The Future of Marketing with AI - AUTONOMOUS session

Hello, everyone. Hi, Jo.

Hi. Hi.

We're going to give it a couple more seconds so that everyone can filter in.

There we go.

I think we're all here now. So thank you so much, everyone, for joining our next speaker, our very own Joe, who'll be talking to us about kind of the future of AI and marketing. So, Joe, I will give you the floor.

Thanks, Natasha. Hi, everyone. Good morning. Apologies in advance. I have a bit of a cold, so I sound a little froggy. But thanks for being here. Feel free to throw in the chat where you're dialing in from. I imagine we have a lot of marketers in the crowd here. Let me move this forward here. I'm Joe McKinney. I'm Boi's Chief Growth Officer in the Americas. But I'm also a recovering ad agency CEO, and I left my leadership role in advertising about a year ago to be on the front line of the transformation in our industry. I've been with BoI since June, and I joined the company because they were already leading the charge and working with a lot of great companies that had a huge ambition to innovate. So it's great to be here. This lovely photo, by the way, is AI's idea of an ad agency CEO who now works in AI. Kind of weird, but before we dig into AI and marketing, I'd love to know why you've chosen to work in AI. And even though I can't read them all right now, if you could leave your thoughts in the chat, I'd love to go back and read through them later. But I figure I'd start by telling you why I'm working in AI, because there's a lot of reasons why I'm focused on this space right now. First off, I'm a really impatient person and really bored with the status quo. So chaos and chaotic times like this are really great for me. I have a really strong belief that the people who should be leading the charge in AI transformation are those who have deep experience in knowing and recognizing great human work. Experts need to be on the front line as beginners here in AI. I also want to really be sure that diverse perspectives are included in technological transformations that will have this level of impact on the world. And finally, as a career marketer, I think it's time for a complete marketing makeover. Speaking of marketing makeovers, here's Sam Altman, who has some ideas for us. He predicts that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for will nearly instantly and at no cost be handled by AI. Wow, thanks Sam. But don't panic. The truth is, predicting the future of AI and marketing is challenging. I mean, even the title of this presentation freaked me out. AI itself has made some really intriguing forecasts about marketing's future. And here are a few that come from all of our favorite chatbots. By 2026, 80% of marketing content will be AI generated. Or let's say 92% of employers expect their orgs to be driven by AI by 2028. Or AI will completely replace human market a decade. Wow, that's such great news. But here's the thing. These predictions are really provocative, but they are inherently unstable. The future of AI on marketing and pretty much every other area of business is going to depend on a lot of really dynamic factors. So things like data privacy, regulations and consumer trust, the evolution of human AI interaction, ethical considerations and AI deployment, the pace of technological advancement. I mean, every day feels like a huge technological advancement and societal acceptance and adaptation to AI technologies and a whole lot more. So instead of really bold predictions, I think it's great today at least, to focus on the transformative potential of AI in marketing. And while we do that, let's remember that we've been talking about Gen AI for the past couple of years, but we're still really at the beginning of the journey. And there's a lot of evolutions to come, many of which have been covered in the summit already. If you've been listening into a lot of the talks, whether that's agents, autonomous workflows, simulation, and even AGI. So where do we see the most potential? And no matter the pace, we do know that our world is becoming more autonomous. Hey, it's the name of this summit and we're on a pathway to a new paradigm beyond digital. And this is the cornerstone of two really overarching shifts on the horizon that will really impact marketing. The most foundational shift is the agentic ecosystem, which I assume you already know a lot about, given that it's a topic of many of the discussions in the summit. This is of course, the world where AI agents represent brands or consumers, retailers, media platforms. They represent everyone, and they'll interact, negotiate and make decisions in real time. AI agents become integral to societal and economic systems. And in this sort of agentic future, where AI agents play a dominant role in consumer decision making, decision making, the entire marketing paradigm for brands is going to be transformed. The difference will be that instead of focusing solely on a typical end user's emotional or rational purchase triggers, the focus is going to shift to hybrid marketing through AI agents that manage and streamline our choices on behalf of every consumer. So for marketers, this means developing expertise in the art of influencing and optimizing AI agents to achieve marketing objectives. And the truth is, in other words, marketers are no longer to be marketing to just humans. Alongside that agentic ecosystem, we're going to see major shifts in personalization. Obviously, personalization has been a core aspect of marketing for many years, but we're really going to be moving beyond static segments and predefined characteristics. The future of marketing is hyper contextual. It adapts in real time to a consumer's location or emotional state or physical condition and their immediate context, fueled by AI collecting and processing real time data. Of course, assuming that all the humans allow that to be collected and processed. But AI driven insights from this data are going to lead to really more precise marketing decisions and transform segmentation as we know it into really predictive individualized targeting. So agencies and brands that master this sort of hyper contextual engagement are going to lead the industry in the coming years. So as we transition to that new landscape I just described, and hopefully it's a landscape that you've been contemplating, and if it isn't, you know, feel free to add to the chat some additional thoughts you have. But what are the changes that marketers are going to face given those two scenarios I just presented? Well, the first and clearest implication is that the marketing models are in transition. And for any career marketers here in the, in the crowd, you know, we were historically focused on a very linear, progressive funnel. Those were the good old days where you saw an ad and then you went to the store and you considered and maybe you bought. But recent years have revealed a much more dynamic model which you can see in the middle here, which is a kind of a fluid interaction between consumers, brands and media. It's sort of what we've been experiencing today, where it's not nearly as linear and more interactive. But if we really think about the future and we go beyond a human model that's presented in the middle here, and think about an agentic model for future, it's going to have an even bigger evolution to something that BOI is calling the perpetual loop. I'll walk you through what we mean by this. This perpetual loop model is constantly learning and adapting and has what we think will be around three key stages. The first is anticipate, and this is going to be where agents are gathering data on health, loc, social cues, whatever it might be, to discover and screen relevant options for the consumer. In the nudge phase, agents will share those options in the moment based on context, and they will even be able to generate new content and potentially new pricing to do that. And then in the learn phase, agents will continuously refine their understanding of consumer behavior to improve future recommendations. So for marketers, this means designing really adaptive AI driven marketing ecosystems that evolve in real time and consider humans and agents in the mix. So let's just play this out with an example and I credit this example with my colleague from my colleagues, Jeff. But here's his example with Alan. Alan is going to pick up his kids from school. It's been a really long day, and Alan's AI assistant, maybe he has a wearable detects the tired vibe in every everyone's voice and notices that they're running a half hour late than they usually are on a Tuesday evening. So his AI assistant has also received data on a new pizza variety that's just launched and he thinks it might be what Alan needs in this moment. So in the nudge phage, the AI assistant serves an ad that was generated just for Alan, suggesting the gluten free version of the pizza, and asks him if he wants it delivered from a local store in time for when he gets home. Alan says yes, his kids are thrilled, and the agent makes the order via Uber Eats, but not before it finds him a coupon for free delivery. Alan and his family eat the pizza, they love the pizza, and he makes an Instagram post about it. Now, in the learn phase, this is all about what happens as a result of all that interactions, right? So Alan responded yes to the nudge. He also made a social media post. So the data from that information he used to influence future nudges for people like Alan and others in his situation. It's also used to update Alan's assistant and update the brand's profile for Alan and his family, and then it influences what Alan actually sees in the Uber app next time around. So there's a Obviously you can see the perpetual loop here, but lastly, information like this could be aggregated with other data from other consumers to support increased production of that pizza for next month and it could affect the entire supply chain. So behind the scenes of that kind of interaction, it would be managed pretty differently. So we're used to starting out by a brief, and you might go through the normal stage of figuring out the brief and the creative idea, but then you're going to have to create rules by which the creative and pricing can or cannot be modified. This Is the dynamic part of this process, right? And then based on what is working, you might actually go back and change the brief and the creative idea or the overall execution. So you can see why we call this the perpetual loop of marketing. There are of course like dozens or hundreds of potential implications for the new world order of marketing. You know, actually in thinking about this presentation I was like, wow, this could be really wide or really narrow. So trying to throw a lot of things out there. So hopefully we can have a good chat about this. But let's go over a few of these. Marketing to agents, obviously, as I've just discussed. But to drive agent decision making, we're going to need AI friendly product catalogs. We're going to have to have brand new search strategies strategies, new creative strategies. We're going to need to be experts on agent logic and agent insight and start to unpack the evolving decision making relationship between humans and agents. We were in a workshop this week with a client around this very subject and really thinking about how do we transfer as marketing departments all that we know about consumer insights and how to gather consumer insights and turn that attention to how do we do the same for agents? Algorithmic uniformity. So brands are really going to have to strike a balance between AI efficiency, like all this stuff generated by AI and human creativity because there will be an algorithmic sea of sameness if everything is algorithm driven. So we humans might need to add creative chaos to a uniform system like find a way to disrupt algorithmic uniformity with our own human creativity. Obviously ethical AI marketing, we're going to be navigating some complex data privacy regulations and ethical considerations and AI driven targeting. I mean, I just showed you a scenario where there's a lot of human data coming off this person, this situation. How are we going to be navigating all that? And we're going to be adjusting to a world where everything is synthetic. So synthetic data, synthetic consumers, synthetic influencers are going to cause a shift in marketing towards very AI centric performance measurement. On the exciting side of things, things that get me kind of excited, we're going to have access to emotional intelligence and hyperinsight so we'll have the chance to understand and engage consumers in a more complex data landscape and with new behavioral, emotional, sensorial and biometric data sources. I mean, think back on your career and how you try to understand human behavior and bring that to life in fundamental human truths and insights. Suddenly we're going to know so much more about humans and their behaviors. We're obviously going creating dynamic Content in real time. And AI can generate in the moment content amplified to personal preferences for more tailored responses. And we're going to have the ability to scale our thinking and ideas in ways that we have never done before. Of course, there could be brand new business models that come out of this work that we're doing, and that's something that's going to be very exciting to see unroll within all this. Also, we're going to have to really be thinking about talent and how we develop AI native talent, or upskill people, or add roles that didn't exist before. Hopefully I'm sparking some thoughts here. I know there's more, but through all of that change, what should you be focused on today? These are a few things that I'm obsessed with right now. If you've been listening to a lot of the talks during Summit, you know that we're really passionate about going beyond experiments and efficiency and pushing our thinking to this wave three transformation where we completely reimagine the way we do things and go beyond applying AI to existing processes. And I told you at the beginning of this talk that I love to transform things. So we're having a whole lot of fun starting with a blank slate and saying, hey, if we're building our marketing function from scratch today with AI at its core, what would it look like? And in fact, you can even use AI in that process to reimagine and roadmap, it's time to really start figuring out how to effectively brief, guide and collaborate with agents to achieve brand marketing goals. And this includes making your brand UX available to agents agents and navigating search in new ways and understanding agentic decision making. As we mentioned, one of the most impactful ships that gets me really excited could be moving from validation to simulation. Sorry. Instead of spending months and millions on validation based on historical data and fixed assumptions, which as we know can leave us really blind to trends or changes in real world conditions. We can build systems that are more dynamic, predictive and learn from real time data using simulation in a forward thinking framework in real time, within the moment data could really bring different and potentially better, more reliable outcomes which are certainly needed in marketing. Whatever experiments you're running today, great. But I would also say stay really curious on emerging AI human interfaces like new technologies, augmented reality, voice interfaces, emotional recognition systems, haptic feedback and tactile VR environments. All of these are going to be our marketing playground for brand experience. These are the places we're going to really be innovating. Finally, as you navigate this change, I guess just be human. Consumer trust is going to be critical to our success as marketers. Establishing really clear ethical guidelines is going to be essential as we lean into this future agentic world. I think our roles for marketing and across the business ecosystem are going to evolve from executing tasks to setting strategy and driving transformation in a world that's just going to be completely influenced by AI. So let's take some questions. I know that was a lot to process in a short period of time. Let me stop sharing my screen so I can see you in the chat. Hey there.

Hi. Thank you so much, Joe. A lot of love coming from the chat. So many good questions also. So the first question is on sustainability. So where is sustainability taking place in this process? Marketing's role should shift from consumerism to accountability. Could you speak a bit to that?

Yeah. I think these are really interesting conversations and we're definitely having these with clients. Obviously sustainability is a really big term and I think it means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But one of the things we're trying to really ground a lot of our conversations with marketers, particularly as we talk about that what was previously impossible, what should we do? It's also what shouldn't we do? Just because we can doesn't mean we should. And I think those are a lot of individual choices within companies and within business models. But it's true from our marketing as well. I think we're going to really be walking that guideline, you know, a guideline that feels very native to us and within our own companies. But these are all really important topics for consideration. I wish there was one easy answer to that question.

Awesome. We have another one around metrics. So how do you see marketing KPIs evolving as AI transforms the landscape?

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I've been sort of pondering this myself. I think it is going to really change if we have a typical. If we are saying we're going to be marketing to humans and we're going to be marketing to agents, obviously there are potentially different KPIs. And if we look at that new perpetual loop model I was showing you, it might not be that we're judging on active engagement. It could be that there's passive engagement that we're trying to measure and the KPIs could shift to how much was I preferred in an agentic ecosystem versus how much did someone like engagement or convert on a particular piece of advertising? And I think this is something I'm very curious to see how the industry comes together and sort of remakes it. Obviously there'll be leaders like Google and Meta driving a lot of this conversation in this near future as they try to hold onto their turf in traditional marketing measurement.

Great. Last question is how can you move marketing teams to accepting the introduction of agents to help with marketing needs? So this is really the transformation question.

How can you move marketing teams to accepting the introduction of agents? I mean, how do we get people to really think that this is coming? I think it's coming. I don't think it's coming tomorrow. I think it's coming over the next few years. And I think one of the core questions I would be having within my own marketing organization is, hey, we spent years becoming experts on human insights and human marketing. Now's the time for us to be standing up that same practice and same level of commitment to agent insight and agent marketing. And I think the way to do that is to really start roadmapping your strategy and your way in to say, hey, if I believe this is the three to five year future, what am I doing right now to get there? You've heard a lot of people in the summit talking about investing in Wave one and Wave two and Wave three transformation. This is exactly what we're talking about here. If need to help motivating your marketing teams to accept this, happy to come do a talk to your marketing team and rabble rouse them a bit.

Awesome. Thank you so much Jo. It's been a pleasure having you on stage. We'll be having a 10 minute break before we resume the second half of the day, so we will see you in about 10 minutes time. Folks, thank you so much for joining and see you in the next sessions. Bye.