What should our first AI pilot include?

A practical AI pilot starts with one or two brand or marketing opportunities that a team believes it can do better than anyone else. Generative AI in marketing is most useful when it helps create a new experience around that strength, rather than becoming a broad programme with no clear job to do. Small AI can take the form of a focused digital brand or marketing tool that responds to user inputs in ways that serve both customer needs and business goals. This keeps the pilot clear, achievable and easier to understand. It also creates a useful boundary: the team is testing a specific opportunity to improve understanding, engagement or personalisation, not trying to automate every part of marketing at once.

Human-in-the-loop AI co-creation turns generative AI into a creative springboard, not an unchecked content machine. AI can help teams explore ideas, summarise complex subjects, draft variations and speed up routine work, but fluent output is not automatically original, meaningful or right for a brand. A strong AI production workflow gives people responsibility for the brief, prompts, selection, editing and final quality check. Creative and marketing specialists still need to judge whether an idea reflects the brand's values, speaks to customer needs and creates real differentiation. The useful shift is from producing every word or asset by hand to setting tasks clearly, reviewing output critically and guiding the work with experience.

We believe a first AI pilot should be small enough to learn from, but ambitious enough to improve a real customer or brand experience. We do not see generative AI as a substitute for imagination, strategy or human connection. We see it as a collaborator that needs a clear brief, expert direction and honest evaluation. Our work has included a dedicated working group to experiment with GenAI tools and assess their potential, alongside practical small-scale creative implementations for clients and their customers. We have also launched a small AI project designed to create a previously unattainable level of customisation and personalisation. For a partner, look for people who can connect prompting and technology with brand strategy, creative judgement and meaningful measurement.