Looking forward to next week’s GenAI for Marketing Conference in London.

I’ll be joining a keynote panel titled “State of AI in Marketing. What’s Hype vs. Reality?” (Monday, 5pm) together with Ambra Cosentino, Frank Ravanelli and Richard Love and after our prep call… let’s just say it’s going to fun.

Marketers love a shiny object, but AI might be the shiniest we’ve ever had. Truth is though, everyone is experimenting, nobody has it fully figured out and half the noise in the market comes from the fact that we’re all talking about different things when we say “AI.” Generative… agentic… adaptive models… automation… machine learning… general intelligence… It’s like we’ve been handed the world’s most powerful toolkit and immediately lost the manual.

We’ll be getting into:

Why marketing keeps repeating the same pattern: big promises, shiny tech, heroic demos… followed by “Wait, why isn’t this working?”
Whether this time might actually be different, and the uncomfortable possibility that the tech isn’t the barrier… we are.
How to define success, and what our expectations should be for payback.
Why personalization has been ‘the future’ for 25 years
Why AI without people and process is just a very expensive autocomplete.

And yes, we’ll absolutely be asking the taboo question: If marketing has failed to implement every major technology wave for decades, what makes us think we’ll nail this one?

It’s going to be fun - a proper scene-setter for the two days that follow.

If you're at the event on Monday, come along!