ANZ executive manager of marketing strategy and capability Kate Young told the Mumbrella Finance Marketing Summit 2026 that embedding AI into marketing teams is fundamentally a change management challenge, not a technology one. Speaking alongside Australian Centre for AI in Marketing CEO Louise Cummins on 12 August 2026, Young said marketers must now move past measuring adoption rates and start demonstrating genuine value through better work.
"What we're actually talking about with all of this work around an AI-enabled marketing future is change management," Young said. "It's actually changing the way we think about how we approach customer problems, how we deliver commercial outcomes, how we come together as a team, how teams work, the tasks that they do and the processes that govern them in terms of how they show up each day."
Enthusiasm alone won't carry the shift
Young and Cummins explored why early excitement about AI tools often fades without structural support. Bringing sceptics into the process matters as much as empowering early adopters. Teams that ignore resistant voices risk creating pockets of experimentation that never scale into organisation-wide capability.
The pair framed AI adoption as a redesign of workflows, team structures, and decision-making habits. Marketers who treat it as a software rollout miss the deeper operational changes required.
From adoption metrics to meaningful output
A key message from the session was the need to shift measurement. Tracking how many people use an AI tool tells a thin story. What counts is whether the work improves - faster creative testing, sharper customer insights, or campaigns that perform measurably better against commercial targets.
For marketing leaders, this means building evaluation frameworks that connect AI use to outcomes rather than activity. Young suggested that teams still early in their AI for Marketing adoption should resist the temptation to report vanity metrics like login frequency or prompt counts.
Why this matters for marketers
The session made clear that marketing managers who skip the organisational groundwork will see uneven results. AI tools can accelerate individual tasks, but without rethinking team processes and bringing sceptics into the fold, the gains stay isolated. For managers building their own capability, structured learning paths like the AI Learning Path for Marketing Managers offer a way to develop the change leadership skills that Young described as essential - not just technical know-how, but the ability to redesign how teams solve problems together.
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