At Babylist, artificial intelligence has helped transform the company’s email operations, according to CMO Jill Cress. Two years ago, the team sent 5 million emails. This year, it expects to send 1 billion emails and push notifications.

But that increased capacity has introduced another challenge: keeping the company’s brand voice intact.

“We are now starting to see that our tone, our edge, our authority is getting a little bit diluted because we’re not necessarily doing the work of feeding back into the context layer,” Cress said.

For marketing leaders, putting AI to work involves more than automating tasks. PepsiCo is focusing on how consumers discover brands through AI-powered search, while Sharp Electronics is using the technology to turn customer service data into insights for other teams. At Babylist, increased production has made human oversight especially important.

Those experiences came from an Oct. 8 panel at the Zeta Live conference in New York City, featuring marketing execs dealing with the fast-paced growth of AI.

Babylist Balances Automation and Brand Trust

At Babylist, a universal baby registry, email marketers manage AI agents instead of spending time building messages, writing subject lines and conducting quality assurance.

“All of our email marketers are actually managing agents,” Cress said. “They’re becoming more embedded in product squads where they can actually lean into design and accelerate the more strategic work that needs to get done.”

The company is also seeing improved engagement, although Cress did not provide specific figures.

“Our open rates are improved, our click-through rates are improved, and the impact to the overall business is better,” she said.

But Babylist is drawing distinctions between where it uses AI and where human involvement remains essential.

“Babylist’s moat is our trust,” Cress said. “Ensuring that humans are writing [our independent reviews] is incredibly important, and we take that very seriously.”

The company is experimenting with AI to speed up some writing while using the technology to produce and adapt imagery that previously required photo shoots. Cress said the imagery is outperforming the company’s previous photo shoots.

The challenge now is maintaining the company’s voice as AI helps teams produce more content. “So it really requires a level of human oversight to stay close to that,” Cress said.

PepsiCo Rethinks Search and Discoverability

AI is changing how marketers must approach search, according to Mark Kirkham, CMO of PepsiCo Beverages U.S.

“I think we need to just stop talking about search and agentic search. It’s just search,” he said. “Like it was commerce and ecommerce 20 years ago. It’s all just commerce now.”

Kirkham pointed to TikTok’s growing role in search behavior and questioned whether marketers should keep distinguishing between traditional search and AI-powered search.

“A search is a human behavior. That’s the human behavior you’re solving for,” he said. “What’s the technology that’s going to make it quicker, faster, more efficient, more accurate?”

At PepsiCo, one of AI’s most immediate applications is discoverability.

“For the most part, where we’re getting the most impact is honestly in discoverability,” Kirkham said.

He pointed to Gatorade as an example of a brand whose scientific benefits require consumer education, especially as people seek information on platforms like Reddit and Gemini.

“If they’re being educated through Gemini, then you’ve got to be smart, and you have to have very clear discoverability,” Kirkham said.

The challenge is increasingly relevant as generative AI platforms recommend a limited selection of brands.

On the creative side, Kirkham described using AI to test concepts and produce animatics faster, reducing work that previously took significant time and money.

But when asked whether AI was improving creative quality, he was less certain.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think we’re getting better at the process.”

Sharp Turns Customer Data Into Action

On the other hand, AI is helping Sharp turn customer service data into insights for other teams, said Grace Dolan, President of Sharp Electronics’ U.S. Consumer Division.

The company has a nationwide repair service team of 550 people and a call center with 35 employees, according to Dolan. Every day, those operations generate thousands of data points.

“In the past, they just kind of sat there,” she said.

Now, AI helps the company identify customer issues and share findings across departments.

“Every day I’m able to get a report on what the newest issues are. Why are people calling?” Dolan said.

Those reports can alert sales teams to issues to watch for and help marketing teams identify what to include in FAQs.

Rather than an exciting new use case, she said, “it’s just smarter use of information that always existed.”

Dolan also described an organizational change: assigning one employee responsibility for helping colleagues understand AI developments and sharing examples of how teams are using the technology.

“It’s not that he’s the chief AI officer,” she said. “He is just somebody on my team who has a tremendous passion for AI.”

The employee produces an internal newsletter and develops case studies about AI applications across the company.

Still, Dolan cautioned against treating the work as finished.

“I think we’re still figuring it out,” she said. “We’re learning, and we talk about it a lot, and we always feel behind.”