Artificial intelligence has become the hottest emerging technology for marketers, many of whom are eager to find immediate use cases for tools like ChatGPT in their business strategies.
But as marketers look to experiment with the rapidly evolving landscape, it is essential to find people who can navigate ChatGPT integrations and help them stay up-to-date on new generative AI tools.
For the excited yet disoriented marketer, Ad Age has compiled a list of agency, media, brand and tech executives leading the charge in AI marketing. This directory includes not only liaisons for brands, but also creatives to keep an eye on and specialists building tools from scratch.
New players are bound to emerge on the scene, but for now, here are 13 AI leaders—from OpenAI, Coca-Cola, Roblox and more—who you need to know.
Alexia Adana is a creative director at Edelman helping the PR firm adopt emerging technologies like AI. As clients become more interested in generative AI tools, Adana is finding real use cases, as well as putting Edelman in a strong position to leverage the technology.
“She’s constantly experimenting with generative AI prototypes and betas, becoming a prompt wizard and creating mixed reality environments,” said an Edelman spokesperson. A quick look at Adana’s LinkedIn profile illustrates this curiosity; she has posted her experimentations with imaginative brand tie-ups using tools like Midjourney and DALL-E 2.
Thanks to work from employees like Adana, Edelman is already infusing AI into its tried and trusted products. For instance, the agency has fitted AI into its “Trust Barometer,” a 20-year-old tool that it uses to measure how corporations are viewed by the public. The newly titled “Trust Management Platform” leverages predictive and analytical technology to better illustrate a level of trust, and when it fluctuates.
Last month, Meta’s chief brain Mark Zuckerberg formally entered his company into the generative AI space, with the rollout of its LLaMA model. He then announced in a Facebook post the formation of a new team at Meta that will “turbocharge our work in this area.”
The head of this team is Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of artificial intelligence, machine learning and core tech. Prior to joining Meta in 2020, Al-Dahle spent nearly 17 years at Apple, where he worked in special project groups concerned with autonomous systems and imaging and sensing technologies.
Al-Dahle’s new team at Meta will be focused on building creative and expressive tools using generative AI technology, Zuckerberg said in his post. Over the long term, the group will develop AI personas to be integrated within Meta’s products. Examples include chatbots in WhatsApp and Messenger and image posts built inside Instagram filters and ad formats.
Al-Dahle will have his work cut out for him given the increasingly competitive AI space. Moreover, Meta’s focus on generative AI is reminiscent of its decision to go all out for the metaverse, which in nearly one and half years has yet to produce anything popular in the mainstream.
A year and a half before generative AI took marketing by storm, Paul Caiozzo started Supernatural, an AI-powered successor to his former agency, Interesting Development. The shop’s mission: to blend the creativity of humans with the increasing potential of technology.
Under Caiozzo’s leadership, Supernatural has pursued this objective for clients including Kayak, rental marketplace Citysnap and crypto exchange Gemini. At the heart of its work is what the shop calls “the machine,” a platform trained on 25 years’ worth of advertising research, combined with reams of data and machine learning technology. The result is a control center of sorts that analyzes the challenges and goals posed by clients to create effective marketing.
And while his agency embraced AI long before the current bandwagon, Caiozzo is still experimenting with newer platforms, such as Stable Diffusion, for tasks like animation and colorization.
“The motivation was financial, but the time saved was certainly a bonus,” Caiozzo told Ad Age last fall. “We didn’t have the budget for stock or to illustrate and animate or shoot live action.”
Like any space, AI has its influencers. One to keep an eye on is Karen X Cheng, a creative director who specializes in low-budget production. Cheng regularly uploads videos of clever and out-of-the-box experimentation with AI tools.
Her videos have shown how to produce vivid animation using household items and generative AI, innovative shots with an iPhone and tutorials on getting the most out of public AI tools. Cheng’s primary channels are TikTok (where she has 966,000 followers) and Instagram (where she has 1.2 million followers). These platforms allow her to reach millions of young users looking for entertainment or help with their own AI-powered endeavors.
Brands have picked up on Cheng’s skill and growing popularity. Puma hired Cheng to create a TikTok for its #SheMovesUs campaign, which became its top performing video of the year. More recently, McDonald’s teamed with Cheng for a spot around Lunar New Year, which blended AI, augmented reality, QR technology and a metaverse activation into a single commercial.
Roblox joined the AI craze when last month it announced plans to create generative AI tools for creators. The idea is that users are already leveraging third-party AI tools, but these tools don’t quite produce Roblox-ready material. Roblox saw an opportunity to offer custom, in-game technology.
Leading this effort is Stefano Corazza, head of Roblox Studio. Roblox Studio is the toolkit for creators to build their worlds, and has already democratized creation for millions of users. With the addition of generative AI tools such as voice and text-based bots, the ability to design intricate worlds on the platform could be made even easier.
Corazza has been at Roblox for less than a year, but his previous experience has established him as a leader in emerging media technology. At Adobe, he was head of augmented reality, where he also integrated machine learning to allow for more accessible custom creation tools. Similarly, he co-founded an animation toolkit called Mixamo, whose mission was to democratize 3D character art via machine learning tech. Mixamo was ultimately acquired by Adobe.
Disney has deployed an entire research arm to explore use cases in artificial intelligence and machine learning. In November, members of this team published a paper showing its ability to age people’s faces in videos with astonishing clarity. Dubbed face re-aging network (FRAN), the tool can make people look both younger and older. It is also supposedly production-ready, which means we could start seeing it in action relatively soon.
Markus Gross is the person to know at Disney Research Studios, located in Zurich. He is chief scientist and lab director, as well as a professor of computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
While the Zurich team is a tiny department in the behemoth that is Disney, its work is being used across all of the Mouse House’s entertainment properties, from animation to Marvel. And as Disney continues to boost its standing as a player in the advertising ecosystem, its technological developments could be used to attract marketers looking to enhance the creativity of their campaigns.
The Zurich team’s most recent publication offers a glimpse into how Disney is interested in generative AI. The paper, published in January, demonstrates a new method for estimating the sharpness of real and generated human faces, which can in turn be used for more effective training of AI models.
As chief strategy and transformation officer at Kraft Heinz, Dafne Hefner is in charge of how the company embraces new technology into its business. It is this mission that has fueled Hefner’s interest in bringing AI to the packaged food giant.
This month, Hefner oversaw a partnership made between Kraft Heinz and Microsoft to enable the latter’s AI tech to support the former’s supply chain management. The deal is part of Microsoft’s new Dynamics 365 Copilot, which enables clients AI-powered assistance across business functions—from supply chain to marketing to sales.
Under Hefner’s leadership, Kraft Heinz initially struck a deal with Microsoft in 2022 to bring digital transformation to accelerate supply chain innovation. This month’s recent expansion on that partnership, specifically focused on AI, shows Hefner making good on her promise.
Before joining Kraft Heinz in January 2022, Hefner was a veteran at Anheuser-Busch InBev, where she worked in numerous departments including partnerships, marketing and strategy.
Alex Mashrabov is director of generative AI at Snap, where last month he helped launch “My AI,” a chatbot built inside Snapchat. The bot uses OpenAI’s GPT model, the same foundation for ChatGPT. Indeed, “My AI” will function very similarly to ChatGPT, helping users with anything from answering questions to planning trips, although it has been customized specifically to limit harmful and explicit content.
Mashrabov is a seasoned AI expert. He co-founded software development company AI Factory in 2018, where he served as its chief operations officer and, through a partnership with Snap, helped develop the Cameo feature. Cameos are selfies that are animated and integrated inside short videos in Snapchat. Snap acquired AI Factory in 2020 for reportedly $166 million.
Despite Snap’s recent generative AI launch, the company has been active in the AI space for years. It uses variations of machine learning and artificial intelligence in some of its most popular camera features, in particular the augmented-reality powered Lenses.
If you’re curious about how AI will entwine with enterprise, Allie K. Miller is a must-know expert.
Miller is equal parts angel investor, consultant and speaker. She has spent nearly a decade working for some of the top companies researching and producing AI solutions for a variety of business functions, from marketing to media to data analysis. Think of Miller as a marketer for AI itself, promoting its current use cases and potential for future disruption.
Miller is an influencer for the AI space, routinely posting new use cases, news and endorsements on her social media channels. A recent poll she posted to Twitter illustrates just how convinced she is of the power of this technology:
Miller spent time at IBM Watson, where she was lead product manager helping clients integrate image, text and face recognition technology. She also helped with the development of AI solutions for other areas, such as conversation AI, which is now taking off thanks to the popularity of tools like ChatGPT. And she served as global head of machine learning business development for startups and venture capital at Amazon Web Services. In this role, she advised new companies on how to incorporate AI into their business from the start.
Ad agencies are having to quickly understand AI for their brands, and for R/GA, Michael Olaye has stepped up to the plate. Olaye is the agency’s senior VP and managing director of strategy and innovation, which means that he’s had to stay on top of all the latest fluctuations in the AI space, as well as their implications for clients.
For example, Olaye shared in a recent LinkedIn post a story reporting that the U.S. Copyright Office declared AI-generated images to be unqualified for copyright protection.
“We’ve all been in a holding pattern with what/how can be legally used from AI-generated creative,” he wrote in the post. “This is one ruling that will no doubt force more conversations around how royalties from training data must work going forwards.”
With Olaye’s insight, R/GA is educating clients on how generative AI works, and how it may fit in their marketing strategies. Olaye’s resume has also prepared him for the role he is now playing at his agency: He co-founded U-Dox, a digital creative agency based in London in 2001, before becoming head of technology and innovation at Havas London. Olaye also previously served as CEO of digital agency Dare and chief growth officer of Nordic-focused tech agency The North Alliance.
Salesforce this month rolled out its own generative AI platform, Einstein GPT, which could have particular use for marketers given its purpose in customer relationship management (CRM) technology. Einstein GPT blends OpenAI’s ChatGPT model with Salesforce’s private AI models, creating a system that will have numerous functions in the workplace, from generating personalized emails to crunching data in a fraction of time it would take a human.
Armita Peymandoust is senior VP of engineering, AI and machine learning at Salesforce, where she is helping to build out such use cases for marketers.
“Extending what’s available to the creative side of marketing is where we see AI going,” she told Ad Age last month. Peymandoust previously spent time as director of product management at digital advertising firm Marin Software and senior software engineer at Yahoo.
Salesforce is already integrating generative AI tech in some of its most popular products. Slack, which Salesforce acquired in 2021, has been fitted with a chatbot powered by ChatGPT that will allow employees to craft quick responses. Salesforce has also launched a $250 million fund targeting generative AI startups with whom it can work alongside.
OpenAI is arguably the most recognizable player in the AI space at the moment, thanks to its generative AI tools ChatGPT and DALL-E 2. These platforms have captured the attention of professionals and the public at large, demonstrating the creative potential of generative AI, and with ease of use and accessibility.
OpenAI, which transitioned from a non-profit organization to a for-profit company in 2019, is helping brands integrate its tools into their businesses. Leading this effort is Aliisa Rosenthal, OpenAI’s head of sales. Rosenthal oversees account executives, managers and sales engineers to bring ChatGPT and DALL-E to companies like Publicis and Buzzfeed.
Just this month, OpenAI announced a partnership with Bain & Company to explore new ways of creative marketing. Other companies that OpenAI has recently partnered with include Salesforce, as mentioned above, and Microsoft, which invested $10 billion into the AI company earlier this year. And seeing that OpenAI recently unveiled the latest iteration of its technology, GPT 4, expect more partnerships to be announced soon.
Coca-Cola showed a big commitment to AI when last month it signed on as the first brand in OpenAI’s partnership with Bain & Company. The collaboration will see the beverage giant use OpenAI tools such as ChatGPT to enhance the creativity of its marketing.
“Coca-Cola’s vision for the adoption of OpenAI’s technology is the most ambitious we have seen of any consumer products company,” said Zack Kass, head of go-to-market at OpenAI, in a press statement.
As Coca-Cola’s head of global creative strategy and content, Pratik Thakar will helm AI experimentation from the drink giant’s side. No plans have been disclosed, but Thakar will likely test generative AI tools in the company’s ongoing “Real Magic” campaign, which he helped launch in 2021. “Real Magic” focuses on attracting younger audiences—more reason for Thakar and team to use popular tools like DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT.
Thakar has been at Coca-Cola for the last 10 years, and in his current role since the start of 2021. He previously had stints leading strategy at both Grey Group and McCann Worldgroup.
English 
Українська