AI is forcing marketers to question decades of accepted best practices because the assumptions those practices were built on are changing, according to new research.

A paper by Prof. Rajan Varadarajan of the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, published in “Marketing Strategy Journal,” says AI is changing how decisions are made on both sides of the marketplace. Companies are delegating marketing decisions to AI systems, while buyers are using AI to research vendors, compare products, and make purchase recommendations. Decisions once made solely by humans are more likely to be human-AI collaborations.

This is “knowledge decay.” That’s when marketing knowledge becomes less useful because the environment it was designed for no longer works the same way. AI accelerates that by changing how information is created, evaluated, and used throughout the buying process.

Your strategy isn’t expiring. Your playbook is.

The paper draws an important distinction between marketing principles and marketing tactics.

Some ideas survive major technological shifts because they’re rooted in human behavior. Customers still want solutions to problems. Brands still need to differentiate themselves. Trust still matters.

The tactics built on those principles are another story.

Take SEO. For years, marketers optimized pages around how people searched Google. Now they also have 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 eventually talk with sales. If AI agents increasingly research products before a human ever reaches a vendor’s site, that familiar journey starts to look less universal.

The paper describes those enduring ideas as conceptual knowledge and the playbooks built on them as instrumental knowledge. The first often survives technological change. The second has a shorter shelf life because it depends on how markets function at a given moment.

Four questions for marketers

The report says marketers need to be asking these four questions:

• “Who is your customer?”
• “What is your customer?”
• “Who is the marketing decision-maker?”
• “What is the marketing decision-maker?”

These are a stress test for marketing assumptions. They let you test whether what you think still matches how customers buy. 

Consider an SEO strategy built around earning clicks to your website. If a buyer gets an AI-generated comparison before ever visiting your site, does that strategy still measure success the right way? With B2B lead generation, if an AI agent researches vendors, builds a shortlist, and recommends products before a human enters the buying process, is the buyer journey still the one your funnel assumes?

The same exercise applies across marketing. Every framework rests on assumptions about who gathers information, who evaluates options, and who makes decisions. As AI takes on more of those roles, marketers need to ask whether those assumptions still fit the market they’re 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 marketers make every targeting, budgeting, or creative decision, it may overlook AI’s growing role in execution.

The point isn’t that people disappear from the process. It’s that AI influences decisions that marketing frameworks have traditionally treated as entirely human. The report suggests revisiting those assumptions before revising the tactics built on them.

The new competitive advantage

The paper compares AI with earlier shifts such as the internet, ecommerce, and social media, each of which forced marketers to rethink accepted practices. The difference is that AI is changing both marketing execution and purchasing behavior simultaneously, shortening what the authors call the “knowledge relevance lifespan” of many accepted practices.

For marketers, the lesson isn’t to throw out everything they’ve learned. It’s to become more skeptical of assumptions that once seemed permanent. The next competitive advantage may come less from adopting the newest AI tool than from recognizing when yesterday’s best practice no longer describes how customers actually buy.

“Dawn of the AI era in marketing strategy and twilight of the conglomerates era in corporate strategy: Knowledge decay, knowledge relevance lifespan and new knowledge creation,” by Prof. Rajan Varadarajan, University Distinguished Professor and Regents Professor of the Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, can be downloaded here. (No registration required)

Source link