Marketers Hand Brands Over to AI

"Marketers are growing more comfortable with letting generative artificial intelligence assume the voices of their brands.

The work often involves AI agents, which are a series of interconnected AI entities, that perform different tasks in the marketing chain, as the industry inches closer to a day when proponents say AI will develop, produce and even approve entire campaigns with little or no human intervention.

"You're going to relinquish control. It makes too much sense," said Noah Brier, co-founder of AI-focused consulting firm Alephic.

Building better AI tools to evaluate the work of other AI tools will be key, since the amount of marketing content being generated is already too great for proper human review, Brier said.

But brands aren't waiting for perfection.

Prudential Financial recently addressed the challenge of producing large volumes of personalized content by working with Adobe and AI startup Gradial to create a virtual employee.

"We are, for the first time, onboarding a digital co-worker in the content authoring space," said Hema Widhani, chief digital and marketing officer at the financial services and insurance company.

The AI "employee" has been tasked with using behavioral, geolocation and real-time data to generate webpages tailored to the interests of each of the millions of customers and advisers who visit Prudential's web properties, Widhani said.

At last year's Aspen Ideas Festival, Prudential debuted an AI photo booth that outlines each user's potential retirement, complete with a simulated image of the person 20 years into the future. The project is designed to help identify new customers, said Widhani.

Since Prudential works in a highly regulated industry, it has begun testing evaluative AI agents that review all AI-generated content to determine whether it complies with relevant legal regulations and adheres to the company's brand voice, Widhani said. AI-generated content that is published under the names of Prudential executives requires an extra layer of scrutiny, she said.

Every AI process still requires some form of final human review, but the personalized webpages may become an exception to that rule, said Widhani.

The nature of the relationship between AI and its human reviewers is changing.

Consumer health products company Opella operates an AI "factory" that produces advance care planning materials for medical professionals alongside the hundreds of webpages, images and Instagram posts that it generates every day, said Chief Growth Officer Alberto Hernandez.

The company, which sells products from the antihistamine Allegra to the laxative Dulcolax, embeds at least one human regulatory adviser within its AI marketing team to catch and undo hallucinations, or instances when the algorithms spit out false information, Hernandez said.

To ensure that its AI-powered marketing materials are medically accurate, Opella also trains its AI agents using the expertise of healthcare professionals.

Opella is confident enough in the AI agents that have been trained on the voices of its many brands that it doesn't alter the work they produce beyond human fact-checking, Hernandez said. "We don't allow for interactions and changes, because [in the time it takes to] say, 'No, can you make the logo bigger,'" the AI could have produced another 100 pieces of content, Hernandez said.” [1]

1. Marketers Hand Brands Over to AI. Coffee, Patrick.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 21 Apr 2025: B4.