Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

Panacea or Emperor’s New Clothes?

AI has turned marketing into a live experiment.

In my interviews in The Drum with senior-level marketers, the spread is huge: where some teams are barely touching it, others are using it daily, across insight, planning, production and optimisation. Most are somewhere in the middle: curious, slightly wary, and trying to separate what genuinely helps from what merely makes a nice demo or rapidly becomes an expensive mistake.

This session is built for that middle ground.

We’ll look at the brands using AI to real effect, and the moments where leaders have been burned by tools that over-promise and under-deliver. Not in abstract terms, but in the gritty reality of workflows, teams, budgets, governance and outcomes.

Hosted by Rachael Pollard, CMO at Uswitch

Our guest curator, Rachael Pollard, has been at the sharp end of digital change for years and has approached AI with both pace and rigour. Her fire-side chat will be followed by a panel of marketing leaders – Cassandra Hall (Motorway), Jay Safdar (Lloyds Bank), Nicola Collins (EDF), Adam Evans (Domestic & General) and Olivia Butter (Klarna) – sharing what’s working, what’s failed, and what they’d do differently with the benefit of hindsight.

What we’re hearing from the front line

What’s proving useful:

• AI is far more valuable than post-writing and summarising decks. Those are party tricks.

• AI is strong in kind learning work: structured tasks where feedback is clear and repetition improves output.

• Used well, it can remove friction, shorten cycles, and free teams for higher-value thinking.

• “Vibe coding” is arriving fast, and marketers should understand what it changes inside a team.

• The real gains come from hybrid working: humans setting judgement, taste and direction; AI accelerating the doing.

Where it disappoints:

• Serious businesses are not trusting AI to predict marketing results with any confidence.

• AI doesn’t deliver strategy. It can support strategic work, but it cannot own it.

• Automating all creative is a direct route to sameness. Blandness scales beautifully but diminishes effectiveness.

• AI struggles with wicked learning work: ambiguous problems, shifting contexts, and decisions where judgement matters more than pattern.

(With thanks to Tim Clancy for the kind vs wicked learning metaphor.)

What you’ll leave with:

• A clearer view of where AI can improve your marketing function, quickly and safely

• Practical examples from peers, including mistakes worth avoiding

• Collective insight you can take straight into planning, capability building and governance

The format:

Breakfast, sharp conversation, and plenty of time with peers.

We’re bringing together 100 senior marketing leaders across B2B and B2C brands for keynote conversation, a candid panel, and roundtable discussion designed to surface real practice, not theory.

If you’re responsible for performance, brand, teams, and the quality bar, this is for you.

Register now to secure your seat for what promises to be a punchy September session.