AI in Marketing: Balancing Automation and Human Creativity

AI is embedded in marketing but human creativity more valuable than ever: Report

Dentsu Creative's 2025 Global CMO Report reveals that while AI is integral to marketing, human creativity and empathy are more critical than ever. CMOs recognize AI's content enablement but emphasize the need for cultural impact and authentic connections. The report highlights the importance of balancing algorithmic optimization with originality and building trust in an AI-driven landscape. Dentsu Creative has released a report stating that while artificial intelligence (AI) is now firmly embedded in global marketing practice, the need for human imagination, empathy and cultural intelligence has never been greater. The agency's annual Global CMO Report 2025, Agents of Reinvention: Marketing at the Intersection of AI and Human Ingenuity, draws on insights from more than 1,950 senior marketers across 14 markets. The survey was conducted online in April 2025 across 14 countries, including the UK, US, India, Japan, Germany and Brazil, with representation from companies of all sizes. It identifies 10 key themes shaping the profession this year, from anticipating algorithms and building intimacy with consumers to investing in cultural trust in an era of "agentic AI". The findings reveal stark contradictions. Almost every chief marketing officer surveyed said they use AI in their personal workflow, with more than 30% doing so daily. Yet 87% believe modern marketing strategies will demand more human creativity and empathy, while 78% insist generative AI will never replace human imagination, an increase of 13 percentage points from last year. AI is seen as a crucial enabler of content at scale, but speed alone is not enough. Ninety per cent of CMOs want to combine agile production with intelligent data to deliver the right message at the right time, but 76% admit their ability to create content quickly remains a barrier to effective personalisation. The tension between visibility and distinctiveness is also rising. Seventy-one percent of CMOs agree that "if I don't win with the algorithm, I will be invisible", yet 79% fear that optimising too heavily for algorithms risks producing a "sea of sameness". Cultural impact is increasingly viewed as the antidote. Eighty-four per cent of CMOs said they need to win "share of culture" rather than just "share of voice", though 81% admit there are too few proven models to achieve this. Marketers are looking to entertainment tie-ups, community engagement and creator collaborations as solutions. The report also highlights the growing dominance of social and influencer-led content. Nine in ten CMOs believe it generates greater engagement than traditional advertising, while 91% said brands are now built through partnerships with creators and cultural tastemakers, a 14-point rise year on year. More than 70% plan to devote over a fifth of their budgets to innovation. Despite AI's rapid advance, trust remains paramount. Eighty-nine per cent of respondents believe agentic AI will have a profound impact on their businesses, but the same proportion stressed that trust and taste will matter more than ever as automated agents curate everything from travel itineraries to shopping baskets. Abbey Klaassen, global brand president of Dentsu Creative, said the findings underscored the need to connect creativity, media, data and production in real time. "The future of marketing is about augmenting human ingenuity with AI," she said. "It's not about doing more with less, it's about doing things we couldn't do before." Yasu Sasaki, the company's global chief creative officer, added: "AI is exceptionally good at prediction but creativity by its nature is unpredictable. The premium on originality and innovation has never been higher." Patricia McDonald, global chief strategy officer, warned that marketers face "an extraordinary series of paradoxes". She said: "The more we embrace AI, the more human we must become; unearthing the deeply personal truths, grounded in culture, that resonate, differentiate and scale." In India, Amit Wadhwa, CEO of Dentsu Creative & Media Brands South Asia, argued that brands will succeed only by "out-humaning the algorithm" through imagination, empathy and cultural trust.

AI agents collapse the wall between marketing and CX | Marketing | Campaign India

From HUL's virtual try-ons to Zepto's AI personas, brands and agencies face new roles as machines reshape leadership and trust. In most organisations, marketing and customer experience once ran on parallel tracks. One built desire. The other built loyalty. That separation no longer exists. AI agents are collapsing the gap between awareness and retention, between acquisition and advocacy. And as they do, the roles of CMOs and CXOs are being rewritten in real time. It's not about adding AI to an existing playbook. It's about leading in a world where the playbook itself is generated, adjusted and executed by intelligent systems that never sleep. Across industries, brands are already adapting. Consider Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL). It is embedding AI into decades-old operations across every layer of the customer journey. On the other hand, challengers like Zepto are born AI-first, designing go-to-market strategies, support systems and intelligence layers around real-time consumer feedback. Whether traditional or new-age, firms now face a single reality: brand leadership is about orchestrating systems, not just strategies. So, what does leadership look like in this AI-led landscape? Leadership in an AI-first era The CMO who stops at campaign launches is already behind. The CXO who only worries about net promoter score (NPS) is too. AI agents don't acknowledge silos. They operate end-to-end. From discovery to retention, they adjust the customer journey in real time. To keep up, leadership itself must evolve. Today, CMOs are leading AI enablement pods, focusing on cross-functional team training and monitoring AI agents across the funnel. CXOs are hiring 'Experience Prompt Engineers' who fine-tune how AI interprets user behaviour and responds contextually. Leadership in this environment demands a new blend: data fluency, AI tooling literacy and ethical oversight. And these qualities need to be embedded into every decision rather than bolted on later. "These shifts aren't hypothetical. They're happening right now, and that too at scale," the author notes. HUL and Zepto: Lessons from the frontline The AI evolution is already visible in two very different playbooks. Legacy brand HUL is reimagining engagement by combining AI, natural language processing (NLP) and martech to drive personalised experiences. Its beauty brands are introducing AI-enabled skin and hair analysers, virtual try-ons and AR-guided tutorials. With more than five million consumer trials and conversion rates above 2.5%, these tools are turning technology into measurable outcomes. On the other end of the spectrum, Zepto is recasting brand intelligence with Zepto Atom, its AI suite. Atom creates consumer personas -- data-rich customer profiles that let marketers run interactive sessions with virtual customers, test messaging, analyse drop-offs and deploy campaigns in real time. According to Zepto's leadership, this toolkit compresses what was once a multi-week, multi-agency loop into minutes, powered by first-party behavioural data. Whether it's lead qualification, post-purchase engagement or creative optimisation, AI agents are no longer assistants. They're co-owning the customer journey. The agency role is shifting from production to orchestration. When AI agents can generate, test and deploy creative in real time, the traditional creative cycle gets disrupted. Yet, this isn't the end of creativity -- it's a reallocation. The smartest agencies now help brands decide where human creativity offers irreplaceable nuance and where AI's speed and scalability win. They are building proprietary agent workflows, maintaining brand voice consistency across millions of touchpoints and guiding clients on how to layer human insights into machine-driven customer experience. This doesn't mean fewer ideas. It means faster iteration, tighter feedback loops and always-on storytelling. But acceleration without clarity is a risk. Knowing the human-AI handoff points becomes essential. AI handles high-volume, low-complexity tasks well -- answering FAQs at 2 a.m., adjusting discounts mid-conversation, or flagging frustration before it's voiced. But edge cases still belong to humans. Sensitive complaints, crisis moments, irregular requests and emotional nuance require human intervention. The most effective organisations map these transitions carefully: where AI prepares the human, where it stays in the loop but doesn't lead, and where human contact is non-negotiable. The goal isn't to slow things down but to ensure speed and empathy coexist. Bias. Hallucinations. Consent. These are not afterthoughts in an AI rollout. They are front-page leadership issues. Driving conversions with a biased model or prioritising efficiency over transparency risks eroding trust and damaging brand equity in the long run. Leaders are increasingly aligning with frameworks such as India's DPDP Act and California's CCPA to ensure that AI systems safeguard privacy while delivering value. But principles alone aren't enough; they must be operationalised. This means actively mitigating bias, ensuring fair outcomes, embedding explainable AI, and treating sustainability as a growth lever. Trust isn't just a brand value anymore. It's infrastructure. This is also where AI stops being a plug-in tool and starts owning the entire go-to-market journey. AI agents and the funnel When designed well, AI agents do more than optimise funnel stages. They connect them. Go-to-market AI links revenue data across CRM, ad platforms, website analytics and customer success tools, mapping the entire journey. It can reveal why some leads convert faster, which touchpoints influence deal size, and what early signals predict churn. According to industry reports, companies that dedicate more than 50% of their GTM tech stack to AI significantly outperform peers. This isn't just automation. It's a rethinking of go-to-market, where every touchpoint doubles up as insight and action. Trust as the currency Naturally, this shift is redrawing organisational charts. The rise of AI agents has created positions that didn't exist a few years ago. Agent Orchestrators manage multi-agent systems across marketing and CX. CX Prompt Engineers shape the tone, timing and nuance of AI responses. These hybrid roles demand skills that are part creative, part technical and part strategic -- qualities not produced by traditional career paths. Forward-looking organisations are retraining as much as recruiting. But even amid this transformation, one constant remains: trust. AI brings speed, scale and intelligence. But these are now baseline expectations. The real differentiator is confidence. If customers walk away from an interaction feeling more understood, more in control, and more reassured, then the tech did its job. If not, the AI becomes just more noise. In the age of AI, leadership isn't about keeping up with machines. It's about ensuring machines keep up with the brand.

CMOs lean on AI, but human ingenuity still holds ground | Advertising | Campaign India

While over 30% use it daily, they emphasise that brand strategy will require more human imagination than ever. Artificial intelligence has moved from 'emerging' to embedded in global marketing practice. However, senior marketers believe its rise has only heightened the need for creativity, empathy and cultural intelligence. That is the central finding of The 2025 CMO Report: Agents of Reinvention - Marketing at the Intersection of AI and Human Ingenuity, released by Dentsu Creative this week. Based on inputs from more than 1,950 senior marketing leaders across 14 markets, the study identifies 10 themes shaping marketing in 2025, ranging from algorithm management and intimacy-driven engagement to trust, taste and the rise of agentic AI. The results highlight contradictions that define the modern marketer's role. While almost every CMO surveyed has integrated AI into their personal workflow -- and over 30% use it daily -- most also emphasise that brand strategy will require more human imagination than ever. AI as enabler, not replacement Marketers are leaning heavily on AI to scale content and drive efficiency. According to the report, 90% of respondents want to combine agile production with intelligent data to deliver the right message at the right moment. Yet 76% say their ability to create content quickly remains a barrier to true personalisation. This efficiency-versus-creativity tension is one of several paradoxes highlighted in the findings. While 87% of CMOs believe modern strategy requires more creativity, empathy and humanity, 78% assert that generative AI will never replace human imagination -- a rise of 13 percentage points from 2024. Patricia McDonald, global chief strategy officer, Dentsu Creative, described the dilemma bluntly. She opined that contemporary marketers face an extraordinary series of paradoxes and contradictions. "Automation is vital to keep up, humanity is vital to stand out. They must win with the algorithm or be invisible, but optimise too closely and they become indistinguishable," she noted. "If every brand chases the same signals with the same tools, we are simply running harder to stand still. The result is that the more we embrace AI, the more human we must become; unearthing the deeply personal truths, grounded in culture, that resonate, differentiate and scale." Algorithms and the risk of sameness The report finds that 71% of CMOs agree that if they don't win with the algorithm, they will become invisible. At the same time, 79% worry that tailoring too closely to algorithmic signals risks creating a 'sea of sameness'. For many, winning in culture appears to be the counterbalance. About 84% of CMOs say brands need to secure share of culture, not just share of voice. Yet 81% acknowledge there are few proven models to achieve this. In practice, leaders are turning towards entertainment tie-ups, creator collaborations and community engagement to bridge the gap. According to Yasu Sasaki, global chief creative officer of Dentsu, the report clearly underpins that while clients are embracing AI at pace, they remain committed to the power of human craft and creativity. "As we adopt AI at scale, it places an ever-greater premium on originality and innovation: AI is exceptionally good at prediction but creativity by its very nature is unpredictable. What is most exciting is when AI and human creativity come together to unlock new possibilities, spot new patterns and shape new futures," he stated. The creator economy as growth engine The shift towards cultural integration is reflected in how budgets are being allocated. 90% of CMOs now believe social and influencer content generates more engagement than traditional advertising, while 91% agree that brand-building today happens through partnerships with creators, platforms and cultural voices. This figure is up 14 percentage points year-on-year. Still, 82% express concern about ceding control to such collaborations. The appetite for innovation is also increasing. More than 70% of CMOs plan to invest at least 20% of their budgets in innovation, including creator-led formats, social-first content and experimental technologies. Abbey Klaassen, global brand president, Dentsu Creative believes that the future of marketing is about augmenting human ingenuity with AI to enable a level of pace and personalisation not previously possible. And this hinges on not about doing more with less, it's about doing things one couldn't do before: connecting creativity, media, data and production to meet the right customer with the right message in the right moment, leveraging the modern content supply chain to show up in more of those moments than was possible in the past. "What we hear from our clients, and the report bears that out, is that they need seamless integration of data, AI-enabled production and their existing martech stack to realise the potential of real time creativity to accelerate growth," she added. Agentic AI and the question of trust One of the most debated themes in the study is the rise of 'agentic AI', where autonomous systems curate travel itineraries, shopping baskets or entertainment choices. A full 89% of CMOs surveyed believe such tools will profoundly impact their businesses. At the same time, the same proportion say trust and taste will matter more than ever in this context. The implication, according to the report, is that while AI agents may automate consumer decision-making, brands that fail to cultivate cultural relevance and emotional trust risk being filtered out altogether. Amit Wadhwa, CEO, Dentsu Creative and Media Brands, South Asia, Dentsu, observed that algorithms may shape what we see; but it is imagination, empathy and culture that shape what we remember. "In India's dynamic landscape, true success will come to brands that out-human the algorithm, fusing AI with creativity, data with intimacy, and innovation with cultural trust. Those who dare to co-create authentically and build experiences rooted in trust will not only grow their brands but also shape the future of society," he emphasised. Local and global tensions While the report takes a global perspective, its themes resonate strongly in emerging markets such as India. With platforms like short video and e-commerce apps competing for consumer attention, the tension between efficiency-driven automation and culturally nuanced creativity is especially stark. The study suggests that the more marketers rely on algorithms, the more they must invest in localised insights, cultural hooks and authentic partnerships to avoid uniformity. This duality -- global AI adoption combined with hyperlocal cultural differentiation -- frames much of the challenge for CMOs in 2025. Ultimately, CMOs worldwide are converging on the idea that AI will become foundational, not optional, in marketing operations. But they are equally convinced that the differentiation consumers remember will come from human qualities -- creativity, originality, empathy and cultural fluency. As McDonald framed it: "Automation is vital to keep up, humanity is vital to stand out." With algorithms increasingly shaping visibility and commerce, and agentic AI poised to automate more decisions, success will likely hinge on whether brands can fuse technology with cultural intelligence. The battle is not only for consumer attention, but also for trust and distinctiveness in a marketplace at risk of sameness. With Google leaning on AI-driven search ads, Meta doubling down on AI-powered commerce, and Amazon expanding its retail media muscle, Dentsu's findings suggest CMOs will need to sharpen their cultural edge rather than just their algorithmic chops. The battleground is not merely who has the best AI tools, but who can fuse them with trust, taste and human imagination. In a crowded adtech race, cultural fluency may be the ultimate differentiator. So, while the CMO's toolkit in 2025 may be governed by algorithms, but its edge will still be defined by human ingenuity.