AI-Driven Marketing Tools Adoption in Small Businesses: A Narrative Literature Review

The rapid advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has dramatically impacted the field of marketing, by allowing companies to interact with their customers through automation, to optimize marketing campaigns, and to make better decisions in marketing; yet, there are still many challenges that small businesses face when considering AI-based marketing solutions due to limited resources, capability gaps, and uncertainty about the benefit of using AI in marketing. This review is a synthesis of recent academic research on the adoption of AI-based marketing tools among small businesses in order to identify the key barriers and enablers of adoption. Using existing models of technology acceptance and use, such as the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), and Resource-Based View (RBV), this review found that the adoption of AI-based marketing tools is influenced primarily by how useful a company perceives the tool, whether or not the costs of the tool outweigh the benefits, whether or not a company has the necessary knowledge to implement and use the tool, and whether or not a company trusts the tool to perform as promised. Additionally, incorporating industry-specific information highlighted the importance of third party service providers and developing capabilities to help support the adoption of AI-based marketing tools. This review also presents an integrative conceptual model of the relationships between the technological aspects of AI-based marketing tools, the organizational aspects of a company, the environmental aspects of a company, and the human aspects of a company, and provides a comprehensive way of viewing the adoption of AI-based marketing tools that can be used by both researchers and practitioners.