Jamie Allen on why AI is re-engineering marketing, not replacing it
CES has plenty of spectacle. Jamie Allen brought something else: clarity. The Nvidia director working across adtech, streaming and sports argues that AI isn't here to erase marketing-it's here to rebuild how the work gets done.
Creativity amplified, not replaced
"You can't create good creative without good creatives," he says. The best ideas still come from people. AI speeds the draft, reduces friction and expands what's possible inside a deadline.
Tools are getting simpler again, which opens the door for more makers. Think less software gymnastics, more time on style, taste and concept. Platforms like Canva and Adobe prove the point: more people can make, and pros can move faster.
From hype to hard math
The early buzz missed the grind: causality, data quality and proof of impact. That's where focus is shifting. CMOs who win are partnering with CIO, CISO and legal to deploy responsibly-no more siloed experiments that can't scale.
Marketing is getting more operational and technical, without losing its creative core. That's a good trade.
SaaS is the new agency OS
Inside most brands, finance, ops and email already run on platforms. Marketing is catching up. Agencies, consultancies and integrators are moving from billable hours to deployable software, often powered by agentic AI.
Allen points to the model in motion: WPP, Accenture and Monks are building tools clients can plug in. Nvidia's role is enablement, not end-product-its expanded Nematron family of models gives teams smaller, specialized building blocks instead of one giant model for everything. In his words: "The media industry is made up of lots of small problems… each one needs a specialist agent."
- Brand safety agents
- Media buying agents
- Sports intelligence and content understanding agents
If you're evaluating platforms, ask: Which problems does this agent solve end-to-end? How does it integrate with my stack? What data governance is baked in?
Speed is the real disruptor
Research-to-product time has collapsed. A paper drops and a week later there's a demo. "Days matter. Weeks matter. Months matter. If you stagnate in the technologies you're aware of, you're very quickly behind."
That's why AI stuck while other trends faded. The feedback loop from discovery to deployment is tight-and getting tighter.
What this means for marketers
- Stand up an internal AI council with CMO, CIO, CISO and legal. Set guardrails, data access rules and a test-to-prod path.
- Shift your agency model toward tools. Build or buy SaaS that codifies your IP-then train teams to operate it.
- Design agentic workflows for planning, buying, brand safety and creative ops. Start with one high-friction task and automate it end-to-end.
- Upgrade measurement. Use causal testing and incrementality by default, not as a quarterly special project.
- Train creatives to direct models: precise prompts, reference boards, version discipline and quality bars.
- Run weekly sprints. Ship small, useful automations every Friday. Roll winners into your stack.
What this means for publishers
Discovery won't be just search. Agentic networks will query trusted sources directly and surface context, history and perspective-not just a one-off answer. The value is giving people a reason to come back.
- Structure content for machine consumption: clean metadata, taxonomies and APIs.
- Invest in first-party data and identity-consented, portable and useful.
- Package expertise as services that agents can call, not just pages to crawl.
The next 36 months
Expect promises like true personalization, better data use and more relevant ads to finally click. Not magically-because the plumbing is catching up. The work is systems, not stunts.
Marketing isn't being replaced. It's being re-engineered into software, workflows and ecosystems that reward clear thinking and fast execution. Or, as Allen puts it: "Our question is always the same. How can we help?"
Further reading and useful links
- A survey on LLM-based agents (authoritative overview)
- Practical AI certification for marketing specialists
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