Twelve senior marketers. One table at the National Gallery. No slides.
In March 2026, we brought together a carefully selected group of VP, Director, and CMO-level marketers from brands including Monzo, Meta, Twitch, Experian and more, for an honest conversation about what AI in global marketing is actually doing to their work.
No headlines or hype but what they are actually are dealing with day to day.
The conversation was held under Chatham House Rules so nothing is attributed but every tension in this article is real. And if you are running campaigns across multiple markets right now, most of it will be familiar...
If you're interested in joining our next roundtable, you can register here.
Everyone is producing more. Nobody is sure it is better.
AI has made teams more productive. More assets, more campaigns, more content, faster and at lower cost than anyone could have managed a few years ago. Nobody in the room was dismissing that. But when people looked back honestly at their output, a more uncomfortable question surfaced: how much of this is actually useful?
The volume is up. The signal-to-noise ratio is not. And there is a growing sense that the skill most at risk is not creation, it is curation. AI can generate at speed. It cannot do taste, storytelling, or cultural context.
One brand strategist in the room described testing AI on strategic narrative work. Their senior stakeholder's response was unambiguous: "What is this?" "AI and a bit of me." "Redo it."
The teams navigating this well are not the ones producing the most. They are the ones being precise about what actually needs to be made, and what does not.
Why has the operating model not caught up?
Every organisation represented in the room has adopted AI tools. Not one has fundamentally changed how they work around them.
The bottleneck in AI adoption used to be budgets, skills, and leadership buy-in. Those have largely been solved. The constraint has moved inside the operating model itself, into governance, decision rights, and the question of who is actually checking what goes out the door.
Local teams and agencies are already using AI independently, because they are under pressure and the tools are accessible. But without shared standards or central visibility, brand consistency erodes quietly. Not through one big failure, but through hundreds of small compromises across markets.
Someone at the table called it "the messy middle." Everyone nodded.
AI does not create complexity. It amplifies whatever system sits underneath it. If the system is solid, AI makes it more effective. If the system has gaps, AI makes those gaps bigger, and harder to spot.
The governance question is not a technology problem. It is an organisational one. And most teams have not answered it yet.
Authenticity is now a strategic decision. And brand equity determines how much risk you can take.
Consumers are getting better at detecting AI-generated content. The tells are subtler than they used to be, but the suspicion is growing. For brands built on distinctive voice and cultural credibility, that is not just a reputational risk. It is commercial.
The Coca-Cola AI Christmas ad came up. It drew industry criticism, but tested well with consumers. The reason, as someone in the room framed it: a hundred years of brand love fills in the gaps. Consumers saw the missteps, but the nostalgia the ad triggered was stronger, pulling them back to something they had known and loved for decades.
A newer brand making the same mistakes gets no such grace. For scaling brands entering new markets, AI-generated content that misses culturally carries disproportionate risk. There is no accumulated goodwill to absorb it.
This means authenticity can no longer be treated as a brand value that exists in the background. It has to be a deliberate strategic decision, made explicitly at the point where AI enters the process. Where does human judgement stay in? Where does it hand over? Who decides, and on what basis? The industry is also moving toward labelling of AI-generated content, with regulatory consultations already underway. The brands engaging with that question now will be better placed when the answer arrives...
The default question has flipped. And it is making people uncomfortable.
Toward the end of the morning, the conversation shifted to something more forward-looking. Across the room, people recognised the same cultural shift: the question "why can't AI do this?" is coming up more and more. Human involvement now has to be justified. That is significant, and unsettling, because the tools are not ready for everything yet.
The problem with that framing is what it does to the conversation. It puts human judgement on trial rather than keeping it in the room. People start defending instincts they should not have to defend. AI gets applied in places where it genuinely is not the right tool, not because anyone decided it was, but because nobody felt they could push back.
Reframing the question changes the dynamic entirely. Moving from "why can't AI do this?" to "how far can AI take us?" keeps human judgement as part of the process rather than an obstacle to it. It creates space to ask honestly: where does AI add real value here, and where does it hand over?
The teams navigating this well are not the ones defaulting to AI or defaulting to humans. They are the ones asking better questions about where each belongs, and building the confidence to answer honestly.
Key takeaway
AI in global marketing is not a technology problem, it is an organisational one. The brands that will perform best internationally are the ones building the governance frameworks, operating standards, and human oversight structures that make AI work properly at scale. Volume without those foundations does not produce better campaigns. It produces more of the same, faster, with the errors harder to spot.
Be in the room where it happens
Our roundtables are invite-only, senior by design, and kept deliberately small. VP, Director, and CMO level. Carefully curated so the conversation stays practical, direct, and genuinely useful.
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If you have an international campaign you think needs our help, get in touch today.
