In this episode
Rachel Thornton, CMO Enterprise at Adobe, argues that autonomous agents have become a distinct audience for enterprise brands — one that has to be educated and marketed to, not merely accommodated as a new channel. She and Greg Kihlström work through what that changes in practice: why brand visibility now runs through ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini rather than search rankings alone; why content has to be machine-readable to be ingestible by those systems; and how brands avoid flattening into sameness when an agent evaluates on structured, comparable attributes instead of feel. Thornton also details how Adobe built Brand Intelligence — a brand ontology plus computer vision and a reasoning engine — to keep the ten-thousandth generated asset as on-brand as the first, and describes the global AI skilling deficit her team addressed through a LinkedIn partnership that has reached tens of thousands of marketers.
Key takeaways
- Agents are an audience, not a channel. Thornton’s framing is that if agents evaluate on a customer’s behalf, they are a new audience — so the CMO question becomes how you educate that audience and make it aware of what you offer.
- Brand visibility now means LLM visibility. A brand can hold strong SEO metrics and still be invisible at the moment a customer is deciding, because that evaluation increasingly happens inside ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.
- Content has to be agent-readable or it doesn’t get ingested. Websites now serve two readers; if the content isn’t machine-readable and easily ingestible, you forfeit visibility on the platforms doing the evaluating.
- Optimize for both readers, because the human still chooses. The agent may perform the evaluation, but the person usually makes the final decision — so the same content has to work as structured data and as persuasion.
- Distinctiveness is protected by defining the brand, not by opting out. Thornton’s answer to the sameness risk is that every brand already serves multiple audiences with different criteria; agents are one more, and the brand promise is what keeps the output recognizable.
- Consistency at scale has to be enforced in the tooling. Adobe Brand Intelligence combines a brand ontology, computer visioning, and a reasoning engine so that generative output doesn’t morph over time into slop — the last asset matches the first.
- The AI skilling gap is about orchestration, not tool proficiency. The customers seeing the best results didn’t bolt AI onto existing tasks; they examined their teams, processes, and workflows and optimized those with AI.
- Training scaled through distribution, not internal enablement alone. Adobe made its AI marketing curriculum broadly available through a LinkedIn partnership, reaching tens of thousands of marketers, with the Adobe Champion community shaping what gets built next.
- What CMOs should not hand off is the brand definition itself. Brand promise, guidelines, and aesthetic are the human work; scale, reach, and efficiency are what AI is for.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Agents evaluating your brand: the setup
- 2:47 — Rachel Thornton’s role across Adobe’s enterprise business
- 3:54 — Where marketing, creativity, and AI intersect
- 4:38 — Assistant that narrows options vs. agent that transacts
- 7:06 — What brands haven’t priced in: visibility moves to LLMs
- 8:17 — Making content agent-readable and machine-readable
- 9:01 — When an agent quantifies “luxury”: the sameness trap
- 10:09 — Optimizing for the agent and the human who decides
- 11:43 — Keeping human-authored and AI-generated content one brand
- 12:58 — Adobe Brand Intelligence: brand ontology and a reasoning engine
- 15:41 — Quantifying trust as the work brands should have done earlier
- 16:06 — The global AI skilling deficit inside marketing teams
- 17:45 — Scaling training through the LinkedIn partnership
- 19:58 — What CMOs should retain and never automate
- 22:22 — A year from now: new use cases, not just scaled production
- 23:09 — Staying agile
What “agents as an audience” actually means for a CMO
Thornton splits the shift into two questions a marketing leader now has to hold at once. The first is inbound: if individuals and companies are using agents to evaluate and decide, that agent is a new audience, and the standard audience discipline applies — make it aware, educate it, make sure it can find what you offer. The second is internal: how agentic workflows change the marketing team itself, from generative AI scaling content to agents building campaigns and responding faster to customer signals. Her point is that the same technology shows up on both sides of the operation, and CMOs who only think about one of them will be surprised by the other.
Why brand visibility now runs through LLMs, not just search
Thornton defines brand visibility as where you show up and how you show up. The failure mode she describes is specific: a brand keeps its SEO strategy and its SEO metrics stay healthy, but it doesn’t appear inside ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — so it is absent at exactly the moments customers are making choices and evaluating options. In her conversations, this is the question every CMO wants to get into. The technical consequence is that the website is now read by ingestion systems as well as people, and content that isn’t easily ingestible doesn’t compete for that visibility at all.
The sameness trap: staying distinctive when agents quantify attributes
Greg Kihlström raises the tension directly: an agent’s definition of a term like “luxury” is quantifiable in a way human judgment isn’t, and optimizing for that tends to reward structured, comparable attributes over the photograph that produces a feeling. The risk is convergence — every brand encoding itself into the same ones and zeros. Thornton’s counter is that this is a familiar problem in unfamiliar clothes. A luxury brand already knows a handbag buyer evaluates on different criteria than a shoe or sweater buyer; agents are another set of criteria to serve. Being findable by agents and speaking distinctly to humans are not a trade-off, and the brands that treat them as one give up the evaluation before it starts.
Keeping human-authored and AI-generated content one brand
As content mixes human, AI-generated, and human-in-the-loop production, Thornton’s concern is drift — an organization effectively running two brands instead of one. Her answer is that brand identity has to be explicit and enforceable: a set of brand guidelines, a shared understanding of what looks right, applied to every asset a creative builds across every touchpoint. Adobe’s product response is Brand Intelligence, built on a brand ontology with computer visioning and a reasoning engine, designed so that scaling across channels doesn’t degrade the work into something the brand wouldn’t have shipped.
Closing the AI skilling gap: orchestration over point solutions
Thornton describes a global AI skilling deficit spanning campaigns, events, content, brand, and creative — disrupted work streams moving faster than the teams running them. What Adobe’s customers asked for was a common grounding: everyone from the AI-curious to the experienced tool user working from the same foundation, and crucially, understanding AI as a way to orchestrate work streams and teams rather than as a point solution. Adobe made the resulting content broadly available through a partnership with LinkedIn, which Thornton says tens of thousands of people have used, with the Adobe Champion community now shaping the next set of material. The pattern she sees in successful customers is structural: they looked at their workflows first and optimized those, instead of bolting AI onto a thing.
What CMOs should not hand off
Asked what to retain, Thornton points at the brand definition itself. Brand promise, brand guidelines, brand aesthetic — the answer to “who are we as a brand” — is the prerequisite, not the output. With it, the remaining questions are about scale: how to reach more customers, more efficiently, with consistency. Without it, she says, you are at the mercy of whether the brand shows up the way you intended. Every company has a brand, from soft drinks to makeup to networking equipment, and the work of bringing that promise to life consistently is what she would not leave to agents or to chance.
FAQ
What does it mean to treat AI agents as an audience? It means applying standard audience discipline to agents: making them aware of what you offer and ensuring they can find and evaluate it, rather than treating agents as just another distribution channel. Rachel Thornton frames it as a new audience a CMO has to educate.
Why can a brand have good SEO and still be invisible to customers? Because evaluation is shifting from traditional search to LLMs. Thornton’s point is that a brand can maintain strong SEO metrics and still fail to appear in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — which is where customers are increasingly making decisions and comparing options.
What is agent-readable content? Content structured so that LLMs can easily ingest it. Thornton’s guidance is that a website now has two readers — the human audience and the systems ingesting content for platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude — and content that isn’t machine-readable forfeits visibility on those platforms.
How do brands stay distinctive if agents evaluate on quantifiable attributes? By defining the brand explicitly and serving both audiences rather than choosing one. Thornton’s view is that brands have always served audiences with different criteria; the agent is one more, and the human still makes the final choice, so the persuasive layer still matters.
What is Adobe Brand Intelligence? A product built on a brand ontology, computer visioning, and a reasoning engine that checks assets against a brand’s guidelines as creatives build them — so that scaled generative output stays on brand from the first asset to the ten-thousandth rather than degrading over time.
What should CMOs not automate? The definition of the brand. Thornton argues that brand promise, guidelines, and aesthetic are the human work; once those are settled, AI’s role is scaling that promise consistently across every customer interaction.
About Rachel Thornton
Rachel Thornton is committed to helping businesses create amazing customer experiences at the intersection of marketing, creativity and AI. As Chief Marketing Officer for Adobe’s enterprise business, Rachel is responsible for Adobe’s global enterprise Creativity & Productivity and Customer Experience Orchestration marketing.
Rachel develops marketing, messaging, positioning strategies and activations that expand awareness of Adobe as the world’s best marketing and AI platform for delivering brand-changing customer experiences. Her team amplifies Adobe’s unique enterprise story in ways that energize, celebrate and empower CMOs and experience makers worldwide.
Rachel has more than 25 years of experience in B2B technology marketing, having held leadership roles at Amazon/AWS, Salesforce, Cisco Systems and Microsoft. She has deep experience building and scaling enterprise marketing, customer acquisition, and self-service revenue contributions.
Rachel Thornton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhthornton/
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Transcript
[00:00:59] Greg Kihlström: [upbeat music] Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of the Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. What happens when the thing evaluating your brand isn’t a person but an agent shopping on their behalf, one that doesn’t respond to a great story and doesn’t care how your homepage makes anyone feel? Agility has usually meant adapting faster than the market. This is a different kind of adaptation. The audience itself is changing shape, and the brands that handle it well will be the ones that adapt without becoming unrecognizable in the process. Today we’re going to talk about what actually changes for a brand when autonomous agents enter the discovery and purchase path, creating content that holds up to an agent’s evaluation without flattening into sameness, and closing the AI capability gap inside marketing teams, and what that unlocks. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Rachel Thornton, CMO Enterprise at Adobe. Rachel, welcome to the show.
[00:02:39] Rachel Thornton: Thanks, Greg. It’s great to be here.
[00:02:41] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in, though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Adobe?
[00:02:47] Rachel Thornton: All right. let’s see. I’m the CMO for all of Adobe’s sort of enterprise business, so all of their customers, large customers, so if you think about brands like, whether it’s Coca-Cola or L’Oréal or Cisco or ServiceNow, like big enterprises, whether it’s B2B or B2C. and then just responsible for making sure we’re telling a great story to them, making sure we’re helping them solve problems on behalf of their customers, helping them build things like brand visibility, content supply chain, and great customer experience.
[00:03:21] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Love it. Yeah. And I, I know you touched o- on this a little bit just now, but, I think I’d be surprised if anyone listening is not familiar with the Adobe brand. I mean, all-
[00:03:32] Greg Kihlström: … most people listening are, enterprise marketers here, so, we, we, we know Adobe. But for, for the listeners, could you frame the specific focus of Adobe’s enterprise business today? what are, what are some of the primary challenges that you’re helping your largest customers solve in this era where, ev- everything seems to be about AI transformation?
[00:03:54] Rachel Thornton: we think of it as the intersection between marketing, creativity, and AI. And at that intersection, how can we help brands really put AI to work when they think about their customers, whether it’s personalizing journeys, building amazing creative, building content supply chains that allow them to scale that creative across audience segments, across languages, across regions. but I think that, that intersection across those three things is where we’re operating and where we’re helping customers really make the most of not only their brand and their creativity, but again, scaling that, marketing that, and then building amazing experiences for their customers.
[00:04:38] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. So let’s dive in here, and I wanna start with one of the things I teed up in the intro, and it’s just this idea of the agent as an audience. And-
[00:04:49] Greg Kihlström: … when people say that agents are becoming an audience, they can mean a few different things, right? an assistant-
[00:04:55] Greg Kihlström: … that narrows the options while a human still decides, or even a system that evaluates and does the transactions on its own. Where are we actually seeing s- each of these today, and, and do they call for different responses from a CMO?
[00:05:12] Rachel Thornton: I– They do, and I think the way to think about it is, as a CMO, as a marketer, you’re always thinking about your audience, your customers. what are you building for your customers? What types of experiences and what type of creative are you, building and then orchestrating? And so now, with whether it’s, individuals or companies using agents to help evaluate or decide, as a marketer, I– the way sort of our team thinks about it is, “Hey, if this is a new audience for us, how do we make sure we’re educating that audience, making that audience aware of all we have to offer?” So I think from a CMO’s perspective, there’s the, “How do I think about agents as an audience, and then what do I have to do to ensure I’m educating them?” But there’s also then thinking about it from a,
[00:05:58] Rachel Thornton: “Hey, I’m also thinking about- How AI, how agents, how agentic work streams happen now on my team, more and more CMOs are saying, “Look, how do I use whether it’s generative AI to scale my content, or agentic to help me build campaigns, to help me respond faster to customer signals, to help me amplify the impact of my teams internally as maybe we move from some activities that are rote or maybe the undifferentiated heavy lifting of marketing,” like, oh, I had to basically create this big audience segment to now I can have an agent do it, but then take that segment, really understand it, and build great creative and experiences for it. So I think as a marketer, you sort of have to have– You have to think of it from both perspectives, how are you using agentic, but then how
[00:06:43] Rachel Thornton: are you also thinking about agents as a new audience?
[00:06:46] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting that, same technology but different use cases-
[00:06:52] Greg Kihlström: … but marketers thinking about all of it, right? [chuckles] So it’s-
[00:06:57] Greg Kihlström: … it’s a, yeah, it’s a lot to… It, it, it’s several new components to add to the process of both consumption and creation, right?
[00:07:06] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. So as we, as we think about, um… And I know Adobe’s done a lot of research into AI shopping trends. I know, on the, on the website, we’ve, we’ve featured some of that as well. What are you seeing that most brands haven’t quite priced in yet? where, where does a brand that looks perfectly healthy on some of those traditional metrics start to break down once an agent is doing the evaluation?
[00:07:32] Rachel Thornton: I think for every brand, you now have to think about brand visibility. So how we define that is where are you showing up and how are you showing up? As consumers shift from looking for things in, very traditional places like SEO to now looking at, LLM, so whether it’s ChatGPT or it’s Claude or it’s Gemini, as a marketer, you have to think, I had an SEO strategy, maybe we even continue to have great SEO metrics, but if we’re not showing up in LLMs, then your brand isn’t visible at key moments when customers are making decisions, when they’re making choices, when they’re evaluating options. And that has become a really, like every CMO I talk to, that’s, that’s what they wanna get into, which is how do I ensure brand visibility across, kind
[00:08:17] Rachel Thornton: of every search platform that my customers would be using? And then the other thing that’s really interesting, and we, we talked about this a few minutes ago, which is if agents are an audience, the really, the way to think about that is you wanna make sure that your content is agent readable or machine readable because that’s what, if you think about ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, they’re ingesting a bunch of content. So on your website, it’s not just now what’s your human audience like about that site, but are you making it agent readable so that it’s easily ingestible and you can show up better in places like LLMs, like, like I said ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. But you really have to think about that or you miss, optimizing for brand visibility on those platforms.
[00:09:01] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, and I think that’s, that also brings a challenge of how agents, if I can use the word think, how agents think about a brand, right? So it’s like, I, I used the example the other day of an agent defining what luxury means is very different or ver- is a very quantifiable way that humans don’t necessarily think as well. And so, optimizing for how an agent is going to, to think through this stuff tends to reward, very structured, very comparable, attributes versus, a- again, a human might look at a photo and, and, and have a feeling and, and things like that. This can also tend to make brands gravitate
[00:09:47] Greg Kihlström: towards sameness though, right? So in other words, like if you, if you’re thinking in ones and zeros and okay, this must mean luxury or this must mean quick or convenient to an agent, how do we keep that distinctive, distinctiveness in the, in the brand and yet appeal to the agents as well?
[00:10:09] Rachel Thornton: I think the best way to think about it is, again, if you go back to this concept of an audience, so as a brand, you would always have an audience. You would always have multiple audiences, right? So if you’re a luxury goods brand, you are gonna think about, a, hey, I’m selling handbags, so somebody who’s evaluating for a handbag is looking for different criteria than somebody who’s maybe looking at our shoe line or, our, our sweater line, right? But at this, at the core of it, as a marketer, you’re always thinking, “What are the things my audience is gonna care about, and how to make, how do I make sure that I’m delivering on that content to really break through?” I think with agents, and as a brand, you have to really think, I
[00:10:54] Rachel Thornton: still wanna make sure I am findable and searchable by whether it’s consumers or their agents. So do not miss the chance to optimize your content, like, like again, like I said on your website, for example. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t also wanna talk to your human customers and say, “Hey, this is the type of handbag you might be interested in.” And so you have to think whether humans are looking at it or agents are reading it, how do you make sure you’re optimizing for both so that when a, an evaluation is happening, you’re there first and foremost, but then you’re also presenting your information in the right way for one audience and maybe an agent that’s gonna do the evaluating, but ultimately the human that’s going to make the choice, right? So thinking of them as important and critical for the entire
[00:11:39] Rachel Thornton: sort of customer journey, I think is what is gonna help brands stand out.
[00:11:43] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and to what you were just saying as well, how do you… Some of that is, some of that content is going to be human authored and some of that content is going to be AI generated. maybe s- there’s some hybrid, human in the loop stuff happening as well. How do you- How do you keep it from being kind of two brands versus one more cohesive regardless of the, of the audience, if we’re treating agents as an audience?
[00:12:13] Rachel Thornton: I think there’s a couple of things to unpack there. It’s, one, how do you make sure, across your customer experiences and what you’re delivering and across your, your content supply chain, where possible and where you know you need to optimize for agents, making things agent-readable or machine-readable. But if you think about the concept of brand identity, I think what has become really critical, especially now with generative AI, with, stuff that’s created that you just look at it and go, “Ugh,” every brand has to say, “We have a set of brand guidelines. We know what looks right for our brand.” And you have to make sure that to ma- your creatives, as they’re working across, all of these
[00:12:58] Rachel Thornton: different touchpoints in the customer experience, and they’re building assets, that every asset they build is on brand. it’s interesting because Adobe, this has been something we’ve been talking with customers about for a while, and we decided to build a product that really helps you, and it’s, it’s basically… It, it’s designed to help you ensure that every brand asset you put out there is on brand, right? That even if you’re scaling it using agentic AI or generative AI, I should say, across multiple channels, that every asset, whether it’s your first asset or your 10,000th asset, they all are on brand. They all are true to the original. And so what we’ve built with Adobe Brand Intelligence is brand ontology. We built computer visioning and then a reasoning engine that basically, as your creatives are
[00:13:43] Rachel Thornton: building, Adobe Brand Intelligence helps ensure absolutely what you said, that everything is on brand, that it doesn’t morph over time into something that is basically slop, and that you are proud, and it is repl- it is exactly what you want it to be, like I said, in the first instance and the, the last instance.
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[00:15:41] Greg Kihlström: I might be an optimist here, but I feel like this has really been an opportunity for brands to actually better define what their brand is about. Like, if you have to quantify-
[00:15:54] Greg Kihlström: … what trust means with your brand, if you have to quantify, some of these things, you’re actually– You’re probably doing the job you should’ve done 20 years ago, it just wasn’t possible, right?
[00:16:06] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I, I, again, I, I think it’s an opportunity for brands to really, to do that. And, and I guess maybe along those lines, let, let’s talk a little bit about the skillsets and just, what, what the, what teams, should look like to, to be able to enable these things well. And so, you’ve s- you’ve spoken about a, a global AI skilling deficit. So, in the enterprise teams that you s- that you see and, and, and talk with, what kind of gaps are you seeing? is it, tool usage? Is it people that can use them, but there’s that judgment component, right, of, of, yes, it was generated, but to your point, it was, maybe, maybe a little sloppy or-
[00:16:50] Rachel Thornton: It’s not on brand. Exactly, yeah.
[00:16:52] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. So, like, what, what are, what are you seeing there and, and, what should, what should marketing leaders be keeping in mind as, as they’re looking at skilling?
[00:17:00] Rachel Thornton: Right. So I think the first thing to keep in mind is that if you think about marketers, across all different disciplines, whether you’re looking at campaigns or events or content, or brand or creative, AI is really changing a l- is disrupting so many different marketing work streams. So we talked about search, we talked about creative, we talked about content supply chain and customer experiences, and it’s happening quickly. And so what, what we s- heard loud and clear from our customers was, “Hey, we’d love it if across our company, whether we have someone who’s new to AI and everything they can do, or whether it’s someone who’s been using tools for a while, how do we get everybody grounded on what they need to know, grounded
[00:17:45] Rachel Thornton: on the tools and what they can do? But also, more importantly, grounded on how to think about AI not just as a point solution but as a way to really orchestrate work streams, orchestrate teams.” And I think doing that and having that type of content available, and this is a lot of the reason why we partnered with LinkedIn to make it very broadly available, is it’s helping marketers understand Hey, it’s not just that I’m using this tool to do something different or better, it’s that I’m thinking about how I can make my teams more productive, I can make my work output, I can do that faster, more efficiently, more effectively. and I think where we’ve seen with our customers, customers who’ve had the best success with AI, is when they think about it not as like, “I bolted it onto
[00:18:30] Rachel Thornton: a thing,” but, “I really looked at my teams and I looked at our work processes and our workflows and I thought, how do I create, how do I get those to be optimized using AI?”
[00:18:41] Rachel Thornton: And I think that’s what creating this content, it was in service to.
[00:18:46] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, and I mean, there’s… I know this from firsthand exper- There’s nothing like doing it yourself versus hearing about… I th- I think it gives-
[00:18:53] Greg Kihlström: … I mean, there, there’s empathy, but there’s also just getting your ha- It’s, it’s no longer intimidating if you’ve done it before. there might be skills that you need or team members that you need help from to do certain things, but it’s no longer a, “Oh, I don’t do that,” right? It’s you’re actually, you’re hands-on doing this.
[00:19:13] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:14] Rachel Thornton: I mean, people have been really pleased with it. We had a lot of good response. We were excited to launch it with LinkedIn. that’s gone really well. We’ve had tens of thousands of people, more than that at this point, like-
[00:19:27] Greg Kihlström: … accessing it, using the training. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. So we’ve been really pr- we’ve been really pleased and now we’ve… We also, because we worked with our Adobe Champion community, so folks that are experts in a lot of our products, but just also experts in, trends in the industry, trends in marketing, trends in AI, it’s been exciting to see how, like, marketers have responded to that comment. So we’ve gotten a lot of feedback on, “Hey, this is what I’d like to see next.” So now we’re in the process of, okay, what are the next set of things our Adobe Champions can deliver for customers?
[00:19:58] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Love it, love it. So, coup- couple things here as, as we wrap up here. certainly there, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of possibilities of, of what can be given to a- agents to be able to do for us. I tr- I live this every day. [laughs] I, lots of automation in my life, and for the clients that I work with as well. but there’s also some things that we’re gonna want to hold onto from a, from a human perspective for lots of good and, and strategic reasons. What should CMOs be thinking about as far as, what not to hand off? And, every organization’s different, but like, what’s, what’s kind of the, the mindset, when you start thinking about, okay, well, yeah,
[00:20:43] Greg Kihlström: there’s, there’s lots of things we can automate and, and, and offload or, or whatever, but what should, what should CMOs be thinking about retaining?
[00:20:52] Rachel Thornton: I think you touched on it, and you said it right a few minutes ago. Like, now is this moment where brands have to make sure they’ve thought about, what is our brand promise? What are our brand guidelines? What’s our brand, like, aesthetic? Like, who are we as a brand? Because I think if you’ve done that, then you can understand, all right, I know what my brand is, I know what our brand promise is, I know what we wanna deliver for customers, and now it’s, how do we scale that? How do we scale impact? How do we reach more customers? How do we do it efficiently? I think if you haven’t asked yourself that, then you’re at the mercy of, is this how I wanted my brand to show up? And so I think every marketer, every CMO has to think, what does my brand stand for? How do I make sure that comes through in every interaction a customer
[00:21:38] Rachel Thornton: has? How do I not leave that, not just to agents, but in a way, not just to chance, right? Like, you may know as a luxury goods provider, hey, my brand is known for this. We like this. We’re gonna make sure this aspect of the brand comes through in everything we do. If you’re a, if you’re a tool provider or, everything from soft drinks to makeup to, to, even the promise of like, Cisco’s one of our customers, networking equipment. Every company has a brand. Every brand has to think about what is their brand promise and how do we scale that promise effectively using AI, but you have to do the work of understanding your brand and bringing that brand to life and ensuring that brand promise resonates and stays consistent.
[00:22:22] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Well, Rachel, thanks so much for, for sharing everything today. Got two last questions for you as we wrap up here. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
[00:22:38] Rachel Thornton: I honestly think it’ll be how people have used AI in like, hey, this is like new use cases we have for it. This is how we’ve really scaled that engagement. This is how… people talk a lot about pilot to production, but I think the next frontier is like, hey, how we’ve pr- we’ve not only scaled production, but come up with brand-new use cases and brand-new ways to delight customers that we maybe didn’t have before.
[00:23:01] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Love it. And last question, what do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:23:09] Rachel Thornton: I would think it’s just, at this point, there’s so much happening every day. there… I think reading, learning, listening to podcasts, just the more you can, like, be out there learning, collecting information, and really understanding how it’s gonna impact your, marketing or your brand or your company, I think that’s critical, and that’s what helps people stay agile.















