Message from the President: March 2025

The field of generative AI is evolving at an astonishing pace. Are you keeping up? Large language models (LLMs) are advancing so quickly that keeping track of new versions is a challenge.

 Many educators have already integrated tools like ChatGPT into their teaching. If you haven’t, your students likely have. Many of us also use these tools for research, including tasks like copy editing.

And this is just the beginning. Consider OpenAI’s recent release of Deep Research, which leverages reasoning to search, interpret, and analyze massive amounts of text, images, and PDFs on the internet—pivoting dynamically as it encounters new information. Just imagine such a model being unleashed on Web of Science! At some point, that’s exactly what will happen, and you can’t help but wonder: What will be the role of scholarly marketing researchers then? 

Think it’s far-fetched? We are already seeing similar developments in market research, where synthetic personas and datasets are disrupting entire business models.

I invite you to discuss these developments at the upcoming Annual Conference in Montreal (May 21-23) and the World Marketing Congress in Dijon (July 02-24) with dozens of sessions dedicated to the most recent developments in AI. As a starting point, check out Grewal et al.'s visionary article “How Generative AI Is Shaping the Future of Marketing,” which has recently been accepted for publication in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

Marko Sarstedt
President of the Academy of Marketing Science