February 07, 2025

Data, creativity, AI, and marketing: where do we go from here?

While causes of inefficient data coordination vary, silos remain the most frequent offender. There is still a widespread tendency to collect and store data in isolated buckets that are often made all the more challenging by lingering reliance on manual processing — as underscored by the fact four in ten cross-industry employees cite structuring, preparing and manipulating information among their top data difficulties. Therefore, a sizable number of organizations are working with fragmented and inconsistent data that requires time-consuming wrangling and is often subject to human error. The obvious problem this poses is a lack of the comprehensive data to inform sound decisions. At the AI-assisted marketing level, faulty data has a high potential to jeopardise creative efforts; resulting in irrelevant ads that miss their mark for target audiences and brand goals and misguided strategic moves based on skewed analysis. Of course, there are no quick fixes to tackle these complications. But businesses can reach greater data maturity and efficacy by reconfiguring their orchestration methods. With a streamlined system that persistently delivers consolidated data, marketers will be equipped to extract key performance and consumer insights that steer refined and precise AI-enhanced activity.

How AI is transforming strategy development

Beyond these well-understood risks, gen AI presents five additional considerations for strategists. First, it elevates the importance of access to proprietary data. Gen AI is accelerating a long-term trend: the democratization of insights. It has never been easier to leverage off-the-shelf tools to rapidly generate insights that are the building blocks of any strategy. As the adoption of AI models spreads, so do the consequences of relying on commoditized insights. After all, companies that use generic inputs will produce generic outputs, which lead to generic strategies that, almost by definition, lead to generic performance or worse. As a result, the importance of curating proprietary data ecosystems (more on these below) that incorporate quantitative and qualitative inputs will only increase. Second, the proliferation of data and insights elevates the importance of separating signal from noise. This has long been a challenge, but gen AI compounds it. We believe that as the technology matures, it will be able to effectively pull out the signals that matter, but it is not there yet. Third, as the ease of insight generation grows, so does the value of executive-level synthesis. Business leaders—particularly those charged with making strategic decisions—cannot operate effectively if they are buried in data, even if that data is nothing but signal.?

Why Cybersecurity Is Everyone’s Responsibility

Ultimately, cybersecurity is everyone’s responsibility because the fallout affects us all when something goes wrong. When a company goes through a data breach – say it’s ransomware – a number of people are held to task, and even more are impacted. First, the CEO and CISO will rightly be held accountable. Next, security managers will bear their share of the blame and be scrutinized for how they handled the situation. Then, laws and lawmakers will be audited to see if the proper rules were in place. The organization will be investigated for compliance violations, and if found guilty, will pay regulatory fines, legal costs, and maybe lose professional licenses. If the company cannot recover from the reputational damage, revenue will be lost, and jobs will be cut. Lastly, and most importantly, the users who lost their data can likely be impacted for years, even a lifetime. Bank accounts and credit cards will need to be changed, identity theft will be a pressing risk, and in the case of healthcare data breaches, sensitive, unchangeable information could be leaked or used as blackmail against the victims. ... The burden of cybersecurity rests with us all. There is an old saying attributed to Dale Carnegie: “Here lies the body of William Jay, who died maintaining his right of way— He was right, dead right, as he sped?along, but he’s just as dead as if he were wrong.”

Spy vs spy: Security agencies help secure the network edge

“Products designed with Secure by Design principles prioritize the security of customers as a core business requirement, rather than merely treating it as a technical feature,” the introductory web page said. “During the design phase of a product’s development lifecycle, companies should implement Secure by Design principles to significantly decrease the number of exploitable flaws before introducing them to the market for widespread use or consumption. Out-of-the-box, products should be secure with additional security features such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), logging, and single sign-on (SSO) available at no extra cost.” ... However, she doesn’t feel that lumping together internet connected firewalls, routers, IoT devices, and OT systems in an advisory is helpful to the community, and “neither is calling them ‘edge devices,’ because it assumes that enterprise IT is the center of the universe and the ‘edge’ is out there.” “That may be true for firewalls, routers, and VPN gateways, but not for OT systems,” she continued. ... Many are internet connected to support remote operations and maintenance, she noted, so “the goal there should be to give advice on how to remote into those systems securely, and the tone of the advisories should be targeted to the production realities where IT security tools and processes are not always a good idea.”

Will the end of Windows 10 accelerate CIO interest in AI PCs?

“The vision around AI PCs is that, over time, more of the models, starting with small language models, and then quantized large language models … more of those workloads will happen locally, faster, with lower latency, and you won’t need to be connected to the internet and it should be less expensive,” the IDC analyst adds. “You’ll pay a bit more for an AI PC but [the AI workload is] not on the cloud and then arguably there’s more profit and it’s more secure.” ... “It’s smart for CIOs to consider some early deployments of these to bring the AI closer to the employees and processes,” Melby says. “A side benefit is that it keeps the compute local and reduces cyber risk to a degree. But it takes a strategic view and precision targeting. The costs of AI PCs/laptops are at a premium right now, so we really need a compelling business case, and the potential for reduced cloud costs could help break loose those kinds of justifications.”?Not all IT leaders are on board with running AI on PCs and laptops. “Unfortunately, there are many downsides to this approach, including being locked into the solution, upgrades becoming more difficult, and not being able to benefit from any incremental improvements,” says Tony Marron, managing director of Liberty IT at Liberty Mutual.

Self-sovereign identity could transform fraud prevention, but…

Despite these challenges, SSI has the potential to be a powerful tool in the fight against fraud. Consider the growing use of mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs). These digital credentials allow users to prove their identity quickly and securely without exposing unnecessary personal information. Unlike traditional forms of identification, which often reveal more data than needed, SSI-based credentials operate on the principle of minimal disclosure, only sharing the required details. This limits the amount of exploitable information in circulation and reduces identity theft risk. Another promising area is passwordless authentication. For years, we’ve talked about the death of the password, yet reliance on weak, easily compromised credentials persists. SSI could accelerate the transition to more secure authentication mechanisms, using biometrics and cryptographic certificates instead of passwords. By eliminating centralized repositories of login credentials, businesses can significantly reduce the risk of credential-stuffing attacks and phishing attempts. However, the likelihood of a fully realized SSI wallet that consolidates identity documents, payment credentials and other sensitive information remains low, at least in the near future. The convenience factor isn’t there yet, and without significant consumer demand, businesses have little motivation to push for mass adoption.

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