‘It’s the greatest sparring partner you can have’: EY’s CMO on AI adoption

“It’s a behavior change. Because I think for a lot of the teams, it’s not instinctive. There’s not a day that I’m not driving people mad saying ‘have you used it?’ Unless you experiment, you’ll fall behind,” he says.

EY has its own in-house marketing and consulting practice, the newly packaged EY Studio+, which develops work for clients. But as a brand, it still relies on agencies – WPP’s Ogilvy and the newly merged WPP Media – to create and plan its ads. Rudiazky says AI has transformed his briefing process for those agencies.

“It’s elevating the idea, the thinking. For me, AI is the greatest sparring partner you can have.”

EY’s marketing tagline, ‘The better the question the better the answer,’ is also a philosophy that permeates through the marketing function. For briefs, it has a “newsroom process” where it assembles all the “thinkers” to articulate the question it wants its agencies to answer. “Now we have the AI agent in there, too.”

“Where’s the biggest gain [from using AI]? Is it in the briefing process or at the supply end? My hunch is that we’re finding it’s at the briefing process, because a bad brief means bad creative work.”

Other advertisers are pushing forward with using AI in the creative development and execution of campaigns, but EY says it has been a slower mover because of the complex legal framework around it.

This isn’t a problem unique to EY. The World Federation of Advertisers, a body representing the biggest ad spenders globally, said data and IP concerns were the most common reason CMOs had for holding back on their adoption. WPP has invested heavily in OpenAI, a central AI platform powering content, media and insights across the group.

“The tools are there to do extraordinary work on paper,” says Rudaizky. “But legally, unless you own the source… that’s the big thing here we’re navigating with agencies. What’s the legal context for any creative content created with AI? I think that will come faster with the legal framework.”

It’s on a path to creating that framework with its agency partners. “We know certain things, certain technologies, we can’t use. We’ve got a big, proper policy, as you’d expect from EY. We do those regularly, but it’s important because, on the one hand, we want to go there fast. On the other hand, we have a responsibility to our customers.”

While legal issues are dominating the conversation, Rudaizky has also been thinking about how the commercial relationship with his agencies will change. Amid the rise of AI and the promise of efficiencies it will deliver, it’s raising questions on whether the time-based model the industry has largely relied on will be replaced with one based on output and outcomes.

Rudaizky is no stranger to the inner workings of ad agencies. He started his career at Saatchi & Saatchi and J Walter Thomson before spending nearly seven years as a client lead at WPP.

“Undoubtedly, there will be efficiencies in some part of that for me,” he says of the conversation he’s having with partners. “Then the question is, what else can I do more of so you get into the space of reaching more customers, where I can get to more media? So, will there be a balancing of some of the creative development costs? Undoubtedly. But that doesn’t mean to say the overall marketing investment doesn’t continue, because you can actually reach more. You can personalize more.

“Different financial models will emerge. I think agencies will create new models because AI will create new ways of engaging customers. Things are going to change and you can either take that, you can be shaped by it, or you can shape the future with it. And the best agencies will innovate and create a new model. We can probably reach more customers with more personalization, inspire them and grow faster with AI. That’s the ideal scenario.”