In a December 2024 interview for IRG’s study on AI, Renata Ferraiolo Pereira is candid that her organization is at the very beginning of the journey and doing the bare minimum with AI, largely because of intellectual property concerns and because other priorities come first.
Key findings
- Where AI is used, it is for adoption and adaptation of content rather than for creating it, for example producing a range of assets across fragrance variants once the big idea exists.
- Her assessment of its value is that it sparks creativity and gives a first push when you are stuck, but needs a lot of refinement afterward.
- She says it has not replaced a single person yet, and she does not know whether it will, but it simplifies work and helps the team move faster.
- The agency created AI personas that were asked for feedback on a creative idea, in place of running focus groups.
- Because the company is private, an internal version of the chat tool was created rather than using the external one, in order to maintain privacy.
What is actually being used
The uses she describes are unglamorous and specific. Content generation for adopting and adapting existing work. A first draft when a room has stalled on naming something or writing a brief. Recommendations on write-ups and copy, always refined afterward.
Beyond content, AI is being used in new product development, in testing insights and products with consumers, and with the agency to create personas that can be asked for reactions in place of focus groups. She notes the product development work is more confidential.
What is holding it back
Two things. The organization is quite new and has a lot going on, so AI is a priority but other priorities come ahead of it. And intellectual property approvals have to come from enterprise headquarters.
She is direct about who slows things down and why she does not resent it. Legal is the most frightened group, and if anyone is slowing them down it is legal, not because they want to but because they are making sure the organization does not get into trouble.
At the top of the company the attitude is the opposite. The chairman and owner uses AI himself in meetings, and during a brainstorm on naming strategy pillars for 2030 he pulled out his phone to ask the tool what it would suggest.
Her main partner in the C-suite is the chief technology officer, who leads the AI contract and the partnerships with the large technology providers, and who owns the technologies and training needed to make any of it work.
Where the opportunity is
The opportunity she names first is data volume. There is an abundance of data and no human can use all of it, so she hopes AI produces faster outputs that simplify business analysis, and helps generate the right questions to ask, since business is a matter of looking at the data and then asking the right questions.
In product development she sees AI summarizing consumer insights and going further: predicting what the product should look like, what benefits and claims it could carry, and what might happen in the marketplace at launch, using data already available.
Where the limit is
Her argument about the human side is not sentimental. AI is fantastic but it does not make anything authentic, so a human has to stay connected to it and make it authentic. Meanwhile the world is moving toward experiential events, and brands that are growing are tapping into culture and into events.
AI can produce a television spot, she says, but it cannot replace a face to face human event, and she expects events, collaborations and brand presence in sports and culture to be the biggest continuing trend. Her own example is a live selling activation where AI created the content, followed by an event with real interaction with consumers, influencers and customers.
The role she gives marketing is to keep the consumer at the center. AI can help define a target audience for media buying, but not decide which human you are trying to talk to or what problem you are trying to solve. Her summary line borrows the company’s own phrasing: brands do not change the world, humans do, so AI does not change the world either.
Her most counterintuitive point is about who adopts it first. Marketing, she thinks, can be very resistant, because marketers fear losing creativity and control and want to touch everything. Business analytics, consumer insights and product supply are likely to be more pragmatic.
What she wants from the study
She asks for use cases rather than concepts. Everyone is a little tired of the word AI and more interested in how it is being used, how it is driving business, and what the real day-to-day benefit is.
The second request is structural: how companies ahead of them have organized themselves and which partners they chose, so that a reader can see who picked which provider and what the benefits of each are. She notes this matters especially for a midsize company.
Her closing point is about the range of the sample. She asks that the study cover small, mid and large corporations, because what the largest companies do with AI only they can do, given the budgets they have.
Scope and limitations
This is a single interview transcript from December 2024, and the speaker is explicit about the limits of her own vantage point. She says she is not sure she is on top of the developments and that she is not far enough along the journey to offer more.
Source
This page summarises Transcript: Interview with Renata Ferraiolo Pereira (SC Johnson), by Mariana Peneva, Renata Ferraiolo Pereira, December 9, 2024.