How AI Use Evolved at Companies in 3 Diverse Sectors

With artificial intelligence continuing to advance, the industry is starting to move from the “robots are coming for our jobs” to acceptance.

AI platform Brand.AI sponsored a group chat at ADWEEK House during Advertising Week New York looking into exactly how different facets of the industry are embracing AI. Founder and co-CEO Chelsey Susin Kantor represented Brand.AI, joined by Dorothy Ann Advincula, global lead, measurement and insights at Uber Advertising, and Rakia Reynolds, founder and executive officer of creative marketing agency Skai Blue Media.

The platform

Kantor’s AI journey began at Google in 2016, when CEO Sundar Pichai initiated a pivot from mobile-first to AI-first. At the time, she sought to quell fears about AI by learning as much as possible about “how people thought about AI, the role that they thought it was playing in their lives, the language and stories that we should be using to convey our vision for AI, and, most important, the value it had at the time.”

The next big shift came when ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and people could suddenly directly interact with the technology, which was already part of tools they were using.

Kantor left her job at Meta in May 2023 to launch Brand.AI, and she said she wants to “reset the stage” and talk about how the technology can move beyond handling simple, tedious tasks to helping fuel new ideas and creativity, “as more of a copilot than just a delegator.”

The brand

For Advincula, the most important purpose of AI is taking the massive amounts of data Uber Advertising generates and “helping make sense of that data in a in an accessible way.”

She shared an example of a whiteboarding session with one of the company’s advertisers, in which the advertiser only came up with four things they wanted from the session.

“We spent the next hour showing the tools and solutions that my team can provide and the depth of the data that Uber has,” Advincula said, which resulted in going from those initial four requests to “the entire room talking and brimming with all of these ideas.”

The agency

Using AI to fuel “ethical intelligence” was at the heart of Reynolds’ AI journey. She noticed early on, “We were using these words over and over that I felt were harmful to communities. How do we look at AI in a more ethical way? How do I build an ethical intelligence platform to combat artificial intelligence?”

To that end, Skai Blue Media began experimenting with AI tools in 2016, seeking to avoid the mistakes Reynolds saw in the way others used the technology. She noted, “Sometimes when you take the nuance out of the nuance work, that’s where you make the big mistakes,” with one of those mistakes being a press release that was clearly generated by AI.

The current state of AI

Kantor said that as recently as one year ago, companies’ stances on AI were being formed by the chief technology officer and the legal department, but that task is now moving into the chief marketing officer suite.

She noted that some brands are still hesitant to take the plunge, but if trained properly on the company’s tone, visual guidelines, voice, and what the brand stands for, the technology can be impactful.

“You see brands taking hard stances like, ‘We are about human creativity. We are not going to use AI. We are going to champion creative people to do this work,’” she added. “I don’t think any creative person is at risk of losing their job, because I think AI does not have taste.”

“This is a relationship,” Advincula said. “If you’re afraid of it right now, spend the time to get to know it, learn about it, and then there’s going to be give and take with it. I don’t see AI as the end. The outcome is what you do with the results, or what you get from it. And the outcome is yours.”

And Reynolds concluded, “AI is more of a copilot, it’s a partner, it’s an amplifier. This is your friend.”