With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Scaling Marketing With AI

Carrie Teegardin kicked off an executive panel discussion at From Day One's Atlanta marketing conference with an iconic line from the original Spider-Man movie: “With great power comes great responsibility.” It was the perfect metaphor to kick off the panel about artificial intelligence and its impact across industries, particularly the marketing world. “There’s a lot of stuff you can do, but really, should we be doing that now at this time?” Teegardin, a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who moderated the conversation, asked, setting the tone for the discussion. The panel, titled “AI in Marketing: Scaling Personalization Without Losing the Human Touch,” brought together marketing leaders who are actively trying to find a balance between innovation and ethics. Allison Conrad, the managing director of technology at Accenture, immediately seized on Teegardin's Spider-Man analogy. “It really hits on one of the key things around leveraging AI,” Conrad said. She cited the results of a recent Accenture collaboration with Amazon Web Services that surveyed 1,000 C-suite leaders. About 72% reported they had halted an AI pilot or program because of responsible AI concerns.Conrad encouraged marketers to engage in the governance conversation early on. “Marketers need to be at the table,” she added. “Responsible AI gets real when you turn it to customers. And who knows the customers better than the people in this room? If you’re invited to that, I encourage you to go. If you’re not invited, I encourage you to invite yourself.”When Trust Requires Moving Slow to Go FastChristopher Merrill, the chief marketing officer for the digital platform at Synchrony Financial, shared how his company built a fence around the metaphorical AI playground before opening up access.“In financial services, just like any bank, [we] have your social security number and your bank accounts, and so you would probably not like that information to go out outside of my walls," Merrill said. “The beauty and also the danger of AI is once you submit things to ChatGPT, you ask things, you upload documents, it’s gone forever.”Synchrony initially blocked access to public artificial intelligence tools entirely. Instead, the tech team at Synchrony Financial built its own private ecosystem using open-source AI and dubbed it "SYF-GPT" after the company’s stock ticker. “So, yes, did it take longer? Obviously, you know, it took time,” Merrill said, “We were a little bit behind versus some of the folks that didn’t have that same kind of data constraints. But now it’s allowing us to go faster,” he said. The secure environment Merrill's team built now allows employees to upload sensitive documents and draft copies without fear of data leaks. Keeping the Human in the LoopThe panel unanimously agreed that human judgment remains more valuable than ever despite the rush toward automation. Aniket Maindarkar, the chief marketing officer at business process services company Firstsource, shared a cautionary tale about chasing AI hype.After receiving a provocative email from leadership about a competitor producing an ad video for a fraction of the cost, Maindarkar's team raced to produce its own AI-generated video. The quality wasn’t up to par, he admitted. The team eventually partnered with an agency to refine the story and ensure it resonated emotionally with viewers. “For marketers, the only moat that you have is authenticity. That’s it. That’s the only moat that we are left with,” Maindarkar said. “So tech does stuff, but in today’s environment, I think for marketers, the people aspect becomes so important, because without that, you’re probably lost.”Panelists spoke about "AI in Marketing: Scaling Personalization Without Losing the Human Touch" Conrad built on this, distinguishing between AI’s ability to drive efficiency versus its inability to create true distinctiveness. “The LLMs [large language models] that are out there, unless you’re very sophisticated in doing a lot of native work, they’re learning. They’re learning off of everyone else’s data and your data,” she said. “It’s going to be really hard to be distinctive if you rely too heavily on that. What is the human doing? The humans are the people in this room, making sure that you don’t lose your distinctiveness. AI is not really good at that. That emotional connection that you have been investing in your brand, that’s another thing that AI is not going to give you.”From A/B to Multivariate TestingThe panelists agreed that one of AI’s most impressive capabilities is the ability to optimize performance. “We all do some sort of A/B testing,” Merrill said. “Digital, for a long time, has made that so much easier with tools like AI. You can test not just three, four, or five multivariate models, but literally hundreds at the same time. It is an extremely powerful tool, if done correctly.”Maindarkar says AI is now helping dismantle internal silos, bringing together teams that previously worked in isolation and unifying the content-creation process. Now, teams collaborate on a single platform using shared briefs and templates, giving marketing leaders a direct line of sight into what really drives pipeline and brand perception.The Evolving Skill Set: What Happens to the Grunt Work?Teegardin posed a provocative question to the group: If AI eliminates menial tasks, how will junior employees learn the fundamentals?“How, as young employees, did we learn menial tasks?” she noted, reflecting on her days as a young reporter covering local government meetings. “If our people aren’t doing menial tasks, is that a problem?”Merrill suggested the skill set is simply shifting. “The real skill becomes, well, how do you take full advantage of these capabilities? Do I ask it just one very simple question, or am I asking 100 questions to get deeper at the source to figure it out?” He elaborated. “You can’t just take it and say, okay, this is what the answer is. I’m going to run with it.”Conrad acknowledged this is one of the biggest challenges she’s facing. “That apprenticeship, that mentorship, how do we cultivate that sixth sense? If you don’t have that experience, how do you get it?” All three panelists emphasized that AI adoption is as much about culture as it is about technology. Merrill’s team runs internal campaigns asking employees how they’re using AI, from writing code to creating bedtime stories for their kids. Maindarkar recently held an offsite event where 80 employees formed pods and were challenged to create a campaign ad in 20 minutes using only free tools. “It creates magic within the enterprise,” he added. “In an organization, you often have certain people whom AI is forced upon, but certain people who are experimenting and who are trying and are just waiting for the opportunity to showcase that.”As the session concluded, Teegardin circled back to the villains in the Spider-Man universe. What should marketers watch out forMaindarkar warned that CMOs must now think like a Chief Information Security Officer for their brand. “There is nobody else in the company who’s looking at that in terms of what parts of your brand are being leaked out,” he said. Merrill kept it simple. “I’'ll say just trust but verify,” he added. “AI is an awesome set of tools. But you can’t just take it at whatever it says. You’ve got to have the human in the loop.”Conrad’s final word was a call for robust infrastructure. “You can’t do point solutions,” she elaborated. “Laws are changing. You’re going to need an integrated platform that is constantly monitoring these programs. If you’re going to fight the bad guys, you need to be armed with a lot of automation and a lot of data.”Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.