According to new research, artificial intelligence is forcing marketers to question decades of accepted best practices because the assumptions on which those practices were based are changing.
An article by Prof. Rajan Varadarajan of the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University, published in “Marketing Strategy Journal”, states that artificial intelligence is changing the way decisions are made on both sides of the market. Companies are delegating marketing decisions to AI systems, while buyers are using AI to research suppliers, compare products and make purchasing recommendations. Decisions once made exclusively by humans are more likely to be human-AI collaborations.
This is the “decay of knowledge”. That’s when marketing knowledge becomes less useful because the environment it was designed for no longer works the same. AI accelerates this by changing how information is created, evaluated and used during the purchasing process.
Your strategy doesn’t expire. Your playbook is.
The document draws an important distinction between marketing principles and marketing tactics.
Some ideas survive major technological changes because they are rooted in human behavior. Customers still want solutions to problems. Brands still need to differentiate themselves. Trust still matters.
Tactics based on these principles are another story.
Take SEO. For years, marketers have optimized pages based on how people searched on Google. They now also need to think about how AI systems retrieve, interpret and summarize information. Or consider the traditional B2B buying journey, where marketers assumed prospects would visit a website, download content, attend a webinar, and finally talk to sales. If AI agents search for more and more products before a human reaches a seller’s site, that familiar journey will start to feel less universal.
The article describes those enduring ideas as conceptual knowledge and the manuals based on them as instrumental knowledge. The former often survives technological change. The latter has a shorter shelf life because it depends on how the markets work at any given time.
Four questions for marketers
The report states that marketers need to ask themselves these four questions:
- “Who is your customer?”
- “What 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 see if what you think still matches how customers buy.
Consider an SEO strategy built to earn clicks to your website. If a shopper gets an AI-generated comparison before even visiting your site, does that strategy still measure success the right way? With B2B lead generation, if an AI agent searches for suppliers, creates a shortlist, and recommends products before a human enters the purchasing process, is the buyer’s journey still the one your funnel assumes?
The same exercise applies to all marketing. Each framework is based on assumptions about who gathers information, who evaluates options, and who makes decisions. As AI increasingly takes on these roles, marketers must ask themselves whether those assumptions are still right for the market they are trying to reach.
If a strategy assumes that potential customers research products, compare vendors, or evaluate marketing messages themselves, it may no longer reflect reality. Likewise, if campaign planning assumes that marketers make every targeting, budget, or creative decision, it may overlook the growing role of AI in execution.
The point is not that people disappear from the process. The fact is that AI influences decisions that marketing frameworks have traditionally treated as entirely human. The report suggests reviewing these assumptions before reviewing the tactics based on them.
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The new competitive advantage
The article compares AI to previous changes, such as the Internet, e-commerce, and social media, each of which has forced marketers to reconsider accepted practices. The difference is that AI is simultaneously changing both marketing execution and purchasing behavior, shortening what the authors call the “knowledge relevance lifespan” of many accepted practices.
For marketers, the lesson is not to throw away everything they’ve learned. It means becoming more skeptical of hypotheses that once seemed permanent. The next competitive advantage may come not so much from adopting the latest AI tool but from recognizing when yesterday’s best practices no longer describe how customers actually buy.
“The dawn of the AI era in marketing strategy and the twilight of the conglomerate era in business strategy: Knowledge decay, knowledge relevance duration, and new knowledge creation“,” by the prof. Rajan Varadarajan, Distinguished University Professor and Regents Professor of the Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, can be downloaded here. (No registration required)
