Marrying human passions with artificial intelligence is increasingly the key challenge marketers need to meet to succeed in the future, said experts at Brand Innovators’ recent Summit.
The collapse of the purchase funnel – aided by AI agents – is forcing marketers to leverage AI to create more relevant content, hyperpersonalize interactions and maintain cultural relevance. Keeping up with culture requires the speed AI enables, said speakers at the AI Marketing and Innovation Summit, hosted by WPP Media.
“These are choices everyone is facing as we speak,” said Maha Khawaja, senior manager, integrated media, Nestle Nespresso. AI is “fundamentally transforming” how consumers consume content and how it’s created, she said.
“We have to be fluid in our approach because right now the bend between inspiration and transaction is blurred,” said Baylie Braverman, Nespresso’s manager integrated media planning & strategy. Consumers now make decisions on the spot in store, using information from social and digital channels; brands need to mind “how are we joining this funnel,” she said.
Many speakers noted AI has reset consumer expectations of speed and personalization. Meeting those will require automating processes such as drawing insights and testing with AI, in order to go to market faster.
“With AI we know if it’s the right moment and we can jump in very quickly,” said Shamira Faruqui Amin, senior brand manager at Skrewball, Pernod Ricard. “We can be proactive instead of reactive.”
In a regulated industry such as spirits, that creates an advantage for moving into a cultural moment, she said. Thanks to AI “we are able to move with more speed and do it methodically,” she said.
From left to right: Jon Cooke, vice president, sales, East Coast at Ogury; Ryan McBride, Senior Vice President, Business Development, Yobi; Roderick Blaylock, Vice President, Marketing, Casamigos, Diageo
“Knowing-of” or knowing the consumer
AI can also process data to create more personalized interactions, which most speakers said has become a standard.
Hyperpersonalization makes a big difference in how AI can help move brands from “knowing-of to knowing” the consumer, said Jon Cooke, vice president, sales, East Coast at Ogury. AI can understand why a consumer likes a brand based on social media input and provide “the connective tissue” between disparate data sets such as sales, marketing and customer service.
Indeed, speakers warned that AI algorithms are only as good as the data they are built on, and marketers are becoming more protective of their data at a time when AI models most need to carry out the kind of predictive modeling marketers find useful.
“With AI, the data scientists have arrived,” said Vincent Fontana, head of product specialists at HSBC Bank. The bank did not have a data team a few short years ago and now “these scientists are lead generators in disguise,” he said.
Using AI, the bank can identify better matches between clients and investment products by looking at their transactions and behavior across multiple data sets to get a more accurate view of their risk appetite and goals than they were able to glean from intake questionnaires, he explained.
Most speakers agreed on the need to break down “walled gardens” to use the best data sets available, but they also noted consumers and AI companies are increasingly protecting their data.
“In 2026 we’re definitely in a privacy-first era. That presents its own challenges,” said Cooke.
“Crawlable” content
Search engine optimization (SEO) has given way to AEO – AI engine optimization – and “crawlable” content that can be discovered by AI searches is the new goal, said speakers. Marketers are now focused on making their content discoverable by AI agents and large language models as more consumers use the technology to shop and research products.
“Look at your feeds in social media… that is all AI and it influences how you make meaningful connections with your consumers,” said Aaron Sobol, head of NA media investment and data governance at Unilever. “Search has changed. You have conversations with search now.”
Unlike keyword searches, AI prompts are unique and mastering them requires marketers to have a deeper knowledge of what consumers are looking for, said Pooja Chandiramani, vice president, global media strategy and planning, marketing analytics, operations and transformation at Coach.
But sometimes improving performance is as basic as making sure brand content can be read by AI platforms. Several speakers noted marketers have often been surprised to find even their own websites are not “crawlable” by AI agents – a new term gaining popularity among marketers.
Chandiramani recalled how Coach generated a wide variety of social content to increase its visibility online, only to realize its TikTok content was all being filtered out by ChatGPT.
“We had all this content, but no one could see it,” she said. After reviewing the best sites and formats for being noticed by LLMs, Coach’s team found more niche fashion sites such as Who What Wear were among top sites for relevant audiences and successfully adapted its strategy.
Many speakers warned against marketers falling in love with the speed and ease of creating content without a well-thought content strategy. The result is slop, they said.
“If you move at speed without strategy, it’s just noise,” said Pernod Ricard’s Faruqui Amin. “You can’t be producing for the sake of producing.”
The secret sauce
AI requires organizational changes, data management and mindset shifts among marketers, speakers said. Organizations need to break down data “walled gardens” to better inform and train AI systems and break down their own internal silos that hinder applying those systems to workflows.
“You have to have people who are curious…people who walk in saying ‘Hey boss look what found out,’” said Mary Teryek, vice president of marketing, U.S. consumer division at Bausch + Lomb. Without that “the culture and the technology just aren’t working,” she said.
Dan Eckrote, president, business & transformation at WPP Unite noted his own organization has changed its ways of working and integrated agents into its workflows. “Our org charts have agents on them. It’s scary but exciting,” he said. “It’s person to agent to person. That completely transforms how we operate.”
Organizations need to be constantly reviewing their work and execution, said Eckrote. “Things we’re doing together may be obsolete a week from now,” he said.
From left to right: Folasade Onadiji, global marketing leader, Tylenol at Kenvue; Grace Pai-Leonard, Head of Brand, New York Life Investment Management
“With AI there is a fear of apprehension of what is real and what is not real” so brands have to “lead with credibility,” said Folasade Onadiji, global marketing leader, Tylenol at Kenvue. She explained that in her previous job with vaccines as senior marketer at Pfizer, she learned that to move at light speed organizations need to set up structures ahead of time so they’re ready to move when events happen.
Most speakers agreed preparation is key, and so is training AI models on the brand’s guidelines and equity before letting any tools out into the workstream. The AI agents move fast and in often opaque ways, they warned.
“We think the training is the secret sauce,” said Joy Ogunneye, global innovation & brand comms lead at Aveeno Body, Kenvue.
Colgate-Palmolive is programming AI tools with its brand equity values to get more relevant outputs when working on creative concepts or pulling insights, explained Maria Adeeva, marketing director, manual toothbrush, global marketing at the brand.
“It’s our responsibility to infuse our ethos into the models,” said Jessica David, director, brand management at Equinix.
AI can be used everywhere, if properly sandboxed to make sure its outputs are true and in brand compliance, Adeeva said. But it should always be “human-led and supervised,” she added. “The ultimate responsibility is with humans.”
AI often can be confidently wrong, said Nestle’s Braverman. She recalled once looking for a restaurant to take her mother out to dinner and the AI agent recommending a romantic date spot.
“AI is a great tool,” said James Finn, Audible’s global head of brand & content marketing. But he added: “Its instinct and its taste is pretty sh—ty.”
Ultimately, marketing organizations need humans to make sure the signals aren’t noise, but actionable insights. “We’re the editor, we’re the thought leader,” said Audible’s Finn.
“AI can’t build brand equity,” warned Faruqui Amin. While AI gives brands the ability to move fast, the strategy must come from humans, she said: “It has to come from someone who has that intuition and that gut feeling.”
