Our panel at London Tech Week 2025, explored how businesses can navigate shrinking marketing budgets and use AI to achieve more with less. AI is shaping up to be one of the big leaps forward in human history, driving evolution in so many ways from creativity and engagement to automation and performance. In marketing circles, AI is the engine fuelling progress - but that doesn’t mean the situation is straightforward. was moderated by Alex Humphries-French, Propeller Group’s MADTech Practice Director, and featured:
- Vitaly Pecherskiy - Co-Founder & CEO at StackAdapt
- Jessica Myers - Chief Customer Officer at The Very Group
- Ben Carter - Global Chief Customer & Marketing Officer at Carwow
Assessing a shifting landscape
Vitaly Pecherskiy opened the panel by giving his perspective on AI. “If you’re someone that scrolls through LinkedIn and reads about AI, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking that it’s everywhere, and everyone using it will be successful. But the truth is that we’re at a very early stage in its development; many concepts are still stuck in pilots.
“Generally, there’s been high adoption of tactical Generative AI usage - for example, producing more copy. But from a more transformational standpoint, agentic AI is yet to be adopted by many companies that have achieved meaningful scale. That being said, there is one particular area that it has dramatically disrupted, and that’s planning.”
The proliferation of AI has had a seismic impact on the world of search and its continuous development is making it impossible to determine who the long-term winners will be. However, Ben Carter argued that the ultimate differentiator will forever remain the same.
“There are lots of new routes to search now. There are LLMs and AI-powered search engines - and then there’s Google, which is trying to establish the role AI plays within the traditional search rankings.
“But brand will always remain vital; it will always cut through, even in an agentic world. For anyone trying to navigate the current search status quo, it’s important to think of it as a distributed ecosystem. Make sure you’re across all of the platforms you’re working with - but also keep one eye on where search is going, and ensure that your brand is still cutting through in those environments as well.
Improving your margins
Given that marketers are being asked to deliver results with less financial resources, Jessica Myers explained why campaigns should place equal importance on creativity and performance.
“We think full-funnel. We either create demand or convert demand. We’re constantly thinking about how we can prime the customer and drive them all the way through. As a retailer, we’ve got about 400,000 SKUs, which means that a phenomenal amount of content needs to go on a website. If it takes a long time to get content on the site, it’s going to take longer to sell that product.
“Imagine you’re creating a brand campaign. You start the storyboarding process alongside your art and creative directors - but then introduce AI to produce enhanced illustrations. Allow the human element to focus on telling a more emotional story, while the technology accelerates the process. Rather than using technology to replace people, businesses have to strike the right balance - between creativity and commercial, art and science.”
What does best-in-class adoption look like?
How businesses find the right balance between data, insights, efficiency and human expertise is a big challenge.
Jess stressed that with AI being so young and new, the human element remains essential. “Think of a product on your site: the product description has to be really tight so that the customer understands what they’re getting. This helps to convert the sale faster. A clear description also reduces the returns, and reduces the business’ costs.
“Now, your organisation may have a team of copywriters dedicated to writing product copy. However, if there’s hundreds of products on your site which change on a daily basis, they may not be able to keep up with demand. This is where an AI solution comes into play. Not to replace the copywriters, but to use the tool to get it 50% or 80% of the way there - and then have the teams help it learn. The faster it learns, the sooner I can use these people in a different area.”
Ben echoed these sentiments, advocating that AI adoption requires a cultural mindset. “It’s about thinking model-first, not human-first. That doesn’t mean that robots are going to take certain jobs - more so that there’s a lot of tasks that AI can solve, which enables humans to concentrate on more complex tasks. Too many companies at the moment either view AI as a replacement, or don’t consider the importance of upskilling teams to make the best of AI.”
Staying ahead of the competition
Bringing the session to a close, Vitaly provided insight into how businesses can keep pace with the countless changes taking place - and more importantly, stay relevant. “There’s inherent fragmentation within ecosystems. Historically, it’s required a ton of expertise to be able to stitch it together into something that’s functional and actually drives performance within marketing departments.
“First and foremost, you need to navigate the convergence of very fragmented ecosystems in the marketing and advertising sectors. Secondly, every marketer needs to become an expert in using fairly complex platforms. That’s where the big opportunity for disruption is. You can have very complex, flexible, sophisticated platforms with a high degree of relevancy and personalisation - with AI guiding users around these setups in a way that’s most likely to lead to premium results.”