AI is poised to disrupt marketing and sales in every sector. This is the result
of shifts in consumer sentiment alongside rapid technological change.
Omnichannel is table stakes
Across industries, engagement models are changing:
today’s customers want everything, everywhere,
and all the time. While they still desire an even mix of
traditional, remote, and self-service channels (including
face-to-face, inside sales, and e-commerce), we see
continued growth in customer preference for online
ordering and reordering.
Winning companies—those increasing their market
share by at least 10 percent annually—tend to utilize
advanced sales technology; build hybrid sales teams
and capabilities; tailor strategies for third-party and
company-owned marketplaces; achieve e-commerce
excellence across the entire funnel; and deliver hyper
personalization (unique messages for individual
decision makers based on their needs, profile,
behaviors, and interactions—both past and predictive).
What is generative AI?
Step changes are occurring in
digitization and automation
AI technology is evolving at pace. It is becoming
increasingly easy and less costly to implement, while
offering ever-accelerating complexity and speed that
far exceeds human capacity. Our research suggests
that a fifth of current sales-team functions could be
automated. In addition, new frontiers are opening with
the rise of gen AI (see sidebar, “What is generative AI?”).
Furthermore, venture capital investment in AI has
grown 13-fold over the last ten years.1 This has led to
an explosion of “usable” data (data that can be used to
formulate insights and suggest tangible actions) and
accessible technology (such as increased computation
power and open-source algorithms). Vast, and growing,
amounts of data are now available for foundation-model
training, and since 2012 there’s been a millionfold
increase in computation capacity—doubling every three to four months.2

How AI is reshaping marketing and sales

The Swiss AI Initiative was started in December 2023 and seeded with an initial investment of over 10'000'000 GPU hours. ETH Zurich and EPFL have now created the Swiss National AI Institute (SNAI) to provide a long-term and national perspective on AI-based research, education and innovation. SNAI accelerates the momentum of the Swiss AI Initiative and spearheads research on large-scale AI enabled by Alps. 

Going forward, the Swiss AI Initiative will be operated by SNAI.​ Leveraging its integration with the ETH AI Center and the EPFL AI Center, the new institute benefits from the critical mass of both institutions as well as the expertise of over 70 AI-focused professors from over 10 academic institutions across Switzerland.

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The scientific leads are responsible for driving progress in their area together with the participating research groups. In total, there are five vertical activities for novel, domain-specific foundation models, and five horizontal activities to advance the foundations of LLMs and large-scale AI models towards trustworthiness and efficiency.

Insights