For years, marketers have lived with the mantra: “do more with less.” Budgets are trimmed, expectations raised, and the pressure to prove ROI is relentless. But let’s move past the obvious, this isn’t simply about working harder or stretching smaller teams. The real challenge is that most digital asset management (DAM) systems weren’t built to deliver the kind of decision-grade insight that marketing leaders need today.
What if your DAM could do more than store? What if it could drive growth by showing which assets deliver the best returns, which workflows create waste, and how campaigns could be optimised before the c-suite even asks the question?
DAM used to be a repository. Today they must be decision systems: sources of actionable insights that feed campaign planning, creative reuse, and commercial measurement.
Why that matters now: AI agents and automation are already shortening campaign cycles and increasing the volume of personalised, high-value variants that reach customers. At a recent global marketing technology event, Marriott communicated how, with the introduction of AI agents, their teams were helped to cut campaign time-to-market dramatically — around a 70% reduction in campaign timelines.
Those gains are business-critical: when technology reduces time and friction, marketing teams can iterate more, prove what works, and reduce per-campaign cost — which is exactly what CFOs want to see. Vendors are extending DAMs with AI-driven asset intelligence and built-in analytics, enabling asset reuse, forecasting, and pre-publish performance signals.
AI doesn’t only remove manual tasks, allowing you to assign your valuable resources to other more important work. When combined with clean data and connected systems, it predicts which assets and creatives will perform, prioritises reuse, and surfaces the likely ROI of campaign permutations — before you commit production budget. That’s how you can delight your people and foster greater innovation in your business
This capability is central to a cost-optimisation strategy. Global analyses of personalisation show that when you get personalisation right you materially reduce acquisition costs and lift ROI — McKinsey’s research on personalisation shows large gains in acquisition cost and ROI when personalised approaches are executed well.
Imagine walking into a budget review with a dashboard that shows:
This isn’t the future. It’s available now—if systems are set up with analytics-first architecture and AI baked in.
Below are the four priority moves we’d recommend. Each section includes what to do, why it creates urgency, and how to start asking the right questions internally and of your vendors. Use our maturity assessment to benchmark where you are and prioritise.
Marketing teams that modernise their foundations will be the ones chosen for future investment. AI and integration give you speed, visibility and the evidence to argue for growth. If you leave your systems as mere libraries, you’ll be judged as a cost centre. If you redesign them as decision systems, you’ll be arguing from impact.
If you want a hand benchmarking your stack or running the first pilot, use our DAM maturity assessment and we’ll co-design a 90-day pilot that proves the value — fast.