AI Democratizes Knowledge, Creativity, and Marketing Agility at Visa

Nakeya Bennett:

Hi, I'm Nakeya Bennett, the US practice lead for Infosys Aster. We're here at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference talking all things AI and how AI is changing marketing. I'm super excited to be sitting here with Alison from Visa. Alison, you want to introduce yourself?

Alison Herzog:

Alison Herzog and I lead brand and creative and experience at Visa within the value-added services portfolio.

Nakeya Bennett:

Thank you so much for being here with me today. I'm excited to talk to you because I feel like you and I share very similar views on AI. We both love AI. I feel like a lot of people are very afraid of it. And I feel like it is the best thing ever. I use it in my day-to-day life. And I saw a quote that you made regarding ChatGPT saying that, how we use ChatGPT it's like it creates that first draft for us. So that we don't have to start from scratch. Can you talk more with me about just your view on AI and how you feel like AI is changing marketing?

Alison Herzog:

Yeah, absolutely. I love AI. I remember when at SXSW a few years back, the conversation was all generative AI. And I rolled my eyes because I thought, this is the next VR. Because anybody who was there the year that VR was everything and every activation and it was going to our whole world, we were going to walk around with goggles all the time.

Alison Herzog:

Yes. It was like, is this the next, are we going to do this again? Right. But then in reality, people started adopting generative AI like crazy. Visa was I would say very ahead of the curve. And that they saw that employees were using it and they embraced and encouraged employees to use it. And so very quickly they set up an instance that was for employees so we could keep everything secure. We could encourage our employees to use it and get smarter and our work better while maintaining security.

Alison Herzog:

So I am a huge fan. I use it both at work. I use it personally. I'm all things AI. I think there need to be checks and balances. Yeah. But I like you love AI and I believe that it can help us, like you said, get started. The quote that you're using, many times we have mental roadblocks. There are sometimes because we just don't want to do something or it's hard or we're not quite sure where to start. 96% of business professionals identify with having a mental roadblock at work.

Alison Herzog:

You can go to generative AI, add some additional inputs, begin with something, and it can prompt you, it can get you started. So as you prompt it, it can prompt you back. And that's something that I love about it. It absolutely gets me out of a lot of blocks. And just if you're working on multiple things, it just saves so much time.

Nakeya Bennett:

So in your world of all things, brand, experience, media, social, how are you guys at Visa adopting AI to become more efficient and more effective?

Alison Herzog:

AI is one of those equalizers. It is allowing us to move much more quickly. There are so many things within the creative world. We don't want to lose the humanity of creative. I think that's a big issue within this revolution around AI is balancing the two. What it does allow us to do, and we've heard this throughout the conference, is to scale quickly. So once we find what that vision is, what that beautiful creation can be, instead of people spending days, weeks on many, many cuts, cut downs, cuts, et cetera, to fit social platform, video, static, real, story, whatever it is, you create the core and then you have AI. In one instance, there was an example of 16,000 different assets. AI can do that very quickly. I don't really want my creative team spending their time on that when they could be getting to the core of the story.

Nakeya Bennett:

Right totally agree. So in terms of just talent and talent strategy. How do you feel like on your team AI is evolving that?

Alison Herzog:

Something that I love and I've mentioned about AI is that it is an equalizer. It is a democratizer of knowledge. So many people haven't had the same opportunities in life. They didn't get to go to Ivy League school. They come from a family, like I come from a dad who was a very poor farmer in South Dakota. But I have been fortunate that I was able to go to university. That I was able to go to business school. Not everybody gets that. Generative AI allows us to access knowledge. Anybody can access knowledge. Anybody can ask good questions. You can even use AI to know how to ask better questions.

Alison Herzog:

Many times, it's knowing what you're trying to understand, what you're trying to get to, and then AI can help you get there. And so regardless of your background, your level of knowledge, it is a democratizer of knowledge. Yeah. And I love that so much. It helps our talent. It allows us to, again, we're already working on this. We're already very mindful of who we hire, the backgrounds, and nobody needs to exactly fit a job description. Right. But now everybody can do more. Yeah. And you want your career to evolve and grow. And it means maybe you're started somewhere. Maybe you started in accounting. And over time, you decided you really loved the beauty of marketing. You saw the art and science. And generative AI allowed you to see new paths. So that's what I love. It's a democratizer and equalizer, and it allows our talent to find different paths and, if nothing else, to also think differently in the path they've chosen.

Nakeya Bennett:

So just to add on to that question, how are you guys ensuring that people are upskilling and cross-skilling on AI?

Alison Herzog:

It is part of our OKRs. Everybody is required within Visa to be using AI essentially on the day. Day-to-day. And we look at it. We want to understand what tools you're using. We're not going so far as to what prompts are you using. But we do. We are providing courses and training almost weekly on how to get the best out of these different tools. That's amazing. Even teaching how to create your own agent. We've created many of our own agents, both for marketing, different business units. I love that our legal team, they have a goal this year of creating their own so that marketing has to go through so many legal reviews, especially when you're at a large company. So how can we use that agent to submit content to and it can give that initial pass which creates efficiencies down the road.

Alison Herzog:

So we are upskilling our employees very mindfully making sure they have all the training available to them. Again, making it all very accessible to them because we have anything. Of course, Copilot, we've got Microsoft products, so we've got Copilot available, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity. We've got all the fun toys and we're trying to make sure everybody knows how to use the fun toys.

Nakeya Bennett:

So I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about metrics and measurement in terms of AI. So what are you guys doing and how are you measuring the success of AI as you implement it across brand and creative?

Alison Herzog:

We had this conversation day two of the CMO Growth Summit of how do you take the savings, the efficiencies found through AI and calculate and then put them back in? Yeah. And my response was, I don't think we know. I don't think we know what our cost savings are yet. I don't think we know the numbers. People might argue with me. Although predominantly everybody agreed with me.

Alison Herzog:

Okay. I can certainly look to see how we're moving more quickly. I could see how we're able to decision more quickly in some things. I can't definitively say I freed up 18 man out people hours because of this. And now I'm going to invest this this place and this is going to give me this much. We have to use this time right now to set those benchmarks. I agree. I think this is benchmark time for us to be using to then be able to understand how this is helping us to grow and evolve.

Alison Herzog:

Certainly we can measure things though. I can produce now 16,000, not a real figure, but I'm putting it out there, 16,000 assets in a matter of a week as opposed to a month. But I wouldn't say we're so far as some of the traditional media metrics that we've used previously. Those are important, but I'd love to see us find new ways of thinking than how we've traditionally thought.

Nakeya Bennett:

I think that makes sense. We've been talking about the not just modernization of marketing, but how do you take that modernization into measurement and optimization across marketing as well. So that makes sense. I think largely a lot of industries, they're still trying to figure out what that looks like. What are we measuring now and how are we measuring it, like what do the frameworks look like? So I think that's spot on.

Alison Herzog:

The lovely thing of having the CMO Growth Summit is we all can come together. We're all sharing the same challenges. Nobody, for the most part, no one has fully figured it out. Right. And we will figure it out together. Yes. But we are working out what is the scaffolding. Yeah. That's what we're building right now is the scaffolding as we are implementing, deploying AI in its different formats into our organizations. Anything from measurement in terms of how are we upskilling our talent, how are we making them smarter, how are we making the work smarter, how are we making the work better.

Alison Herzog:

I think the way brand also is now treated will continue to both stay the same and evolve over time. We've had lots of conversations. Brand is what draws upon your memory, your emotions. AI is not going to change that, but the way that AI helps us, that's what will change as our day to day.

Nakeya Bennett:

Yep, I totally agree. Let me ask you this. So with AI rolling out and being well used and well adopted within Visa, how are you guys managing the governance of it? Who are the decision makers? Who's controlling what? Who's saying yes? Who's saying no in terms of what tools are acceptable? What can be used? How it can be used?

Alison Herzog:

That really comes from our technology department for the most part in terms of at least the very big well-known names, like the generative AI tools that I've talked about. From a MarTech perspective, it very many times is led by those who find a problem. So an example is we weren't able to be as agile as we wanted to be with some dynamic creative.

Alison Herzog:

I am a deep thinker, I'm a question asker, and a problem solver. I didn't like the idea or the thought that we were just going to deal with this problem. And we didn't know when we were going get it resolved. We were going to be dependent on somebody else. And their tech hours and their priorities. And so I went shopping. I went internet shopping. And it's those types of things of when marketing sources an issue or a challenge, we have those conversations then with our IT group of, hey, this is what our outcome is. We found a more efficient way to get here. While you guys develop perhaps the native way to get there, but for now, this will get us there now.

Alison Herzog:

It still takes a minute to get everything through sourcing. But it is while our technology team looks at the big picture of all of our GenAI technology, we do have MarTech that sits within our global marketing and within our business marketing units, also the ability to see a need fill a need.

Nakeya Bennett:

How are you ensuring alignment across marketing, technology, finance to just communicate and demonstrate the value of AI?

Alison Herzog:

Something that's been top of mind for me the last few years is just being best friends with my CFO.

Nakeya Bennett:

That's a good strategy.

Alison Herzog:

We need friends, we all need friends. I also always have a policy of you want to work with smart people and kind people. Yes, absolutely. You want to help. We all are there for the same reason. We want to do great work and we all want to make money. Nobody goes to work and thinks, I hope that the company fails. Everybody wants the company to succeed. And so I very much am of the mentality of wanting to understand the world of my CFO, my CEO, my CTO, and wanting them to understand my world and to not use what I've referenced this last week as marketing poetry, marketing language, using all common language.

Alison Herzog:

And ultimately, marketing is a growth engine. It is the growth engine of any business. Absolutely. The way people know what your product, your solution, whatever it is you do is, is because of marketing. Absolutely. Anybody that wants to argue to me that marketing is not valuable, I say, have you used the internet? Do you know who typically is in charge of the website and all the content on the website? It's me. Exactly. It's marketing needs of our organizations.

Alison Herzog:

So how we collectively come together, I would say, is by speaking each other's languages, by understanding what our common goals are, shared objectives, and then working towards those. And honestly, at this level, at the C-suite level, they're looking for the business terms of revenue, market share, pricing, et cetera.

Nakeya Bennett:

Thank you so much, Alison, for your time today. We really appreciate you.

Alison Herzog:

Thank you. Appreciate it.