AI changes the work people can do
Panelists then turned to how AI changes the role of marketing teams. Finnerty explained the framing matters. Teams respond differently when AI is positioned as a way to grow faster rather than reduce costs.
“This isn’t about taking out costs explicitly. It’s about freeing up people to do more, to be more predictive, to be more strategic, you can always grow more,” Finnerty said.
Kyle Dozeman, chief revenue officer, Americas at PubMatic, said the reaction to AI changes once people see how much routine work it can take off their plate. They like that they can “get to the things that can actually make the brand different—like the taste and the judgment and the creativity.”
Rinaldi shared how Hershey revamped its media mix model with Mutinex, cutting down the time spent on data preparation and increasing how often the team can run models.
“We just revamped our entire media mix model, and we went from basically six months of data cleansing work to 24 hours,” Rinaldi said. “And then we’re going to go from three models a year to 12.”
For Vargo, the value of using AI lies in freeing younger team members from day-to-day tasks so they can think more strategically. “I want these young people who work on my team to really look around corners and identify things that they couldn’t otherwise have done before,” she said.
