Decoding AI for Marketing Greg Stuart, Rex Briggs

Marty Kihn, Senior Vice President of Strategy at Salesforce, explains some of the biggest ways that AI has impacted their business in recent years. Salesforce now centers around a Customer Data Platform, or CDP, and Kihn talks through some of the key decisions around data, vendors, and layers of AI models that can change the game for all marketers.

Lu Cotterill is Global Senior Director, Full Funnel Marketing AI / ML at Kellanova (which spun out of legendary brand Kellogg). As a marketer in the CPG space, she’s always searching for the best data available to inform business decisions. In her current role, she focuses on how AI can help them better reach customers. CPG has its own set of challenges, but Lu has found the best way to test use cases for AI and ML is by starting with a business problem - not the technology - first.

Gopi Kallayil is the Chief Business Strategist for AI at Google, which means he has a bird’s eye view of the technology and its implications at one of the world’s largest companies - and all the partner companies they work with. Author of The Happier Human: Being Real in an Artificially Intelligent World, Gopi had spent a good portion of his professional life focused on the relationship between human authenticity and technology. In this episode he shares the ways he sees AI changing the game at the tactical and strategic level in business.

The opinions expressed are those of the guest in his personal capacity.

Barry Padgett is CEO of Amperity, a company using AI to solve this problem: large companies now have lots and lots of marketing data, but it is all coming from different systems and services. That means you might have inforomation about a customer in different places across your portfolio, without the ability to integrate that data to get a more complete understanding of that customer. Especially as access to third party data diminishes, Padgett explains how the company can help big retailers and more streamline their information and ultimately improve customer experience.

Large retailers like Walmart are in some ways at an advantage when it comes to implementing new technology like AI that depends on data, with insights being constantly aggregated across stores, products and customers.

But large companies also come with complexity, and complexity is exactly what Saleel Sathe deals in every day. He’s the vice president of performance marketing at Walmart and has a bird’s eye view on all the ways technology and AI are being adapted at the company.

He shares the lessons he’s learned there and from previous roles at Uber and eBay about implementing new technology effectively for internal teams and external customers.

We talk about the future of SEO and GenAI, the end of the cookie, the best ways to measure and predict, making a better, more addictive app for the company, and more.

While many are enthusiastic about AI, few companies have a smart roadmap in place for its development and implementation. Instead, many people either start from scratch and try to build the capability internally from zero, or buy up other AI companies without much of a plan.

Jim Lecinski’s approach, outlined in his book "The AI Marketing Canvas: A Five-Stage Road Map to Implementing Artificial Intelligence in Marketing," emphasizes the need for a structured and informed strategy. In this episode he elaborates on what that entails and how organizations can approach AI implementation in an informed way to ensure success for their business. Lecinski is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, he previously spent 12 years at Google.