Amazon Web Services Inc.’s AI marketing has evolved into data-driven storytelling, personalized targeting at scale and even sports partnerships. Like most companies, however, that evolution often brings up a dilemma: How does a brand reinvent itself while staying true to core values and maintaining the underlying company spirit?

TheCUBE’s John Furrier talks with AWS’ Julia White about the company’s gen AI marketing focus.

By reimagining its marketing playbook, AWS has maintained its underlying principles of customer obsession and operational excellence, according to Julia White (pictured), vice president of worldwide AWS marketing at AWS.

“With the things we’ve known and have been doing for a while, using AI to help with content development, as someone who’s been in marketing forever, I’ve always had the dream of the one-to-one type of targeted marketing,” White said. “But it was just never really possible before gen AI. Now, doing that well, doing it at scale, just like a lot of other things with AI, comes back to how good your data is and how much you know about the customer that you’re targeting.”

White spoke with John Furrier at the AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the cloud giant is evolving to incorporate generative AI in its core marketing strategy.

AI marketing brings precise scaling in an infinite market

The ideal scenario for most seasoned marketers is personalized, one-to-one engagement. With gen AI, that fantasy can become a scalable reality, provided existing data resources are up to the task. For AWS, AI is enabling precision, meaning that marketing communications are well-timed, relevant, actionable and valuable, according to White. The goal? Utilize AI to cater to a diverse range of customer needs, from cloud beginners to advanced enterprises, with content and experiences tailored to their unique journey.

“We’re only limited by our ability to execute well and meet that customer need best and first, which is a great problem,” she said. “As I think about AI, internally, what we’re doing is that’s giving us the ability to scale, to meet the market opportunity that exists.”

There’s an ongoing cultural shift in B2B marketing where trust and peer influence are taking center stage.  Organic, peer-based trust networks such as the WhatsApp groups of CISOs or casual kite-surfing weekends where business deals emerge serve as real-world examples. In a landscape saturated with content, authenticity and trusted voices are becoming powerful brand amplifiers, White pointed out.

“It is interesting at a more social and psychological level, perhaps that with the advancement of AI, there’s the ability for it to be abused,” she said. “People lean in towards the humanity part of it. The most influential decision-makers are your peers — the humans that you trust and you can see and fight with.”

The AWS marketing team is rethinking its entire stack through an AI marketing lens. From migrating 75,000 webpages using AI to generating real-time content snippets from re:Invent keynotes, the shift has been massive, according to White.

“Is the tech stack to change for marketing? It is, and it’s going to continue,” she said. “I wouldn’t tell you I know exactly what it’s going to look like, but it’s very much changing. I mean, think about just what’s underway right now … we’re using AI and making it a very fast and seamless process.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit:

Photo: SiliconANGLE