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Navigating AI: AI’s Breakout Year... and Our Moving Goalposts

November 25, 2025

AI is advancing faster than the marketing world’s ability to absorb it with a single theme emerging: the technology keeps leveling up, but organizations, definitions and expectations are struggling to keep pace. Whether it’s CMOs stuck in legacy structures, society endlessly shifting the meaning of “intelligence,” or brands reshaping workflows to unlock real performance, the message is clear—AI isn’t the bottleneck anymore. We are.

The AI Trailblazers Winter Summit

The AI Trailblazers Winter Summit is where the future of marketing stops living in decks and starts showing up in person. On December 4 at Rockefeller Center, senior leaders from Adobe, Amazon, Citi, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Sephora, Unilever, Visa, The New York Times and dozens more will join the CMOs and builders rewriting how AI drives growth. The agenda spans conversations like “The Shape of Things to Come” and “Agentic AI and the Future of Marketing,” plus a live GenAI Advertising Showcase highlighting the techniques that are actually moving the needle. The day closes with the AI Trailblazers Power 100 Cocktail Reception, uniting the executives defining the next era of creativity, performance and leadership. Tickets are limited—secure yours now and get inside the room where AI-powered marketing’s next chapter is being written.

A special thanks to our partners Tishman Speyer, Celtra, Razorfish and Cadent for their support in making this summit possible.

Generative AI Is Booming, Differentiation Is Dying

Marketing Dive’s latest coverage of new Gartner research shows a widening gap between AI ambition and AI impact. CMOs expect the technology to reshape their roles, but most organizations aren’t making the structural shifts required to see real performance gains. AI experimentation is rising, yet true transformation still belongs to the few leaders willing to rethink how their teams operate.

  • Marketers expect AI to reshape their roles within two years, but few are seeing real impact because adoption is piecemeal. Gartner finds that even teams using genAI or agents aren’t translating it into business outcomes. The real issue is that AI requires holistic transformation, not bolt-on tools.

  • Business leaders believe companies must reinvent their identities to keep pace with AI, both internally and externally. CMOs are expected to craft this narrative even as budgets stagnate and expectations grow. Without deep organizational readiness, AI agents won’t deliver the performance marketers expect.

  • AI is already disrupting core digital channels like search, social and display, as the biggest platforms pour billions into AI-driven features. Gartner urges marketers to adopt a zero-based approach, reevaluating every channel and touchpoint quarterly. Success comes from strategy, workflow redesign and talent development, not from buying more agent tools.

  • The CMO role is rapidly expanding, with accountability rising across customer experience, product strategy and commercial alignment. AI can relieve some pressure, but overreliance on genAI risks sameness and weak differentiation. Gartner says the CMOs who win will blend AI-enabled insights with human creativity to build trust, emotion and truly distinctive value.

AI Trailblazer Takeaways: The story here isn’t that AI is underperforming. It’s that most organizations are. Gartner’s research makes it painfully clear: CMOs want AI to transform marketing, but they’re still operating on legacy structures, legacy processes and, frankly, legacy mindsets. The teams seeing real impact aren’t the ones buying more tools, they’re the ones rebuilding how marketing works. AI doesn’t create advantage on its own; it amplifies whatever system it’s dropped into. Right now, too many systems are built for a world AI already left behind.

Every Time AI Levels Up, We Move the Goalposts

Scientific American’s latest piece makes one thing obvious: AI keeps getting smarter, but our definition of “real intelligence” keeps moving. Each time machines master a task once considered uniquely human, we quietly shift the goalposts to preserve our idea of what intelligence should look like. The summary below breaks down how shifting standards, AGI debates and our own uneven cognitive abilities shape the way we judge AI progress.

  • Our definition of “intelligence” keeps shifting because every time AI masters a task, we decide that task no longer counts as truly intelligent. The article shows how benchmarks like the Turing test, once viewed as the gold standard, are now treated as quaint artifacts. This constant goalpost-moving makes it harder to know when AI has actually achieved “humanlike intelligence.”

  • The Microsoft–OpenAI agreement exposes how messy it is to declare AGI, given that experts can’t even agree on what “human-level intelligence” includes. Despite AI outperforming humans in areas like chess, translation and bar-exam logic, none of these feats are considered decisive. The uncertainty reveals how much our AGI expectations are shaped by emotion and identity, not just capability.

  • AI systems have surpassed humans in many specialized domains, yet we discount each achievement to protect our sense of uniqueness. Cognitive scientists argue we redefine “real intelligence” whenever machines match human skill, recategorizing those tasks as mechanical. This pattern has fueled the rise of the AGI concept, something broad, flexible and ever harder to reach.

  • Even as AI rapidly beats new benchmarks, complex reasoning and embodied human experience remain difficult for machines. The article argues the flaw may be in treating human intelligence as the perfect reference point, given that our own abilities are uneven and evolution-constrained. As we keep moving the bar for AGI, the intelligence that ultimately arrives may not resemble us at all.

AI Trailblazer Takeaways: AI isn’t struggling to reach human intelligence, we’re struggling to accept it. Scientific American makes it clear that each time AI crosses a boundary we once treated as sacred, we immediately downgrade that ability to “not real intelligence.” The result is a moving target that says more about our discomfort with losing uniqueness than it does about AI’s actual capabilities.

AI Marketing Grew Up in 2025—and the Results Got Wild

AdAge.com’s roundup of the top AI activations of 2025 makes one thing obvious: AI marketing didn’t just progress this year, it leveled up. From fully AI-generated ads to custom brand models, agency-built intelligence and true agentic automation, these breakthroughs are reshaping how modern marketing works. The four examples below show where the industry is heading and what leading teams are already doing differently.

  • Kalshi’s fully AI-generated NBA Finals ad showed just how far AI creativity has come, delivering realistic characters in surreal, high-energy scenes. The spot was produced in just two days, highlighting AI’s speed and efficiency advantages over traditional production. It also exposed limits like short-clip continuity and AI’s tendency to lean into absurdity rather than nuanced storytelling.

  • Ralph Lauren’s “Ask Ralph” set a new standard for custom brand models, using a bespoke AI trained on its full product catalog and style codes. The chatbot guides shoppers through outfit decisions with brand-authentic taste and accessible UX. It illustrates the power of brand-owned AI models in delivering differentiated, customer-facing experiences.

  • Digitas’ NX Score proved how agencies can turn proprietary AI into a competitive weapon, powering 80% of its pitch wins. The tool analyzes huge datasets to map consumer loyalty tiers and benchmark competitors, packaging insights into a single actionable report. It shows that when agencies build AI products with real utility, they gain both credibility and revenue.

  • Virgin Voyages demonstrated the business value of agentic AI with a fleet of task-specific agents that cut creative costs by 35%. Tools like “Email Ellie” and “Landing Page Larry” dramatically accelerated personalization and production cycles. The approach proves that the most impactful AI often isn’t flashy, it’s targeted, operational, and deeply practical.

AI Trailblazer Takeaways: The clearest takeaway from AdAge’s roundup is that AI is no longer a novelty in marketing, it’s an operating shift. The winning brands aren’t dabbling with tools, they’re rebuilding workflows, training models on proprietary data, and deploying agentic systems that actually change output and outcomes. The lesson is simple: advantage is moving to teams that treat AI as infrastructure, not inspiration.

Quote of the Week

“The real question is, how big of a grant does it take to put pressure on state lawmakers to change their AI regulations?”

- Adam Thierer, Senior Fellow at the R Street Institute

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AI Trailblazers is a vibrant platform dedicated to uniting corporate marketers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI). Our mission is to fuel growth, innovation, and career development among our members, who all want to be at the forefront of incorporating artificial intelligence into their businesses and their lives for strategic advantage. More information here.