The AIs of Texas: The ANA’s Conference on AI and Technology for Marketers Delivers on Insights and Inspiration

The event also featured the unveiling of the winners of the ANA’s Marketing Technology Innovator Awards. Gold winners included Louise Cotterill from Kellanova, Mitsunaga Kikuchi from Shirofune, the Dell AdTech Team, and the Brandtech’s Gen AI team.

Several new AI and MarTech products were introduced at the conference, exclusively available to ANA members, including an extensive CMO Playbook for Marketing Technology a resource for CMOs to raise their level of acumen on marketing technology, the ANA AI for Marketers Tool Navigators with over 340 marketing and advertising AI tools represented, and the AI Marketing Transformation Report which reflects the results of a survey sent to the full membership of the ANA on their attitudes and usage of AI, comparing the results with a similar study fielded with CMOs. A preview of an Innovation Management Framework, developed in partnership with Cognitive Path was also provided to attendees in a workshop that kicked off the conference.

Several themes proliferated across the presentations of nearly 40 speakers:

• For many marketers, Generative AI has moved from the interest phase to the activation phase. Newell Brands’ Melanie Huet wowed the crowd with the degree to and impact of integrating AI into Newell Brands’ creative workflow, allowing months of product concepts and design work to be completed in days, in addition to storyboarding and advertising creation.
• Efficiency and the amount of work that can be done is well on its way to exceeding anything one person could do on their own, with some projections indicating that we are on a path to being able to complete five months of work in five hours.
• We are speedily entering the age of Agentic AI. AI agents will not only be able to take care of administrative tasks such as booking travel, restaurant reservations, or show tickets; they will also be your virtual Board of Directors or represent various departments within your organization, available at your beck and call. Over time, your agents will gain the ability to negotiate deals, review legal contracts, and optimize your supply chain, all while ensuring that humans are in the loop to review everything before hitting the purchase button.
• With the increased usage of AI Search tools such as SearchGPT, Perplexity, and Anthropic’s recent integration of realtime search into Claude, traditional search is beginning to twilight as “Answer Engines” begin to become the norm. Pete Blackshaw from Brandrank.ai joined by Lee Beech from Nestlé Canada, demonstrated the AI disruption through the funnel (first impressions, trust, purchase, sustainability, and product performance). With less clicking on links and more answers being brought directly to the consumer, marketers need to rethink SEO and focus on how these AI models perceive their brands and products.
• The Metaverse is not dead, but it is going omnichannel. From wearables to immersive and AR experiences, or using your phone to access the Metaverse, with AI integration, marketers will be able to thread messaging from the physical world to the digital world in greater depth and impact than ever before.
• In a riveting discussion on AI regulation and how government is using AI, Christopher Oswald, the ANA’s Executive Vice President Government Relations and Adobe’s Head of Gen AI Chris Duffey were joined by Texas State Representative, Giovanni Capriglione who recently introduced H.B. No 149, a bill that puts forth guardrails to ensure that governments cannot use AI for nefarious purpose, such as “social scoring” or collecting biometric data from public sources. Capriglione is looking to provide his constituents with AI tools to make the government more accountable, He has been working with the Texas comptroller to allow public access to data around every payment made by the state since 2013. Says Capriglione, “Transparency has two parts. Yes, you have the data out there, but can you make it accessible to the people? We want to give the people tools to hold us accountable.”

Of note, four of the industry’s most lauded forecasters and futurist influencers, Jack Myers, Shelly Palmer, Shiv Singh, and Rishad Tobaccowala all spoke and all of them reflected that we are entering an era of immense change, but all remained optimistic that the AI era will ultimately be a boon for marketers, who embrace an era of minute-by-minute chain. As Tobaccowala suggested, every marketer “should set aside an hour each day to learn something new.”

As Michael Donnelly, Executive Vice President AI, MarTech, and Marketing Futures at the ANA, pointed out on a LinkedIn post shortly after the conference, “What I saw in Austin wasn’t theory. It was clear evidence that those who embrace change and act responsibly NOW will quickly pull away from the pack in what is likely to be the most clear-cut winners and losers in one of the biggest races of our lifetime. And it left me feeling not just optimistic but ready.”

From marketers to technology providers, legislators, publishers, consultants, and thought leaders, the ANA AI and Technology Conference for Marketers provided a full, provocative, and engaging platform of learning and networking to meet the increasingly high-velocity AI and MarTech world of business today.

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