A childhood fascination with R2-D2 and C-3PO shaped Dr. Mark T Maybury’s career long before AI became a boardroom obsession. Nearly 50 years on, that same curiosity is influencing how Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s most complex defense organizations, thinks about AI, robots and responsibility.
Dr Mark Maybury, Lockheed Martin
The first time Dr Mark T Maybury watched Star Wars, he didn’t leave the cinema dreaming of piloting an X-wing. There were no fantasies of hyperspace, heroics or lightsabers. What stuck – what lodged itself so deeply it would go on to shape an entire career – was something else entirely. The robots.
“I was fascinated by the human robot interaction… a robot that had emotions, that could communicate… It could think and solve problems,” he says.
He was 13 years old. The year was the mid-1970s. And somewhere between R2-D2’s quiet competence and C-3PO’s anxious empathy, a lifelong obsession with human-machine interaction was born.
Fast-forward nearly five decades, and that same curiosity is still driving him – only now, it’s playing out on the show floor at CES. Today, he’s vice-president of commercialization at Lockheed Martin, tasked with scouting emerging technologies and deciding which ones are ready to move from imagination to real-world impact.
It’s a perspective shaped by having arrived early – sometimes uncomfortably so. Long before platforms like YouTube existed, Maybury was working on systems that could automatically analyze and extract information from broadcast video. When he demonstrated the technology to CNN more than two decades ago, it worked – but the infrastructure to support it simply wasn’t there. “Sometimes it’s painful to be ahead of the world, because your stuff isn’t what the world is ready for,” he says.
And while Lockheed Martin may be best known for aircraft, space systems and defense technology, his perspective on AI feels unexpectedly relevant to marketers grappling with their own uneasy relationship with innovation.
Because strip away the acronyms, scale and complexity, and the question he’s asking is one every brand is now facing: how do you adopt transformative technology without losing trust, control… or your humanity?
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What’s striking is that his fascination with robots has never been about spectacle. Even now, walking CES incognito, he’s not drawn to the flashiest demos or loudest claims.
Instead, he’s watching for something subtler: how machines behave around people. “How well does that robot do manipulation? How well does that car deal with noise or congestion or risky situations?” he says. He’s looking for what’s disciplined.
It’s a mindset rooted in decades of experience across academia, government, the Air Force and the commercial world – including a stint as chief technology officer of Stanley Black & Decker, where he worked hands-on with robotics in manufacturing.
For all his enthusiasm, Maybury is clear-eyed about the limits of today’s technology – a caution shaped by decades working at the frontier of AI.
“I love generative AI – except it’s biased, it’s brittle and it’s baroque,” he says. “It’s complicated, it’s not very intuitive, and frankly, it doesn’t understand itself.”
That gap between what machines promise and what they can reliably deliver is why he’s always been drawn to a more collaborative vision of intelligence – one that feels closer to the robots that first captured his imagination on screen.
“We talk a lot about augmented intelligence,” he says. “The idea was never to replace people. It was to help humans learn faster and do better work.”
Inside Lockheed Martin, AI is already deeply embedded. Tens of thousands of employees use AI tools every week. Thousands of internal agents operate across engineering, research, manufacturing and operations.
Every system sits within strict governance frameworks. Every use case is trained, monitored and evaluated. Human oversight is fundamental.
This offers a useful counterpoint to the current rush to automate everything. AI can help generate, analyze, test and optimize at scale – but the strategy, judgement and emotional intelligence still need to come from people. In fact, the more powerful the tools become, the more important that human layer is.
In a recent paper, Maybury describes how Lockheed Martin moved from a place that many organizations find themselves stuck in – what he calls “pilot purgatory”: the phase where organizations experiment endlessly with AI but never trust it enough to scale. The breakthrough, he argues, wasn’t better models, but better structure – a system designed to let thousands of people use AI freely, without losing control of outcomes.
It’s a reminder that the real barrier to AI adoption is confidence. Without governance, traceability and shared standards, speed becomes a liability rather than an advantage.
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One of the most compelling lessons for marketing leaders is how seriously Lockheed Martin treats responsibility as a core part of its brand.
“If you’re going to use someone’s material, you need consent – and you need compensation,” he says. Before anyone can use the company’s internal AI platforms, they must undergo legal, ethical and technical training. These are non-negotiables, with guardrails designed in from the start.
“It starts with governance. You can’t use the platform unless you’ve been trained – and part of that training is legal,” he explains.
That level of rigor might feel extreme to a marketing team experimenting with generative tools. But the underlying principle is highly transferable.
Every brand using AI today is making choices that affect trust – whether they acknowledge it or not. What data are you training on? Whose work are you using? How transparent are you being with audiences?
The reputational risks of getting this wrong are already clear. “Brand is important… There are huge risks with some of these advanced technologies, and you want to make sure you understand those and mitigate them.”
One of the most practical takeaways for marketers, according to Maybury, is deceptively simple: train AI on your own material.
“If you have brilliant people and brilliant copy that’s yours, you can tune models on that. That’s how you keep your voice,” he says. Rather than relying on generic models, organizations should be tuning systems using their own tone of voice, IP and expertise, allowing AI to act as an extension of the brand, not a distortion of it.
At Lockheed Martin, for example, AI is used to analyze, critique and refine work. Systems are encouraged to challenge assumptions, flag weaknesses and surface alternative perspectives. That’s where AI becomes a sparring partner for creative teams.
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One of the biggest shifts ahead is embodied AI: intelligence that lives at the edge, embedded in physical objects rather than centralized systems.
It fundamentally changes how brands show up in people’s lives. Experiences will increasingly be spatial, contextual and behavioral, rather than just visual or verbal. Maybury’s paper also hints at why this shift feels so consequential: as intelligence moves away from centralized platforms, the interface stops being a screen and starts being behavior. At that point, trust is something people experience.
Think assistants that understand intent, not commands. Interfaces that respond to emotion, not clicks. Products that anticipate needs rather than wait for instructions.
This is where the Star Wars comparison comes full circle. The most memorable robots weren’t impressive because of what they could do, but because of how they related to humans. That’s a branding lesson hiding in plain sight.
Despite the scale of the technology on display, Maybury’s outlook on CES is refreshingly human. “CES is very inspirational. You see things from marketing, product, support services,” he says. “All those different perspectives give you a much more holistic view of where things are going.”
And inspiration, he argues, is exactly what AI should deliver when used well. Not fear. Not fatigue. But momentum. Appropriately applied, AI can give people back time. It can reduce friction. It can create space for deeper thinking and better ideas. But only if organizations are intentional about how they deploy it.
Which brings us back to that cinema, all those years ago. The robots that captured his imagination weren’t perfect. They were flawed, emotional, occasionally chaotic – and deeply human in the way they interacted with the world. “Even today, I look at those robots and think I’d like to see that in the world,” he says.
That, perhaps, is the most important takeaway for marketers navigating the AI era: the future doesn’t necessarily belong to those with the most advanced technology, but to those who use it most thoughtfully. Because no matter how powerful the machine, it’s still the story – and the trust behind it – that determines whether people believe.
Lockheed Martin
Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company and is principally engaged in the research, design, development,...