With more than 27 years of experience across McCann, VICE, Ogilvy and Zeno Group, Suresh Raj, Chief Growth Officer at M+C Saatchi Group, North America and Vice Chair of The Marketing Society New York, explores why marketing leaders must use AI to deepen consumer trust and strengthen the craft, rather than chasing short-term cost savings at the expense of their people.
The marketing world is moving at two speeds right now, and that mismatch is the real challenge facing leaders. AI is genuinely revolutionary and has clearly produced a fundamental shift in how marketing operates. It delivers real-time consumer data, enables precision targeting, and lets brands react at a speed that wasn't possible a few years ago.
At the same time, many organizations are pointing that capability at the wrong target and using it to cut cost and reduce headcount in pursuit of short-term efficiency. The tension isn't the technology itself, it's what leaders choose to do with it, and that choice is exactly where the job of a marketing leader now lives. The marketing leader's job in this transition is to harness the technology in service of trust, and enhance the craft, and the people who practice it. Everything else, the briefs, the headcount pressure, the race to automate, is a test of whether leaders, on both brand and agency side, hold that line or trade it away for short-term savings.
Consider what's actually landing on agency desks. Briefs are increasingly asking agencies, in effect, to use AI to cut non-working spending, often by significant amounts, while doing the work with fewer people. In other words, to architect their own obsolescence. Agencies are taking these briefs because the volume and value of work appears to be a shrinking pool. At the same time, some brand leaders are stating openly that they've found ways to eliminate the need for agencies altogether. The industry is racing to prove that the human element is optional. That is not a competitive strategy. It's an incredibly dangerous miscalculation of what actually sustains a brand, not to mention a complete obliviousness to the trust consumers inherently have in brand and its values.
The primary error is conflating cost efficiency with competitive advantage. The brands that will lead over the next two to three years won't be the ones simply chasing speed and cost reduction, it'll be the ones using AI as a tool for understanding, and getting to know their consumers deeply enough to build genuine trust. This is particularly important in a time when economic pressures are driving consumption patterns due to pricing sensitivities, when trust and emotional connection to a brand often become more prominent growth indicators. So when AI-driven data on purchasing habits and behavior patterns is used to inform and tell better, more authentic stories, that's when trust - durable, compounding trust - becomes invaluable.
The marketing leader's job in this transition is to keep the brand and organization focused on that outcome.
In practice, that means three things:
1. Acknowledging uneven adoption
People are at different stages of confidence and capability with AI, and that's expected. The leader's role is to create the psychological safety for teams to experiment without fear that experimentation will cost them their jobs.2. Redefining what makes a strong marketer today
Speed of prompting and volume of output aren't the differentiators. What matters now is the strategist who can discern what the data is actually saying, the storyteller who can turn that insight into a geniune human storytelling moment, and the leader who can hold the line on craft while still moving at the pace the market demands.3. Naming what's at stake, directly
Marketing has sustained itself for decades because it creates value through human insight, creative judgment, and relationship-building. AI doesn't remove the need for that. If anything, it raises the bar for it. But only if leaders are willing to say so plainly, rather than letting the efficiency argument go unchallenged.Two to three years from now, the organizations that come out ahead will be the ones whose leaders used AI to deepen customer relationships rather than hollow them out, that kept people central to the strategy as opposed to replacing humans with tech tools, and the ones who treat their teams as assets to develop rather than costs to eliminate.
The marketing leader's job in the AI transition is to harness the technology in service of trust, to protect the craft and the people who practice it, and to keep to keep laser focused on the end audience, who remain decidedly human.
