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A lot of marketers talk about AI as a tool, something that can help them move faster, cut costs and crank out more content. There’s nothing wrong with that point of view.
But AI can do a lot more than optimize budgets and production pipelines, says Debra Aho Williamson, founder of advisory firm Sonata Insights, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Williamson spent nearly two decades as an analyst at eMarketer, where she tracked major shifts in consumer behavior, from the rise of social media to the emergence of AI search and assistants. She created Sonata in 2024 to help marketers understand how AI is shaping not just workflows but also the way in which people discover products, do research and make decisions.
“There’s so much focus on using AI to become more efficient: to save money, to increase your productivity, to increase your output,” Williamson says. “Those are all okay reasons to use AI, but the most important reason in any sort of creative pursuit is to do something that can’t be done or to express creativity in a different way.”
She applies that thinking to what she calls “AI media,” a category that includes ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s AI Overviews and retail assistants like Amazon’s Rufus and Walmart’s Sparky.
These are all tools for getting information, solving problems and navigating tasks, but they’re also organic and paid media environments in their own right.
Instead of bouncing between sites and tabs, a person can move from an initial query to a short list of options – and sometimes all the way down to a purchase – without ever having to leave an AI interface. This has big implications for how marketers should think about paid media.
For example, Williamson argues that AI media can be especially powerful in the middle of the funnel when people are still in the consideration phase rather than at the last-click moment that search marketers typically optimize for.
Even so, in the near term at least, she expects that experimental AI search budgets will come from the traditional search bucket. Over time, though, AI assistants, AI-enhanced search and AI-native interfaces will become a foundational part of media plans, similar to how social and mobile evolved from experiments into core channels.
The question is whether marketers can keep up.
“Advertisers need to get up to speed really, really quickly … but [they] don’t necessarily move as fast as tech companies want them to move,” Williamson says. “The advertising world has a lot to catch up on.”
Also in this episode: What organizational changes brands should make to be “AI-ready,” what has to happen to make OpenAI’s $100 billion ad forecast feasible and why we need a more open dialogue on the societal implications of AI.
For more articles featuring Debra Aho Williamson, click here.
