Artificial intelligence is now an established part of marketing operations, but the technology is reaching a “Jerry Maguire moment” when it will have to “show me the money,” say brand leaders.
The Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit during the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, had the same focus on AI as this year’s tech showcase. It sent the industry a clear message that AI is not a fad or a passing trend, but a transformation that will reshape values, measurement and strategy. But on the flip side, speakers warned that AI use will require more guardrails, responsibility and discipline from marketers in 2026, as the shiny new object grows older.
Looking ahead at trends for 2026, brand leaders found AI technology running through all operations and affecting interactions with humans too. Communications will continue to speed up, relationships with creators and influencers—an increasingly important channel for most brands—will accelerate automation and metrics facilitated by AI technology, while staffing and operations will keep evolving to adapt to AI tools.
“This is not something we can just take a pass and say, ‘nah, I’m going to sit this one out, this AI trend.’ It has implications across a variety of aspects of the industry,” said Terence Kawaja, Founder and CEO of LUMA Partners. Unlike previous hype cycles for technologies such as virtual reality or the Internet of Things, this disruption is a “perfect hand-in-glove fit” with marketing, Kawaja said. The industry’s reliance in data pools, substantial budgets, and convert-or-not binary outcomes create ideal conditions for AI integration, he explained.
Eric Schwartz, chief marketing officer of Clorox Co.
“It’s an exciting time, but also a super intimidating time to be involved in marketing,” said Eric Schwartz, chief marketing officer of Clorox Co. “And for a brand owner, the most intimidating part is everything continues to fragment and speed up. Coming to CES is a constant reminder of that.”
Schwartz acknowledged reinventing a global legacy brand like Clorox requires using every tool available. The brand has engaged in a social-first strategy to increase cultural relevance, but it also needs to rely on automation simply because of the scale of its operations, noted Schwartz.
Automation is “mission critical” to achieve what Clorox has managed in the last three to four years and what it wants to do next, he said. Social-first marketing involves creating feedback loops, cross-pollinating across points of influence and automating the interpretation of all those incoming signals, said Schwartz.
“To be able to keep up and create human experiences that change consumers’ minds is what AI is all about for me,” he said.
Understanding AI’s role
The significant investments organizations have made on AI technology and the disruption it has caused have borne fruit for many enterprises, but those organizations are now moving to a new stage of maturity. Some speakers argued that AI could help improve accountability and measurement and mend the rifts between CMOs and the financial managers within the C-suite.
AI technology will reconnect marketing budgets with their results and present that spending as a business growth engine instead of a business expense, Kawaja explained. This could finally elevate marketing’s credibility at the board level, he said.
“You know what 2026 is? It’s the year of Jerry Maguire: ‘Show me the money,’” said Kawaja.
As AI models mature, they are transitioning from managing probabilities to establishing causality—good news for CMOs who want to prove their worth, said speakers. While marketers one had to triangulate indicators that rarely moved CFOs to justify brand investments, rarely convincing CFOs, AI platforms can mine enough data to establish that cause-and-effect relationship from customer conversations and other sources.
Tomas Puig, Founder & CEO of Alembic Technologies
By processing trillions of potential relationships across datasets, causal modeling platforms can validate what customer conversations consistently reveal to CMOs: “Their gut is often right—it’s just very hard to prove that mathematically,” said Tomas Puig, Founder & CEO of Alembic Technologies, which uses Nvidia’s computing to build its models.
Casting a wide net of data builds what Puig called a “world model” that provides marketers a work-around the problem they often face of developing a taxonomy for measurement. Rather than get bogged down in metrics, “We brute-forced every single connection,” said Puig.
“We bring in literally all the data. We calculate every single connection that could possibly exist across the world. Then we force a model to be built over trillions of connections, literally,” he explained. “
Jamie Allan, director, AdTech & digital marketing industries at NVIDIA noted his company is applying supercomputing capabilities previously reserved for drug discovery, healthcare and climate modeling to apply AI to marketing problems. Over the last three or four years, the marketing and advertising industry has done a lot of work around generative AI image and video creation, then around agentic AI platforms and models, but now “in order for those things to all end up being really successful, that flywheel needs to be connected,” said Allan.
From left to right: Sarah Shaikh, head of sales West at blis; Julia Fedor, head of operations, brand marketing at United Airlines; Laura Morris, head of North America Marketing, VP at HP; Barbara Shipley, senior vice president of brand integration at AARP; Jim Squires, EVP, marketing & growth at Reddit
A matter of trust
But on the flip side, increased AI adoption is leading users to become jaded about AI generated content, and since AI models are relatively opaque, marketers are becoming wary about losing consumers’ trust. “You’re skeptical about everything,” said Jim Squires, EVP, marketing & growth at Reddit.
The speed with which content is being spun out thanks to AI “is going to continue to degrade trust,” said Laura Morris, head of North America marketing, VP, HP.
“Are we the last media company to actually do fact-checking?” asked Barbara Shippley, senior vice president of brand integration at AARP, only half-joking. “Trust is the deficit. We’re trying to hold the flame.”
In a landscape where content is being generated at scale and speed, credibility and lived experience now represent powerful competitive advantages, challenging the assumption that more AI-driven personalization inherently creates better outcomes.
“An algorithm can’t describe a car. You want someone who’s actually done it and shared that experience,” said Squires. “People are just going to be seeking that human perspective out.”
From left to right: Julie Fedor, head of operations, brand marketing at United Airlines; Julie Keating, head of agency partnerships at Sojern; Brad Hiranaga, SVP global experience design at Marriott International; Ester Raphael, chief marketing officer of Intersection
Many speakers called for not neglecting that human perspective in their pursuit of technological might.
Marketeers need to exercise discipline in this fragmented environment, said Julie Keating, head of agency partnerships at Sojern. If marketing remains authentic and disciplined and offer a product that fills a need, leaders should not “get distracted by the shiny object,” she said.
“There’s so many shiny objects that are happening with technology and things that are changing,” said Keating. “I think it’s really, really important to play your game as a marketer and understand who you are and what value you’re bringing.”
It’s easy to get distracted with all the technology developments, said Brad Hiranaga, SVP global experience design at Marriott International. Remaining curious about the consumer and what humans want can counter that interference, he said.
“In today’s world, it’s really easy to get distracted by lots of other things and get away from those human truths,” said Hiranaga. But he cautioned “if we’re not designing with humans in mind—and how they want to sleep, how they want to eat, how they want to be productive for that meeting in the morning—then we’re like missing the whole picture.”
