Tech Talk Interviews

Let's start with the urgency we're seeing around AI adoption in marketing. What's driving this intense pressure?

Caroline: It's all about efficiency and increasing ROI. AI is one of the best ways to decrease time spent and increase efficiency. If you're an organization, the amount of FOMO right now looking at other organizations that are scaling AI very quickly is quite high. The reason is because you're trying to stay differentiated. You're trying to ensure that your competitive moats as an organization remain strong. If you can't get that integration and transformation going in your organization, but your competitor can, you're now at a significant loss.

The pace of AI development seems relentless. How are marketing executives coping?

Caroline: We all see it every day. There's a new timeline. Probably as I'm literally speaking, in the next 10 to 20 seconds there are going to be three major headlines about what's going on in AI. If you're in marketing and advertising, you simply cannot do your job and stay on top of all the developments that are happening. The stress level is very high. In fact, the data is showing that the stress level of marketing and advertising executives trying to get their heads around what's going on in AI is through the roof.

What's your advice for organizations trying to navigate this?

Caroline: What I always tell organizations to do is take a step back. Rather than thinking about the 20 emails you got from AI companies trying to do something with your organization, think about the biggest challenges that your organization is trying to solve for. What's the number one most intense challenge your organization has? What is the most frequent challenge? And then the third question to ask is how many people does it impact? Then you'll be able to sort out what are the things that AI can attack that would be particularly relevant for your organization.

You've created an AI personalisation playbook at the IAB. What prompted that?

Caroline: Before IAB, I was a long term marketer for 20 years at different brands. So I come at it with the perspective of how do I solve the challenges in the industry. There are five main key takeaways in this playbook.

1. Personalisation helps increase ROI. We talk about how do you leapfrog the competition and increase your ROI. This is going to help you do that. And the data doesn't lie. Yum Brands saw double digit increases when they were conducting personalisation tests that then led to increased purchases.

2. There are three key elements that we looked at in this playbook. Human centered AI. We're not looking to replace human beings. We're looking to amplify human creativity with AI. We have to think about cross functional integration, and that's multifaceted. Within an organization, you're going to have marketing, creative, legal, and data all having to orchestrate together. That's incredibly difficult. One of the things that people talk about AI helping with is these orchestration challenges.

What about external collaboration challenges?

Caroline: You've got another thing, the external challenge. If you're in a media agency, you have to work with the creative agency and the brand, and they all have to work in parallel. 

The last piece of those three is risk tiered governance. What do I mean? Well, there's a very different risk profile if you're thinking about a social asset that's running on Instagram or TikTok, right? Even the longevity of that asset will be less versus a television commercial, which will have a higher degree of risk. So even as you think about automated versus human review, you're going to think about it differently in this playbook.

You mentioned cohort based personalisation. Can you explain that approach?

Caroline: One of the things that we focused on was cohort based personalisation. What I mean by that is not one to one, not to you or to the other people in this room, but cohort based. The reason for that was organizations today typically do not have the data implementation layer to be able to truly go one to one personalisation. The tech platforms typically do, but if you look at what these companies, the brands, advertisers, and agencies are capable of doing, they're just not there.

What about organizational readiness? How critical is that?

Caroline: Another thing to think about is organizational readiness. I always say if you take a broken thing and you put AI on it, it's not like putting some hot sauce on it. It doesn't make it better. It absolutely exacerbates the problem. You could see that in data. If your data isn't ready for true personalisation, it's going to exacerbate that and make it worse. If your organization has organizational challenges, same thing.

So the last step of that process would be thinking about your organizational readiness and making sure that before you try to use AI to scale, you got your house clean.

How does the playbook help with implementation?

Caroline: The very last one is that we broke this down into briefing, how do you brief for AI personalisation, building, how do you actually execute, and benchmarking, how do you measure all of this and then optimize in process to make sure you're really scaling and making your creative as relevant as possible.

There's a lot of discussion about human AI collaboration. What's your perspective on where humans add the most value?

Caroline: One of the things we did in the playbook that I really enjoyed philosophically speaking is we broke down a chart of what AI does really well and what humans do really well. Some people think that AI can replace humans in everything, and I am not one of those people.

Specifically in creativity, AI isn't great, and I'll explain why. It's a predictive model. It's predicting the next word in a line. For anyone who's worked in the creative industry, remixing the world of things is not where true creativity comes from. You may get a remix of a current recipe or a remix of a current song, which could be very good depending on the song, but true creativity, something like where did Squid Games come from? Out of somebody's brain. That creativity, that strategy, that's where companies should be thinking about where's the human in this.

AI is very good at taking millions of data points and condensing it down because we as humans are not good at that. We just can't put our mind over that many insights. If that's audience trends, the AI can look at way more than we can. So thinking about what does AI do really well, what do humans do really well, and how do we create something that leverages that? I think you would also stay away from the shiny button and focus on what's really effective.

What's your advice for platforms building at the core of this human AI integration?

Caroline: Think about where AI truly adds value versus where human judgment and creativity are irreplaceable. Don't get wrapped up in the shiny button syndrome. Focus on creating tools that amplify human capabilities rather than trying to replace them entirely. The most effective solutions will be the ones that understand this balance and design for it intentionally.

Conclusion

Giegerich's practical approach cuts through the AI hype to focus on what matters: solving real organizational challenges, preparing your foundation before scaling, and understanding where humans and AI each excel. Her playbook offers a roadmap for marketing leaders navigating the pressure to adopt AI while maintaining strategic clarity and creative excellence.