Marketing leaders from across Scotland gathered at the Glasgow Science Centre for Navigate: Now & Next 2026 a day shaped by the quality of its thinking and the honesty of its conversations.
Across nine sessions, speakers from Barbour, Unilever, Social Bite, JCDecaux, and beyond asked a question on many marketer's minds: if AI can handle more and more of the doing, what is our role now?
Crawford Hollingworth opened proceedings by confessing, with characteristic wit, that he genuinely loves AI and uses it constantly. Which is precisely why, he argued, understanding its limits matters so much. That spirit of intellectual honesty ran through every session that followed.
From JCDecaux's evidence-based deconstruction of what makes out-of-home creative actually work, to Julie Doleman's refreshingly candid account of failing an Oxford Business School AI course before deploying agentic AI to tackle one of the most complex regulatory environments in the world (the US health insurance system) the day kept returning to the same territory. The technology is not the hard part, leadership, clarity and the courage to invest in the things that AI cannot manufacture - are arguably harder, and more important.
Alice Thompson-Boyd's session on the neurobiology of purpose was perhaps the day's most unexpected highlight: a personal account of burnout and breakdown at Social Bite, the organisation that attracted George Clooney and Bill Clinton to its Edinburgh cafés, reframed through the lens of neuroscience. Her argument, that purpose is not a communications strategy but a biological reality, and that organisations performing purpose rather than living it will eventually pay a cost, landed with unmistakable force. Georgia Lewis Anderson closed the day with the kind of practical, perspective-led AI thinking that cuts through the noise: in a world of infinite AI-generated content, she reminded the room, opinion is the scarcest resource of all. The brands and leaders willing to say something specific, and stake a position on it, will be the ones worth listening to.
Five key themes of the day
The human advantage is not a soft story, it's the only strategy with a genuine moat
Crawford Hollingworth made the case with disarming clarity: creativity, emotional connection, cultural intuition, and moral reasoning are not just difficult for AI to replicate. They are structurally beyond it. As AI flattens the playing field on efficiency and execution, these capabilities become the only true source of competitive differentiation and the organisations investing in them now will find them increasingly hard for competitors to match.Purpose has a neurobiology and that changes everything
Alice Thompson-Boyd's session was the most intellectually rigorous and personally generous of the day. Her central insight - that the brain tracks two emotional streams simultaneously, how the work feels right now and how achieving the goal will feel - explains why so many high-performers burn out despite believing passionately in what they are doing. For marketers building brands around purpose, this is not a wellbeing conversation, it's a commercial one.Community remains the moat that AI cannot copy
Pip Jamieson, who has spent eleven years building communities including The Dots and private member communities for Soho House, Apple, and Dazed Media, brought both the strategic argument and the ground-level evidence. Rapha's community members spend three times more than non-members. The data on community as a commercial driver is consistent and compelling and the urgency of building owned community only grows as algorithmic reach becomes less reliable.AI adoption is a leadership decision, not a technology decision
Both Debora Koyama, who co-created Unilever's enterprise AI strategy endorsed at Board and Capital Markets level, and Julie Doleman from Patient.com converged on the same point: the organisations extracting real value from AI are those with strategic clarity, responsible governance, and the organisational alignment to act decisively. The technology is ready, the leadership work is what remains.Scotland's own innovation scene deserves far more attention
The Scottish Startup Showcase featuring BalanceOS, Koversable, and Appointedd was a reminder that world-class technology is being built here, not in spite of being outside Silicon Valley but partly because of it. Each company is solving a real, human problem with genuine focus. Appointedd's insight alone, that a booked appointment is one of the strongest and most undervalued purchase intent signals in retail, was worth the room's full attention.Three things to do now
Pick one hard problem and start
Julie Doleman's advice was the most practically useful of the day: stop trying to develop an AI transformation strategy and start by identifying one genuinely stubborn problem that has resisted solution. Find the right partner, focus tightly, and get in the water. The organisations making the most progress are not the ones with the biggest AI budgets they are the ones who started.Audit your out-of-home creative against the evidence
JCDecaux's research shows that seven in ten out-of-home ads fail to land their brand in the two seconds they have. Pull your current or planned OOH creative and ask honestly: does it demand attention in the first second? Is the brand bold and unmistakable? Does it make people feel something? If the answer to any of those is uncertain, the session's ten guidelines are a practical starting point and the Scottish data on regional relevance is a specific, measurable opportunity for anyone marketing in this market.Test whether your brand's purpose is lived or performed
Alice Thompson-Boyd's neuroscience is uncomfortably clear on this point: people's brains are tracking the authenticity of organisational purpose constantly, honestly, and unconsciously. The practical challenge is to look at your organisation's day-to-day decisions not the purpose statement, but the actual choices made under pressure and ask whether they reflect the same values you are communicating externally. If there is a gap, that gap is what your audience is already sensing.THE CONTENT
Beyond the Algorithm
With AI dominating almost every conversation in the industry right now, it’s no surprise that it shaped much of the discussion at this year’s Navigate Now & Next. There was a noticeable mix in the room…curiosity, excitement, and the slightly uncomfortable question of “what does this mean for us?” A review by Caitlin Armstrong
Leading Conversations podcast
Live from Navigate Now & Next
It was a day of actionable inspiration and practical conversations, bringing together Change Leaders, industry experts, and the people shaping marketing’s digital and technological evolution whilst redefining business, brand growth, and customer experience. As is now tradition, guest host Paul Borthwick was joined on stage by some Rising Stars of the Marketing Society's Future Leaders' Advisory Group (FLAG).
Headline Partner
Workshop Partner
