Korst and Puntoni in Harvard Business Review, November 16, 2023, on a survey the authors conducted with 600 business leaders at large U.S. companies.
The finding: marketing leaders had been reluctant to take up gen AI and were lagging their peers in other functions. The piece sets out the opportunities in front of them and argues it is time to stop being cautious and start experimenting.
So what: a readiness finding two years before we had the vocabulary for it. What the survey reports is reluctance, not incapacity: marketing leaders holding back while peer functions moved. The paper puts those two facts side by side and does not claim one caused the other. Side by side is the shape of the adoption gaps we measure now.