Unlock the Full Power of Your Email Platform with AI

Marketing automation (MA) platforms promise smarter personalization, improved lead quality, and stronger ROI. According to Oracle:

91% of marketers say these platforms are essential to their business.

Yet even with these systems in place, many marketers still feel the gap between what their platforms should be able to do and what they actually deliver day to day. Limited training, inconsistent data, and a lack of technical expertise often prevent teams from fully tapping into the power of their tools.

Artificial intelligence is changing that. Rather than replacing your marketing automation platform, AI can enhance it, helping teams work faster, make smarter decisions, and unlock capabilities previously out of reach.

Elise Horst, our Director of AI Solutions, explored this topic during her presentation at the annual Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON), sharing practical ways marketers can get more out of their current platforms without major overhauls or budget increases.

While every organization’s automation setup is unique, Elise brought forward three universal strategies marketers can apply to get more value from their MA platforms.

1. Leverage third-party AI platforms to fully unlock MA capabilities

Most MA platforms now offer built-in AI features, but they’re often limited or only available at higher price tiers. Third-party tools like ChatGPT and Akkio help bridge those gaps and make your platform work harder for you.

These tools can take on time-consuming tasks like exploring unstructured data, generating HTML, creating quick analyses, or helping you locate assets inside a complex instance. The best part? You can layer these capabilities onto your current tech stack without switching platforms or rebuilding workflows.

2. Rely on well-trained custom GPTs to offload repetitive tasks and close technical gaps

Custom GPTs act like purpose-built assistants trained on your brand, workflows, and platform. With the right setup, they can take on work that typically requires significant time or technical expertise, including:

• Coding emails: Turn copy into clean, brand-consistent HTML in minutes to speed up production and reduce errors.
• Segmenting audiences: Draft and troubleshoot SQL queries for platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud to build better audiences, complete reporting, or diagnose issues without leaning on technical support.
• Navigating your platform: Surface emails, campaigns, nurture streams, and segmentation logic quickly, improving visibility and helping you answer stakeholder questions with ease.

For a deeper dive into building effective Custom GPTs, including a step-by-step checklist, check out the recap of our demo session at MAICON 2025: Turning Custom GPTs into High-Impact Extensions of Your Team.

3. Consider a tool like Akkio to get better insights, faster

Even with a strong MA platform, messy or incomplete data often makes it difficult to know what’s worth analyzing. Tools like Akkio help cut through that noise by cleaning and standardizing data, filling gaps, and giving marketers a quick way to validate which ideas deserve deeper exploration. What once required exporting spreadsheets and manually comparing performance can now be done in minutes.

We used to spend hours exporting, preparing, and analyzing data, and now tools like Akkio enable teams to:

• Get quick answers to questions buried in complex data
• Compare campaign results instantly
• Analyze multiple metrics in a single prompt
• Quickly gut-check which ideas are worth deeper exploration
• Outline reports and draft insights in a fraction of the time

This makes it far easier to understand what’s working, where to optimize, and how to move faster without relying on heavy technical support.

The Bottom Line

The real opportunity for marketers isn’t adopting new platforms, it’s unlocking more value from the ones they already have, and AI makes that possible. By pairing custom GPTs, third-party tools, and AI-powered analytics with your existing MA platform, you can reduce friction, increase precision, and move forward with greater confidence.

To continue accelerating your AI journey:

• Presentation deck: access the full presentation deck for more details.
• AI Empowered: download the essential guidebook for marketers exploring artificial intelligence.