AI in 2025: A practical brief for marketers
Artificial intelligence is no longer on the sidelines. It's now embedded in how people search, shop, watch, and interact-especially across Southeast Asia, where interest in AI is reportedly three times the global average. Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia all rank in the global top 20 for multimodal AI adoption, supported by a digital economy set to exceed US$300B in GMV by 2025, according to a report by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company. See the e-Conomy SEA overview.
For marketers, this means new creative formats, smarter media buying, and fresh distribution channels-plus a bigger challenge: staying visible and emotionally relevant as AI intermediates more of the customer experience.
Agentic AI expands autonomous capabilities
Agentic AI can initiate tasks, make choices, and run multi-step campaigns with feedback loops. It goes beyond prompt-response and starts to look like an autonomous teammate that plans, executes, and iterates.
- Define guardrails: goals, budget caps, compliance rules, brand do's/don'ts.
- Plug in the right data: product feeds, first-party events, approved messaging libraries.
- Start with bounded briefs: one audience, one offer, one channel-then scale.
- Measure the loop: track how the AI plans, tests, and adjusts; keep human veto power.
ChatGPT Atlas changes discovery behavior
OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas brings AI into the browser, summarising research, proposing next steps, and even acting on behalf of users. Younger audiences already skip traditional search-going straight to social feeds, eCommerce platforms, and generative tools-so AI-driven curation will sit between your brand and your buyer.
- Optimize for answers, not just rankings: structure content with clear takeaways and FAQs.
- Publish "decision assets": comparison tables, checklists, and how-tos that AIs can summarise.
- Track share-of-answers: monitor how often your brand is cited or summarised by AI tools.
Explore ChatGPT to understand how your content reads through an AI lens.
Goku AI levels up video creation
ByteDance's Goku AI generates high-quality video in real time from images, text, motion signals, and audio. Think lifelike human animation, adaptive generation, and precision control-without traditional shoots or editing suites.
- Build modular creative systems: interchangeable hooks, bodies, CTAs you can test at scale.
- Spin up avatar and UGC-style concepts for product demos, FAQs, and offer testing.
- Label synthetic media and align with platform policies; keep consent and rights management tight.
Google AI Max widens paid search reach
AI Max broadens match types, generates ad text from user intent and landing pages, and routes traffic to the most relevant page. Expect more query coverage, faster creative iteration, and new performance pockets-alongside tighter oversight needs.
- Restructure for intent: fewer, broader ad groups with clear conversion signals.
- Control the inputs: keep landing pages current; set brand-safe headline and description constraints.
- Watch query quality: refine negatives and audit auto-routed landing pages weekly.
- Use incrementality tests to verify lift, not just last-click gains.
Meta AI deepens personalisation across feeds
From 16 December 2025, interactions with Meta's generative AI-via text or voice-will help shape the content and ads people see on Facebook and Instagram. More signals mean more granular recommendations.
- Design for conversational triggers: create prompts and responses that reflect your brand voice.
- Expand creative variety: deliver multiple angles per audience to feed the recommender system.
- Update consent and disclosures to reflect new data signals; coordinate with legal early.
30/60/90-day action plan
Next 30 days
- Audit your AI exposure: where do AI systems rewrite, route, or recommend your content?
- Create a lightweight AI policy: approvals, brand rules, data usage, and disclosure.
- Pilot one agentic workflow: briefing, content generation, QA, and publishing for a single campaign.
Next 60 days
- Rework search structure for AI Max: consolidate ad groups, refresh negatives, and update landing pages.
- Ship 10-20 modular video assets with Goku-style production to test hooks, offers, and CTAs.
- Publish answer-ready content: product comparisons, pricing breakdowns, and buyer guides.
Next 90 days
- Stand up an "AI performance loop": weekly creative trials, audience insights, and routing fixes.
- Build a consent-first data pipeline to improve personalisation across Meta and your CRM.
- Set up MMM or geo holdouts to validate AI-driven lift beyond platform-reported metrics.
What this means for your team
Workflow changes beat tool chasing. Centralise your best messages, assets, and data, then let AI systems remix them within clear rules. Keep humans on strategy, brand voice, and safety; let machines handle iteration and routing.
If you're upskilling your team, explore focused training that maps tools to marketing outcomes-not just features.
AI now sits inside discovery, media, creative, and measurement. Treat it as core infrastructure. The brands that win will set sharp constraints, feed clean signals, and iterate faster than the market.
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