‘Where AI Works’

“Where AI Works” explores AI’s real-world impact on business. Each season is led by a different Wharton School faculty expert who brings their own AI-focused expertise to the conversation, alongside practitioners actively shaping AI’s role in innovation, strategy, and transformation. In Season 1, Wharton professor of technology and digital business Kartik Hosanagar explores AI’s transformative role in marketing—how AI-powered social listening, digital advertising, and creative automation are reshaping strategy, customer engagement, and brand trust.

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This inaugural episode of “Where AI Works” starts with marketing, and in particular, how AI is super charging the way brands are creating content. In “The Future of Marketing: AI-Driven Content Creation,” Hosanagar talks with Jonathan Halvorson, the global senior vice president of consumer experience at Mondelēz International.

“Over the last two years, we have done 40 campaign-based AI activations. So this is example where in campaigns, we’re using AI technology to augment and deliver a higher efficacy or a higher efficiency of our assets. In those campaigns, we can clearly point to that not only being some of our strongest work, but also in those campaigns, delivering higher brand awareness, higher market share gains and higher net revenue,” says Halvorson.

“Over time, AI is going to cumulatively learn and get better and better. And I think that’s what really excites us. If we can start from that point, have really good success signals and train the systems, we’re only going to achieve higher levels of efficacy and excellence.”

In “Balancing the Algorithm: How AI Is Reshaping Marketing,” Hosanagar speaks with Jill Kramer, chief marketing and communications officer at Accenture, to about how global brands are harnessing AI and also what it takes to take large teams along on that journey.

“Now that I know that this technology exists, how would I do it given these new circumstances? And that is something we have done across the board,” says Kramer. “With every function that helps run this corporation, we have looked at rethinking the work now that you know that Gen AI exists. Because one of the things you learn, when you embrace technology like this, is those areas of overlaps and adjacency, there’s magic in reimagining those handoffs, those shared services, those processes from legal to HR to operations to marketing to sales. So it’s something that has to be done intentionally.”

In Episode 3, “How AI Changes the Game for Creative Teams,” Hosanagar speaks with the CEO of Accenture song and the founder of creative agency, Droga5: David Droga. The two discuss AI’s transformative impact on creative industries with a focus on how AI is redefining the value proposition for agencies and their clients.

And in Episode 4, “AI at Scale: Revolutionizing Enterprise Strategy and Growth,” the conversation transitions from AI strategy and use cases in marketing, to implementation at scale with Lan Guan, chief AI officer at Accenture.

“From the C-suite perspective, we basically asked them … ‘What is your strategy? What are you trying to achieve? Are you looking at AI as a competency-enhancing technology or something that is actually competency-diminishing?’ So this kind of question, it’s almost like the light-bulb moment to them,” Guan says. “Because it’s very easy for people to get enamored by this kind of a tool conversation and then forget about what is the ‘So what?’”

To listen to the podcasts, visit “Where AI Works.”