Keynotes.

Most marketing and communications budgets are still spent on instinct and old habits, usually under the heading of strategy. Real insight has been too expensive. That is changing. Three things are happening at once. Marketing science has matured, AI has made it usable at ordinary budgets, and AI agents have started doing both the selling and buying.

The talk shows what the combination changes, with cases from banking and finance, culture and entertainment, travel, and the non-profit sector. How established marketing science and the psychology of purchasing work together, and how agentic AI cuts the time and cost of the daily work.

The talk ends with the next buyer. Machines do not consume narratives or chase attention. They read parameters and data. A brand that wants to be chosen has to stay legible to an algorithmic market. The talk shows where to begin.

Most AI pilots show nothing on the bottom line. The models are not failing. The order is. The machine is put to work before anyone has asked what it is for.

AI amplifies whatever discipline it is set to serve, and the wrong discipline produces the wrong answer faster. In marketing that discipline is marketing science, the knowledge of what actually triggers a purchase. In recruitment it is selection research. In management it may be behavioural science. None of these are new, and all of them have always worked. What cost money was using them. AI now carries that work.

The talk shows the rebuild in practice, department by department, on three lines. AI takes the volume. The professionals take the judgement. Only evidence releases the money. The change starts with small tests that show a gain, and the audience leaves with the methodical questions for their own business, and the nerve to ask them.

Everyone is now expected to verify what machines, media and people in power produce. The methods for that are old. Source criticism, controlled testing, a short set of questions any claim must survive. The chatbot did not invent noise, it scaled the supply. Descartes imagined a demon feeding him a false world and worried about one. We subscribe to several.

The talk takes the toolbox on stage. Three lies are told, announced in advance, and catching them is the audience's job. It is more fun than it sounds and harder than it looks. In between, the methods. The courage to use them is the last question on the list.

The internet is changing owners. For two decades businesses have lived as tenants, on Google, on Meta, on media houses, on programmatic platforms. The platforms own the data, set the rules and take the value. It is a tenancy, and few have read the lease.

The talk is about the move toward ownership. Not as ideology. As strategy. The list, the channel, the keys, the contract. What changes when the customer goes from consumer to partner, and how to begin the move without committing the whole business on day one.