Marketers Embrace AI’s Promise While Confronting Its Trust Problem

From left to right: Tiffany Pedersen, David Baum, Cindy Zhou and Jesse Comart

At the 2025 Mid-Atlantic MarCom Summit in Arlington, Va., AI wasn’t just a sidebar topic — it threaded through more than 20 sessions, from paid media to crisis communications to internal brand storytelling.

“AI is everything,” said Tiffany Pedersen, Head of Global Employer Brand Marketing, Alexa, Devices & Services at Amazon. “We can take a job description on our website and turn it into a social media post in two seconds.” Pedersen described how her teams now treat AI as a “teammate,” building tools that scale global content creation, translate marketing into multiple languages, and accelerate recruiting for Amazon’s next generation of AI scientists.

For David Baum, Executive Vice President and Head of Corporate Affairs at Zeno Group, AI’s rise demands balance. “Leadership acts equal humanity times technology,” he said, defining Zeno’s new “leadership equation.” He urged communicators to pair empathy and judgment with automation. “You have to treat your AI as a teammate, not a tool,” he added. “We’re the ones that feed it and shape it.”

That caution echoed across the Summit. Cindy Zhou, Chief Marketing Officer at KnowBe4, flagged the limits of generative tools: “AI will help you get there — 80, maybe 85 percent of the way — but you have to have that QA lens on it.” She recalled a case in Australia where an AI-generated report included fabricated quotes, warning: “Our credibility as marketers is on the line.”

AI’s creative promise was also on display. Jesse Comart, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at GoodLeap, shared how his team now produces full commercials with synthetic humans for about $1,000 — projects that once cost hundreds of thousands. “It’s a little scary that none of those people are real,” he said, “but it’s incredible how fast you can do it and at such low cost.” Still, Comart emphasized that human oversight is vital. “We’re analyzing where our chatbots fail,” he explained. “AI shows us the pain points, but it’s up to us to make the customer journey better.”

Adding another dimension, Geoff Livingston, founder of CognitivePath, warned that integrating AI in communications mandates a culture shift, not just technology investment. He said the temptation to deploy automation too quickly is real: “You risk eroding voice, nuance, institutional memory — in the name of scale.”

Across sessions, speakers agreed that communicators who thrive will be those who experiment responsibly, use AI for scale, and double-down on storytelling. “It’s a time of experimentation,” said Baum. “What got you here won’t get you there.”

Pedersen added that while automation is reshaping the work, human connection must remain the center of marketing. “You still need people to verify the output of AI,” she said. “Promotional resonance, contextual cues — those things only humans can bring.”

For communicators, the message from Arlington was clear: AI can make marketing faster, smarter, and more precise — but only if it strengthens, not replaces, the authenticity that audiences trust.