AWNY 2025: Everyone wants to use AI — some are still scrutinizing it

Another year, another Advertising Week New York dominated by artificial intelligence.

Ever since the technology sprang into the mainstream with the ascent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, the ad industry has been grappling with how to apply the technology practically across the supply chain.

If this year’s AWNY was any indication, many advertisers and marketers are desperate to implement AI into their workflows — yet more cautious than ever about its impact on privacy and creativity. If I had to sum up the state of AI in advertising after this week, I’d say: mixed.

“There’s different expectations from different advertisers as to what we’re doing with AI and how comfortable they are with us using it,” said Jennifer Laing, senior vice president of operations at Causal, during a panel on Tuesday. “We’re definitely seeing more scrutiny than ever in our practices.”

“On the flip side, [advertisers are] also saying they’re building their own internal AI tools. So, we’re feeling the pressure that we must be doing something with AI while also being under a level of scrutiny that we’ve never seen before.”

Education, trust might be roadblocks for some marketers

A report by Contentful and The Atlantic’s research arm, Atlantic Insights, highlighted a gap between intention and impact — which was explored in one of Monday’s panel discussions. Ninety-six percent of CMOs globally surveyed want to use AI, but only 65% of companies are making meaningful investments in the tech. Just 18% said AI has reduced their reliance on developers or data teams.

Some of the hesitation might come from a lack of education, experts speculated.

“A lot of people in this industry who are senior in their career don’t like to ask a lot of questions,” says Rich Raddon, co-founder and co-CEO of Zefr, which uses AI to measure brand safety.

“But this is a time to be very curious and vulnerable. … I think the industry is behind in understanding the fundamentals. What’s so challenging about it is that it’s an industry that’s moving so quickly.”

To be fair, other reporting paints a rosier picture. According to GWI research, 93% of advertisers and marketers in the U.S. that use AI believe it has had a positive impact on audience understanding.

“Everyone is interested in AI and trying to understand two things: who [their] audiences are and their key behavioral points in order to better understand these audiences,” Misha Williams, GWI’s COO, tells The Current.

“But the limiting factor might be trust,” Williams adds, noting reports suggesting AI is already facing a data shortage that risks “low-quality output.”

“People want to use it, but they may not be comfortable with the outputs, with all of the stats they’re seeing.”

Zefr’s Raddon says that the rise of “synthetic data” that is created algorithmically and not generated from real-world events will make human check-ins “more necessary than ever.”

AI is creating new marketing math

Experts say closing the gap will take focus over fluff.

In other words, marketers can’t expect AI to solve everything; they need to focus on their specific goals, whether around campaign performance, data collection, workflow or anything else.

“Focus on two discrete elements: things that cause customer delight and things that cause customer despair,” Scott Howe, CEO of LiveRamp, said during a presentation on Monday. “So, as you think about AI and the signals you collect, if you start with those two options, history tells you that you’ll be a lot more successful than if you focus on everything.”

Mars Inc. offered a case study in action. During a Monday panel, Mars Global CMO Gülen Bengi described how Justin Timberlake’s TikTok post about Snickers ice cream was boosted by Michael Phelps and the sports community. The company was able to use AI to directly link how the social media buzz drove increased sales.

“In that past, we would have known that was a good thing; now, we know how much sales uplift that creates. … Knowing that is tremendously value,” Bengi said.

But if this all sounds more like math than marketing, that’s because it is. Two presenters I saw this week had backgrounds in physics — which is two more than I expected.

“This is an intersection of scientific discovery and creativity that actually has real business value that we can attach to this fragmented world of brand-building,” Bengi added. “We are going to liberate creativity through math.”

Optimism for AWNY 2026

Most people The Current spoke with were optimistic that the conversation around AI will mature by next year’s AWNY.

“I think people will be a bit more educated a year from now,” Zefr’s Raddon says. “There’s a lot of disinformation and misinformation about what AI can and can’t do, so I think we’re going through a period of people saying a lot of bombastic things, but, ultimately, that will get vetted out.”

“We’re seeing entry-level use cases, such as understanding who their audience is,” GWI’s Williams says. “But if we can advance the conversation from today to next year, it is much more pervasive, where companies are talking about agent to agent, where they’re using one agent to control many in order to scale their business.”