Higher Ed Marketers Are Overwhelmed: AI Innovation in Executive Education
02 April 2025
Danielle Macedo is a digital marketing expert with extensive experience in higher education. She teaches at LBS and is the Director of Marketing and Member Engagement at UNICON.
Every time I meet with fellow HigherEd marketers and educators, the same challenge arises. Schools are juggling multiple legacy systems and disconnected CRMs, while being pushed to run best-in-class campaigns and anticipate their students, ExecEd participants, custom clients and alumni lifelong learning needs.
The State of AI in Executive Education
Despite our current challenges, I'm excited by our industry's momentum in AI and marketing innovation. UNICON's 2024 benchmarking survey (90% participation rate from 122 schools worldwide) shows marketing leading AI adoption, with 26% of schools already running active GenAI pilots.
At UNICON's Team Development Conference 'Generate: The Future of Executive Education in a Hallucinated World' at Nova SBE in Portugal, Andrew Crisp reported the growing demand for AI, cybersecurity, and digital marketing skills, sharing Carrington Crisp’s report “The Future of Lifelong Learning and Executive Education”.
At London Business School, where I do some side-teaching on their online Digital Marketing programme with Emeritus, we've seen this firsthand - our course enrollment doubled after incorporating artificial intelligence elements.
But how do we keep momentum while pushing for innovation? It's like trying to build a smart home while still cooking three meals a day - you need your kitchen to work now, even as you dream about that AI-powered fridge ordering your weekly shop.
While Spinning Plates: First Steps First
Here's something I wish someone had told me: before adding another system or innovation, take a strategic step back to understand your existing customers, systems, and data.
During my latest consulting at Cambridge Judge, we built KPI dashboards first; while heading digital at LBS, we mapped customer journeys after researching 1,500 customers; and now at UNICON, we're developing a member engagement dashboard.
For the overwhelmed marketer trying to lead digital marketing in education, my AI survival kit helps manage the daily juggle, while experimenting with emerging tech:
• Sintra.AI (where my AI assistant Vizzy manages my to-do lists, while Seomi optimizes content for search engines - they're part of my latest AI tests)
• NotebookLM turns articles into AI-powered podcasts
• ChatGPT Data Analyst simplifies reporting
• Juicer.io for AI-powered social feeds
• Midjourney turns ideas into visuals (though sometimes with extra fingers), works best when used with DeepSeek for prompting.
Beyond Higher Education
The challenge of digital transformation extends beyond higher education. During LBS Digital Transformation course sessions, CIOs and Heads of Departments from diverse industries share their digital modernization struggles. Organisations in highly regulated sectors like financial services and pharma face particular challenges with legacy systems, fragmented customer data, and change resistance.
Many organizations, including business schools, use Salesforce as their CRM and marketing platform - a trend reflected in UNICON's CRM special interest group, which has grown to over 90 participants. Both corporate and education sectors grapple with Salesforce's complexity, balancing its powerful capabilities against needs for extensive customisation. Teams are now particularly interested in emerging features like Agentic AI (Agentforce) and predictive analytics (Einstein). In executive education specifically, UNICON's latest B2B research reveals many teams leveraging Salesforce for both custom program operations and marketing automation.
Global Perspectives on Innovation
What's fascinating is how different regions innovate. China's ecosystem captivates me - from establishing LBS's WeChat presence in 2017 to seeing the rise of AI influencers, as well as super-apps and now AI models transforming daily life. The latest UNICON Directors' Conference in Hong Kong highlighted this tech-first culture.
In contrast, our recent European Meet Up at the Stockholm School of Economics showed how Scandinavians adopt a more holistic approach, blending business teaching with art (see this FT article). My next stop is the 2025 Directors' Conference in May, at the American University in Cairo. Can't wait to learn from the MENA region!
These various approaches remind us that innovation takes many forms worldwide, and this willingness to share perspectives across borders makes our industry so special.
HigherEd professionals may all be facing challenges in 2025, but they're not alone. While we're each pioneering different paths in AI-powered education, we're building this future together - one step at a time.
Danielle Macedo
With a journey spanning São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Lisbon, Danielle is the Director of Marketing and Member Engagement at UNICON, a global consortium of the leading 122 universities and business schools offering executive education worldwide. As a Learning Facilitator and Digital Marketing Institute Lecturer, she currently teaches on the London Business School online courses 'Mastering Digital Marketing in the World of AI' in partnership with Emeritus and 'Leading Digital Transformation'. She is passionate about the intersection of marketing, technology, data, learning and AI. After leading digital marketing projects and marketing for ExecEd at LBS for 7 years, she has consulted for clients such as Cambridge Judge, LondonMet, Kings College (via SMRS) and Vlerick Business School.