How marketers are using AI beyond buzzwords

It’s no secret that brands have grown their investment in AI and are now experimenting with agentic use cases. At Marketing Brew’s The Art & Science of AI in Marketing event in New York last month, marketers from brands including JPMorgan Chase, Getty Images, and Booking Holdings dove into the nitty gritty.

During the event, brand marketers discussed how exactly they’ve been powering their own tech capabilities and creative operations with AI, and grappled with how the AI landscape has changed over the past few years. For those who couldn’t join IRL, we compiled some of the highlights below.

Build your own tools: AI tools can be customized to meet needs of a specific brand with unmatched speed, David DiCamillo, chief technology officer at Code and Theory, said onstage, and vibe coding—aka asking AI tools to build code that can be used to create apps—can come in handy in creatively envisioning what’s possible. With that said, it’s not that simple: There’s far less rigor involved in building out tools for internal experimentation versus going to market with it for clients, and external tools must meet stricter standards.

Later in the morning, Howard Pyle, founder at think tank and product studio XF, advised against using the term “vibe coding,” describing the term as seeming potentially “flippant” or even cheesy—but he emphasized the value of the concept itself, which he suggested rebranding to building “build your own personal tool set.” He listed a number of use cases for marketers where AI tools of their own creation could be useful, whether that’s developing a specific tone of voice or understanding specific audiences.

“The most creative people are building their own tools,” he told attendees. “That’s the future.”

Understand how language and AI interact: As AI tools become more commonplace, brands will need to reckon with the way consumers converse with those tools, according to DiCamillo.

“How people prompt and what is coming back from those prompts is a paradigm shift [around] how people are navigating your brand,” he said. One example of a question that a consumer might field: “‘I take the subway in every day. What are the right headphones for me?’ These are the questions.”

As brands adjust to how consumers search for product information, there are also opportunities to better distill social insights using AI, Dipin Oberoi, social intelligence, analytics, and insights senior associate at JPMorgan Chase, said during the event. AI can be trained to pick up on human nuance in online conversations, giving brand marketers the ability to understand more of that unstructured consumer data, which could include content that often involves nuanced emoji, sarcasm, and slang.

The social listening industry is “reactive by nature,” he said. “You’re essentially looking in the rearview mirror, reporting on what’s already happened, and you’re limited to the conversations that explicitly mention your brand.” But AI-powered social listening can serve as a “real game-changer. It detects emotions, intent, and emerging themes automatically. It works proactively, surfacing signals before they become mainstream trends. Critically, it captures conversations happening around your entire category, not just your brand name.”

Work with LLMs, not against them: Positioning brands for success in the current LLM and search landscape requires a stronger understanding of MCP [model, context, protocol], the open-source layer that facilitates communication between AI agents and external parties, according to Sarah Evans, partner and head of PR at Zen Media. Building an ecosystem including owned media, like a brand articles highlighting its expertise on a topic, as well as earned media, can help a brand strengthen its position in search results.

“You want to be showing up as an answer so that people can make a purchase decision” when consumers begin transacting with AI more widely, she said.

Optimizing brand content for search also requires brands to add significant detail to their websites, Leslie Cafferty, chief communications officer at Booking Holdings, said during the event. That’s in contrast to the traditional “short and pithy” verbiage used in social media, she added. (On a related note, see Google's announcement last month debuting data attributes designed to support conversational commerce.)

To better operate alongside LLMs, brand marketers may consider upgrading their online presences overall, Susan Nomecos, senior director of global AI and Web3 partnership strategy and operations at Getty Images, said. That could mean updating things like brand guidelines or customer-facing policies, as well as rethinking how organizations use and manage data.

“You’re living in a world where data drives a lot of the decisions you make,” she said. “Garbage in, garbage out.”