Are Your Best Practices Already Outdated?

AI is rapidly reshaping the marketing landscape, forcing professionals to question long-held best practices that were built on assumptions now being overturned. According to new research, the very foundations of these strategies are shifting beneath our feet.

A recent paper by Professor Rajan Varadarajan of Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School, published in the Marketing Strategy Journal, reveals that AI is transforming decision-making on both sides of the marketplace. Companies are increasingly delegating marketing decisions to AI systems, while buyers rely on AI to research vendors, compare products, and generate purchase recommendations. Decisions once made exclusively by humans are now more often human-AI collaborations.

This phenomenon is what the research calls “knowledge decay.” It describes how marketing knowledge loses its value when the environment it was designed for no longer functions the same way. AI accelerates this decay by fundamentally altering how information is created, evaluated, and used throughout the buying process.

Your strategy isn’t necessarily expiring. But your playbook likely is.

The paper makes a critical distinction between marketing principles and marketing tactics. Some ideas survive major technological shifts because they are rooted in enduring human behavior. Customers still seek solutions to problems. Brands still need to differentiate themselves. Trust remains paramount.

However, the tactics built on those principles are a different story.

Take SEO. For years, marketers optimized pages around how people searched on Google. Now they must also consider how AI systems retrieve, interpret, and summarize information. Similarly, consider the traditional B2B buying journey, where marketers assumed prospects would visit a website, download content, attend a webinar, and eventually engage with sales. If AI agents increasingly research products before a human ever reaches a vendor’s site, that familiar journey starts to look less universal.

The paper describes these enduring ideas as conceptual knowledge and the playbooks built on them as instrumental knowledge. The first often survives technological change. The second has a much shorter shelf life because it depends on how markets function at a given moment.

Four questions for marketers

The report suggests marketers need to be asking four critical questions:

“Who is your customer?” “What is your customer?” “Who is the marketing decision-maker?” “What is the marketing decision-maker?”

These questions serve as a stress test for marketing assumptions. They allow you to verify whether what you believe still matches how customers actually buy.

Consider an SEO strategy built around earning clicks to your website. If a buyer receives an AI-generated comparison before ever visiting your site, does that strategy still measure success correctly? With B2B lead generation, if an AI agent researches vendors, builds a shortlist, and recommends products before a human enters the buying process, is the buyer journey still the one your funnel assumes?

The same exercise applies across marketing. Every framework rests on assumptions about who gathers information, who evaluates options, and who makes decisions. As AI takes on more of those roles, marketers need to ask whether those assumptions still fit the market they are trying to reach.

If a strategy assumes prospects research products, compare vendors, or evaluate marketing messages themselves, it may no longer reflect reality. Likewise, if campaign planning assumes marketers make every targeting, budgeting, or creative decision, it may overlook AI’s growing role in execution.

The point isn’t that people disappear from the process. It’s that AI influences decisions that marketing frameworks have traditionally treated as entirely human. The report suggests revisiting those core assumptions before revising the tactics built on them.

The new competitive advantage

The paper compares AI with earlier shifts such as the internet, ecommerce, and social media, each of which forced marketers to rethink accepted practices. The difference is that AI is changing both marketing execution and purchasing behavior simultaneously. This shortens what the authors call the “knowledge relevance lifespan” of many accepted practices.

For marketers, the lesson isn’t to discard everything they have learned. It is to become more skeptical of assumptions that once seemed permanent. The next competitive advantage may come less from adopting the newest AI tool than from recognizing when yesterday’s best practice no longer describes how customers actually buy.