David Jones: 'all marketing is going to be done using Gen AI'

The founding and development of BrandTech Group feels like it has been leading up to this moment as Agentic AI begins to power the marketing sector. With a collection of agencies that include Jellyfish, Gravity Road and Oliver, it is a business built on the impeding arrival of intelligent platforms and tools.

Sharing his thoughts on the impact AI is having and how the business is supporting clients as they operate through its adoption, David Jones, founder and CEO of The Brandtech Group also reveals a few personal insights along the way.

Creative Salon: What would you say has been the most significant shift for marketers in the last 12 months?

David Jones: Two things: firstly, the fact that it is now possible to create 100 per cent of TV commercials using Gen AI, which was not the case a year and a half ago, and, secondly, agentic workflows, i.e. the ability to, at infinite scale, create vast amounts of high-quality, on-brand content in real time.

With the ongoing adoption of AI – How have conversations around creativity and brand building changed this last year?

Three to four years ago all of our conversations with brands were around the why — why do AI marketing?  Then two to three years ago all the conversations with brands were about the what – what exactly is AI marketing? And there were lots of pilots happening and experimentation.

And in the last 12 months it's become about the how — how do we deliver Gen AI at giant scale?

How are you preparing and supporting clients around the impact of agentic AI?

We think there are three core areas to support clients around agentic AI: technology,  talent, and training. When it comes to technology, our Pencil platform, originally built on ChatGPT2 in 2018, was built to be fully agentic in 2024 – more than 18 months ago - and so that's ready to deliver.

In terms of talent, that’s about putting in place the AI-first cutting edge talent who know how to work with agentic workflows and create them – daisychaining agents so they work from brief, to insight, to concept, to creative ideas, to finished executions to media deployment. 

And in terms of training, we have a huge training division - we are one of Google’ largest training partners (Google Cloud Partner of the Year, North America)  and have trained in excess of 425,000 people, across 6,000 brands with 90,000 of those learners taking Gen AI courses.  

How do you try to prepare to lead when geopolitically things are absolutely nuts from one week to the next? Do you have a way of readying to react?

Despite all of the mayhem and volatility going on in the world, the impact of Gen AI and marketing is actually very predictable, in that, today less than 1 per cent of all marketing is done using Gen AI – but it will be 100 per cent. And, every month, more and more of our clients are looking to scale and use Gen AI. So, while you can't predict how things are going to go geopolitically, I think you can absolutely predict that 100 per cent of all marketing is going to be done partly or fully using Gen AI. And we’re going to ensure that we lead in that. 

Which one project from your business are you most proud of from the last 12 months and what does it say about the business offer?

Earlier this year we made the first fully Gen AI TV commercial to run over Super Bowl weekend for our client NetApp. It took 14 working days from brief to delivery!

It’s genuinely remarkable to me that, when it’s possible to create such great content with AI, that  most of the world's advertising agencies aren't leaning in, and all of the best work is being done by creators, like for example, The Dor Brothers.

What are you most looking forward to in the coming months and why is it important?

In the next few months we’re going to release a totally new benchmarking system for AI models. It’s done in Pencil and it grades all the major LLMs on how competent they are across different use cases. No one has done this before — it’s an open platform and people will be able to test different cases themselves. 

Each test shows the original creative brief, the exact prompts used, the actual output produced, and both the time a human team would take and the time Pencil’s AI agents took to complete the same task. This then gives enterprise marketing leaders the evidence they need to separate AI that works from AI that isn’t there yet. I’m really excited about how this will develop over time.

And I am also really looking forward to this year’s One Young World Summit, This is the charity I co-founded with Kate Robertson in 2009 to empower brilliant young leaders to drive change

This year’s Summit is happening in Cape Town in November, and as usual we will be bringing together 2,500 of the most impactful and effective young leaders from all over the world, with business leaders, politicians, activists, celebrities and sports personalities. Our community has now impacted the lives of more than 50 million people — which is very badly needed, given the geopolitical situation that you talked about earlier. 

What one question would you ask your peer CEOs right now?

I'd ask the CEOs of Google, Open AI, and Anthropic, “What are the most amazing things you have planned for the next six to 12 months, and how can we ensure we get access ahead of anyone else?”

What would you like to have been if you weren’t doing this job?

A tennis coach, a rugby player, or owner of a wine chateau in Bordeaux.