How AI Use Evolved at Companies in 3 Diverse Sectors

With artificial intelligence continuing to advance, the industry is starting to move from the “robots are coming for our jobs” to acceptance.

AI platform Brand.AI sponsored a group chat at ADWEEK House during Advertising Week New York looking into exactly how different facets of the industry are embracing AI. Founder and co-CEO Chelsey Susin Kantor represented Brand.AI, joined by Dorothy Ann Advincula, global lead, measurement and insights at Uber Advertising, and Rakia Reynolds, founder and executive officer of creative marketing agency Skai Blue Media.

The platform

Kantor’s AI journey began at Google in 2016, when CEO Sundar Pichai initiated a pivot from mobile-first to AI-first. At the time, she sought to quell fears about AI by learning as much as possible about “how people thought about AI, the role that they thought it was playing in their lives, the language and stories that we should be using to convey our vision for AI, and, most important, the value it had at the time.”

The next big shift came when ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and people could suddenly directly interact with the technology, which was already part of tools they were using.

Kantor left her job at Meta in May 2023 to launch Brand.AI, and she said she wants to “reset the stage” and talk about how the technology can move beyond handling simple, tedious tasks to helping fuel new ideas and creativity, “as more of a copilot than just a delegator.”

The brand

For Advincula, the most important purpose of AI is taking the massive amounts of data Uber Advertising generates and “helping make sense of that data in a in an accessible way.”

She shared an example of a whiteboarding session with one of the company’s advertisers, in which the advertiser only came up with four things they wanted from the session.

“We spent the next hour showing the tools and solutions that my team can provide and the depth of the data that Uber has,” Advincula said, which resulted in going from those initial four requests to “the entire room talking and brimming with all of these ideas.”