Marketing leaders from Microsoft Advertising, Skoda, Unilever, Samsung, Philips and more gathered to confront the AI shift head-on. Are CMOs truly ready to lead in a machine-shaped world? This is what they said – unfiltered, relevant and urgent.
“We’re not just adapting to technology: we’re adapting to a completely new marketing paradigm,” says Globant Gut’s managing director, Marwa Khalife. She was speaking at The Drum and Globant Gut’s roundtable, to kick off the new AI Marketing Pulse editorial series.
It’s a stark warning – and one that lands hard in a room full of global marketing leaders from Microsoft Advertising, Skoda, Unilever, Samsung, Philips, Channel 4, Babyshop, Carwow, ESL Faceit, Okta.
This isn’t another polite panel about AI hype. It’s a candid, unscripted reality check that proves AI is no longer a curiosity – it’s the engine beneath the hood of modern marketing. It’s reshaping everything from content production and media targeting to how brands build trust and stay relevant. And so marketers are no longer just brand storytellers. They’re being asked to evolve into hybrid creative-technologist-business architects.
So the question on the table is, are CMOs truly ready for all that AI is offering them? And what does it take to lead, not lag, in an AI-powered era? What follows is a bracingly honest – and often philosophical – discussion that proves AI’s impact goes far beyond productivity hacks.
Build to last – AI for brand transformation
At Unilever, the promise of AI isn’t about the flashy future – it’s foundational. “We created this tool called Brand DNAi. We’re programming [it] to be like a brain for our brand assets,” says Selina Sykes, vice-president of digital marketing and social first at Unilever Beauty & Wellbeing: “Anyone producing content anywhere in the world can access it, talk to it, and ensure what they’re creating is truly part of the brand’s equity.”
Meredith Kelly, head of marketing at Škoda, echoes the importance of control and consistency across markets as AI fast becomes a connector for legacy automotive brands facing global fragmentation: “We use a kind of ChatGPT-style tool to help make sure ideas are understood across markets and interpreted through the right lens.”
Meanwhile, at Microsoft Advertising, the transformation is deeper than brand assets – it’s strategic intelligence. “We’re using [AI] to cover knowledge gaps,” says Ryan Miles, director of international marketing, going on to explain how it uncovers strategic insights that would normally take weeks or months to identify.
For CMOs, the shift is not just operational: it’s existential. As Ben Carter, global chief customer and marketing officer at Carwow, puts it, it’s about freeing up humans to do the smarter things: “It requires a cultural mindset shift… thinking ‘model-first’ rather than ‘human-first’.”
Marketing to the unseen – audiences in the agentic age
But in a world of disappearing signals and fragmented attention, it’s not just about how AI helps brands. It’s about who those brands are even talking to. Enter the age of agentic audiences: hyper-individualized, highly fluid, and often invisible in traditional datasets.
Claudia Calori, vice-president, head of marketing at Philips, describes how synthesized personas are redefining targeting. “Large language models actually work best when they have a persona to refer to. It gives teams a human reassurance,” and helps them test ideas at scale, she says.
Khalife has seen this play out across clients, with brands beginning to use the different personas as “real-time testing within a very tailored focus group.”
But synthetic insight isn’t always pure insight. As Mads Peterson, managing director of Globant Gut Copenhagen warns: “You can get some very serious hallucinations, if you don’t structure your data [correctly]. And then there’s privacy – can we even use this data?”
These nuances reflect a deeper challenge: bias. While AI can uncover hidden patterns in vast datasets, it can also reinforce outdated assumptions and inherited flaws.
“If you don’t train the model with diversity, you get predictable, one-note results,” warns Fabio Tambosi, senior brand marketer, former Nike, Nokia and Adidas.
For Mitin Chakraborty, head of marketing at Babyshop, that’s a strategic red flag: “What if it’s helping you repeat mistakes that were relevant 10 years ago, but aren’t now?”
Iain Walters, head of marketing at Channel 4, puts it more bluntly: “If people see a piece of AI-generated content pretending to be the real thing and then realize it’s AI, they literally switch off.” That viewer instinct underscores the human test every brand must pass: trust, relevance and emotional connection.
Creative courage – AI as the new creative muse
If brand and audience are transforming, so too is the creative process. But does AI enhance creativity, or dilute it?
“AI is a facilitator, not a creative boss,” says Antonia Faulkner, senior director of corporate comms, ads marketing and insights, Samsung Ads, explaining that “it helps brands be more experimental” in a fragmented media landscape.
But true creative courage lies in pushing AI beyond tropes. That means not just accepting the first answer but taking it to where the magic happens in the second iteration and beyond. It’s a team sport between human and machine, explains Nicolas Rodet, senior vice-president global head of digital, Okta: “It’s an extra asset for validating the experience” but the human is still the one who defines it.
That interplay between automation and intuition is a recurring theme. “A well-phrased prompt is very similar to a well written brief,” says Calori: “And if you really challenge yourself dialectically, that’s where GPT can really help you to stretch your thinking further.”
The new CMO mandate
So where are CMOs really on the adoption curve? The answer is: building, questioning, experimenting, and, most of all, adapting.
“I always think about AI as a foundational technology, the same as electricity [and] the printing press,” says Sykes: “It’s not about the AI – it’s what you do with it.”
As the conversation wraps, the group is left not with all the answers, but with better questions. Questions about ethics, creativity, inclusivity and meaning. In short, the kind of questions that define leadership in the AI era. Because AI might help you do more. But only humans can decide what matters.
To hear the full, unfiltered conversation, including candid takes on creativity, culture change in the age of AI and actionable advice for marketers, watch the highlights video from the roundtable above and on The DrumTV.
