Just as lightning precedes thunder and the moon’s whims dictate the tides, the AI revolution is dragging disruption in its wake, changing marketing in unimagined ways. Gone are the days when customers come to us as blank slates waiting to be informed. What’s replaced them is a phalanx of sophisticated buyers who have already educated themselves and have no intention of sitting through precanned sales pitches.
In fairness, digital transformation took them halfway there, but AI is sealing the deal. Brands don’t set the terms anymore. Instead, it’s our job to meet customers on their personal buying journeys—and if that means delivering content in bite-sized clips they can stream between binging their Netflix series, then so be it.
The question this raises for marketers is relatively straightforward: how do you plan to uplevel? Because one thing is clear: if we don’t become the disruptors, we will be disrupted. That’s always been true in some ways. After all, marketing today isn’t what it was 10 years ago and isn’t what it will be in 10 years. Adaptation is built into the marketing ethos. With AI, however, we’re moving faster than ever before.
To help you keep pace, here’s a totally nonscientific formula I’ve developed for honing the skill of disruption. Let me know if it resonates with you:
1. Embrace the New
AI-driven marketing is reshaping everything from customer engagement and personalization to the marketing function itself. Its predictive power is providing us with richer data than ever, unlocking our capacity to better understand our customers, respond to their evolving needs, and deliver strategic outcomes.
The onus is on us, however, to identify the tools driving this change. Today, it’s AI. Tomorrow, it could be something else. As marketers, the prime directive is to stay ahead of that curve by embracing the next-wave, new-age, cutting-edge tools capable of making us smarter, more efficient, and more productive.
2. Educate Yourself
Classroom learning is good and fine, but it’s rarely ground zero for true education. The distinctions most of us make throughout our careers come from on-the-job learning, attending courses and forums, showing up at networking events, and sharing best practices. As marketing leaders, we must remain openly curious—and that holds true as we explore the bounds of AI-driven marketing.
3. Educate Others
There’s a funny thing about disruption. Like anything truly novel, it’s not always comfortable. As we move beyond the familiar, we may encounter pushback. So, it’s our responsibility to sell disruption to the C-suite. Part of this comes down to our ability to build a compelling story. But much of it must be driven by business realities. We can start with a cool idea, but then we need to run it through our peers, partners, and agencies, and conduct customer testing. We need to use those inputs to create an execution plan that outlines the resources needed, the cost implications, and the massive projected impact—all of which can be informed and improved through the use of AI.
4. Challenge the Status Quo
While disruption requires a specific mindset, its ultimate power lies in its capacity to upset accepted norms—and that’s only possible if we’re willing to challenge the status quo. We do that regularly at Palo Alto Networks, but one of my favorite recent examples is our Precision AI campaign featuring Keanu Reeves. In conceiving this campaign, we asked: how do we take a technically complex cybersecurity story and make it not just accessible, but cinematic?
The result was a bold fusion of human creativity and artificial intelligence—a campaign that deliberately blurred the lines between Hollywood storytelling and enterprise messaging. In 10 months, we saw dramatic lifts in engagement, web traffic, and brand affinity, while building a foundation for future AI-powered storytelling. It worked because we didn’t just think differently—we acted on it.
5. Find a New BFF
Challenging the status quo doesn’t mean becoming a maverick. That’s especially true as we continue to leverage AI tools to differentiate ourselves. When bringing AI to the forefront, innovation must go hand-in-hand with security. To counter risks that range from data privacy concerns to cyberthreats and beyond, we need to work with our security teams to protect sensitive customer and company information. That means the CMO and CIO must become new best friends.
The future of marketing isn’t just about intelligence—it’s about trust. Earning that trust means embedding security by design so we can simultaneously deliver innovation and safeguard employee and customer data. Security should be at the core of every digital transformation and make no mistake: the AI revolution promises to transform the marketing function. To move forward with confidence, marketers must work in lockstep with IT teams to integrate advanced cybersecurity measures as we spin our AI ideas into reality.
6. Link Back to Business Outcomes
At the end of the day, the marketing function remains a cost center. That’s partly why AI promises such transformative results. It’s because now we have the analytic insights to tangibly demonstrate how marketing will drive a business impact or deliver on specific business outcomes. Better yet, combining AI tools with true disruption can help us deliver massive, scalable growth that extends well beyond historical averages.
Are you ready to leverage AI to create disruptive marketing outcomes? The time is now. The revolution is underway. Let’s lead by example.
Curious what else Unnikrishnan has to say? Check out his other articles on Perspectives.
