doing something useful with that understanding.
It starts with consumer behaviour, research and brand equity, then moves through uncovering insight, making strategic choices, segmentation, propositions and creative briefs. AI is used within that process to accelerate synthesis and help interrogate information, while the marketer still has to frame the right problem, find the deeper “why” and decide what constitutes a genuine insight.
The same philosophy runs through ‘Leading Campaigns that Work’, where in the Briefing module Marketers first learn how to think through and craft a strong creative brief, then learn how to build their own AI briefing agent that holds them accountable to those principles as they work.
And in ‘Commercial Marketing for Growth’, core capabilities around growth, objective setting, measurement, experimentation and data-led decision making sit alongside automation, AI and agentic workflows.
That, for us, is what AI-enabled marketing education should look like. Learn the craft of marketing well enough to understand what good looks like, then learn how AI can help you practise that craft better.
Explore the Marketing Association of Australia’s library of marketing courses here.
For a limited time save 30 per cent with code BNT30 (valid until October 31, 2026).
