The hot take round

Barnett closed with a lightning round, asking each panelist to share one AI hot take.

Human’s Solomon pushed back on the industry’s defensive posture. “Everybody’s looking at it like a threat because they’re thinking about this as just disrupting their apple cart,” he said. “It’s just an extension and enabler of the inevitable scenario that’s happening.”

Roku’s Benedict argued that brands need to start thinking in terms of two distinct audiences—human and agentic—and build strategies that serve both. “How they sort of use the center of gravity to make sure that they can build both and have them be collaborative versus bifurcated is really where I think a lot of brands are leaning in,” she said.

Reddit’s Van Zwol referenced a marketing and sociology book he’d studied 20 years ago called The Wisdom of Crowds. “I think that’s where we need to start,” he said. “Let’s pull all of us together because we are the wisdom of the crowd, and then probably we’ll have a good idea of what the future might look like.”

And Tripadvisor’s Lambroza brought it back to fundamentals. “Content is still king, queen, whatever you want to call it,” she said. “It’s so new, but foundationally the basics is good content that is trusted, that people lean into.”