Beyond AI Hype: Why Your AI Strategy Isn't Delivering Value

Juliana Jackson, our Director of AI Strategy for Northern Europe, joined Samarth Bhargava from Data Demand on the Martech 360 Podcast to talk about AI in marketing without the hype.

Most brands are busy with AI right now. They’re running pilots, buying tools, and following mandates from the top. But being busy isn’t the same as getting better, and a lot of that activity never becomes something the business can point to.

Key points they discussed:

• Faster isn’t the goal. If AI helps a team ship more but doesn’t move profitability, it’s just more noise (efficiency vs effectiveness).
• The bigger shift is in behavior. People now search by having a conversation, and creative can be made and iterated much faster. That changes the funnel more than any single tool does.
• AI won’t fix bad data. If the underlying data is messy and governance is weak, agents will just scale the mess.
• It’s still people, process, then tech. Top-down mandates stall when nobody inside actually owns the change. Teams need champions, not just licences.
• Keep thinking. Leaning on AI too hard risks losing the judgement that made the team useful in the first place.

Juliana’s suggestion for leaders: instead of asking “how can we use AI?”, ask “what are we actually doing differently as a business because of it?”