Brand Leaders Debate AI Ownership at IAB ALM Marketing Breakfast

Williams said an important application of AI was serving attendees of Adobe’s events, perhaps using AI to create a schedule of programming most useful to them.

AI ownership: One exec or a sandbox?

AI can unlock potential for businesses if they can figure out who should do the work of understanding and implementing the technology into workstreams.

“Every single person can leverage this to enhance, not replace, their job,” said Matt Prohaska, CEO of digital-media-focused Prohaska Consulting. “We’re not going to have four geniuses down the hall and no one knows what’s going on. We’ve had enough black boxes in our industry. We don’t need more in our own company.”

We like to posture a politic of optimism, but I’m mostly scared about how AI impacts creativity.

Ziad Ahmed, CEO, JUV Consulting

Others championed a center-of-excellence approach to attract people from across an organization to determine how best to use AI, given the challenges of centralizing operations within a sprawling company.

“In corporate America, if five people own something, nobody owns it,” said Tiffany Xingyu Wang, chief marketing officer of sell-side ad-tech firm OpenWeb, adding that there will be no accountability when the inevitable challenges of AI, like bias, arise.

Human creativity over AI

Speaking on the limitations of AI, Ziad Ahmed, CEO of JUV Consulting, questioned whether AI should be the focus of marketing organizations at all.

“It’s a means to an end, not an end,” Ahmed said. “In business communities, we like to posture a politic of optimism, but I’m mostly scared about how AI impacts creativity.”

“[AI] is a challenge to each of us as artists or creatives to make our work more human,” he added, noting that, right now, AI is more the competition than the tool. “Our work has to be better than what a client could put into these algorithms and churn out.”

But even at Zipcar, which used AI in a marketing campaign, Holmes said there were still many areas where human ideas were superior. For example, in trying to convey why Zipcar would be useful for errands, the AI came up with, “Bamboo too big for bus.” Humans wrote, “Monster monstera.”

“Our finance team [is] very eager to know when I can get rid of some of our agencies and partners and just replace it with gen AI,” Holmes said. “We are not there yet. We need to retain our authenticity and humanity as a brand.”