CMO Roundtable with Michelle Devore, Chief Marketing Officer of WellBiz Brands

“In what ways are you using AI technology in the marketing department to enhance your data analysis of trends, performance, and more?” Michelle Devore Chief Marketing Officer WellBiz Brands At WellBiz Brands, we’re using AI in a few different ways, and honestly, the data piece (the thing everyone assumes is the whole story) is the less interesting part at this point. That’s practically table stakes.

Start with the obvious one: bandwidth. Marketing teams are being asked to do more with a tighter headcount every year, and AI genuine-ly lets people get more done while freeing up hours for more strategic work instead of just grinding through the tactical stuff. That matters more than people give it credit for.

The bigger unlock, to me, is what happens to a team’s mindset once they get comfortable working this way. AI is really good at helping you sort through a pile of data and get to an answer fast, so if you’ve got a hypothesis or a hunch you want to test, you’re not shelving it just because it would’ve taken someone hours to dig into. That changes how curious people are willing to be.

And that curiosity feeds bigger thinking. Once a team trusts AI to handle the heavy lifting, ideas that used to get killed early (“That’s too much work”) start feeling possible again. The ceiling on what’s realistic moves.

You get more blue-sky thinking, more willingness to just try things. Then there’s data analysis, which again, is a baseline for us. Trend reporting and performance tracking are on track to be shifted to AI tools as much as possible.

Where we’re headed next is from baseline into active, live monitoring (real-time visibility into promotions, guest behav-ior) so that we can adjust while a campaign is still running instead of doing the autopsy after it’s already over. We’re not fully there yet, but that’s the direction. If a marketing team is only using AI to analyze trends right now, they’re behind.

This year is about pushing past that into real time and into more creativity and experimentation layered on top. Same story on creative: We’re not there yet either, but the plan is to reallocate more of the tactical production work (resizing one ad con-cept into a dozen formats, that kind of thing) to AI tools, so our creative team gets more time back in the dream space instead of spending their day producing versions of the same asset. Creative is still an art.

The ideas behind our campaigns are going to keep coming from our team and our agency partners, not a machine.