Discussing the future of AI-powered personalization

As marketers race to meet rising consumer expectations, AI-powered personalization has moved from a promising experiment to an increasingly proven driver of growth, efficiency, and brand relevance. Across industries, leading companies are moving beyond isolated use cases to embed AI into end-to-end marketing workflows—unlocking new levels of scale, speed, and resonance.

Eli Stein, partner at McKinsey, and Loreal Lynch, CMO of Jasper, discuss how CMOs are making AI real in their organizations. The following is an edited version of their conversation.

Reworking workflows

Loreal Lynch, Jasper: Many marketers are adopting AI but often in an ad hoc way. What needs to happen to unlock real ROI through personalization at scale?

Eli Stein, McKinsey: Two years ago, our CMO survey showed that while most leaders were excited about AI, the majority hadn’t gone beyond experimentation. This year, that same percentage of leaders is now using AI—but only in isolated, one-off use cases. That’s led to modest results: some cost savings, incremental growth, but nothing transformative.

What differentiates the companies that are seeing value at scale? They are rethinking workflows from the ground up; redefining roles to match how marketing gets done with AI; making AI interoperable across systems; and building real capability across teams—not just handing over tools.

Loreal Lynch: How do you work with organizations to reimagine their marketing workflows for AI?

Eli Stein: It starts with understanding your current workflow, something many marketers don’t do in a structured way. Especially in large organizations with thousands of full-time employees and agency partners, the actual flow of work is often a mystery.

Once that’s clear, the second step is defining what kind of marketing you want to do. A brand that wants to generate high-volume, personalized emails, for example, will have a very different workflow than one focused on midfunnel brand storytelling through short-form video.

Then reimagine the workflow from the ground up. A few things are universally true: You’ll need more modular content; and AI agents will take on tasks, like first-pass legal review, that humans previously owned.

There’s no universal blueprint yet. But CMOs need to treat this rearchitecting as a strategic priority if they want different outcomes.

Why personalization now

Loreal Lynch: With rising consumer expectations and tighter budgets, is personalization now a business imperative?

Eli Stein: Absolutely. We’re entering an era where personalization drives relevance and authenticity, and both are becoming nonnegotiable. Take a market like India, where over 4,000 dialects are spoken. If you’re a global company and not communicating in someone’s preferred language or format, you’re going to lose to competitors that do.

Our research shows that over 75 percent of consumers are turned off by content that doesn’t feel relevant. The bar keeps rising, and AI makes it possible to meet that bar at scale.

When I talk to marketing leaders, especially CMOs, I find that there’s a particular value driver they’re anchoring on. Whether it’s brand consistency, customer experience, revenue growth, or efficiency, personalization can help with all of those things.

C-suite alignment

Loreal Lynch: What do you see as the most common metric for CMOs to measure AI’s value?

Eli Stein: The best CMOs don’t pick one. They’re using AI to deliver across all fronts, including external efficiency—making ecosystem collaboration (with agencies and tech partners, for example) faster and more productive; unlocking talent—freeing marketers from process-heavy work so they can do the creative, strategic work they came to do; and driving growth— delivering more relevant, more resonant messages that convert.

Loreal Lynch: How do the best organizations manage the cross-functional nature of personalization?

Eli Stein: Personalization, especially AI-powered personalization, is inherently cross-functional because it cuts at the core of a company’s value proposition. It requires an “alliance of three” across marketing, technology, and product.

Tech is essential—both traditional tools like DAM [digital asset management] and CMSs [content management systems], and newer AI-driven tools. And you can’t personalize effectively if your tech is disconnected from the product experience or road map.

Beyond that, legal and HR are critical. Legal helps define boundaries and risk tolerance, and HR supports the redesign of roles and capabilities as AI changes the nature of marketing work.