Customer behavior isn’t evolving gradually anymore. It’s shifting in real time.

As vice president of marketing integration and creative strategy at Best Buy, I’m seeing firsthand how AI is reshaping not just how customers discover products, but how brands are surfaced, evaluated, and recommended across digital experiences.

Platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini increasingly help customers research, compare, summarize, and narrow options before they ever visit a website directly.

That changes marketing in a fundamental way. Brands are no longer designing experiences for people alone. They’re also designing for the AI systems increasingly shaping how those people make decisions.

AI is reshaping how decisions get made.

At Best Buy, my team is helping reshape how marketing operates, builds, and scales in the age of AI. We don’t view AI as a tool that simply helps teams move faster. We’ve embraced AI as a meaningful layer in how customers discover products and make decisions.

That changes the question we’re asking. It’s no longer just “How do we influence customers?” It’s “How do we show up in the systems that influence them?”

And that’s the challenge because marketing was designed for humans — for storytelling, emotion, and persuasion — and it works beautifully when a human does the interpreting.

But an algorithm can’t feel a brand or experience its campaigns. AI agents interpret, evaluate, and connect signals across content, channels, and sources. That’s the new constraint — how can we keep creating content that resonates with customers at an emotional level while speaking to AI in the structured signals AI systems can interpret consistently?

Rewriting the rules of marketing.

Today, there is no single playbook. The technology and media landscape is evolving in real time, so we’re focused on building agility, empowering teams to make decisions faster, learn quickly, and redesign how marketing operates.

When engaging with AI, it’s not just what you say, it’s how your content is structured.

That’s why we’re streamlining workflows and infrastructure to scale faster without sacrificing governance, while rebuilding campaigns around clarity, consistency, and structure.

When designing for AI-driven discovery, it’s not just what you say — it’s whether your content is structured, interpretable, and trustworthy across every touchpoint.

That means rethinking how we create and distribute content so campaigns could function as connected systems within a more scalable content supply chain — powered by shared taxonomies, consistent messaging, metadata strategies, and operating models built to scale across channels and audiences.

That doesn’t mean Best Buy’s storytelling has lost its creative flair or relevance — it's become increasingly important to connect with our consumers on an emotional level. And AI has unlocked a new level of creativity among our marketers, enabling teams to create campaigns that connect with customers on an emotional level and feel uniquely tailored to their needs at the moment.

That’s been the biggest lesson for us: AI doesn’t sideline creativity — it raises the standard for it.

The challenge now is building marketing systems that can support both emotional storytelling and AI-driven discovery at the same time.

The brands that succeed won’t just adopt AI tools. They’ll rethink how content, workflows, and customer experiences work together across every stage of the journey.

See how other leaders are tackling this same shift, and what it means across industries. Read our full Summit wrap-up here.

Ellie Taylor brings more than 25 years of marketing and advertising experience across global brands and creative agencies to her role as vice president, marketing integration and creative strategy at Best Buy. In this role, Ellie leads the strategy and execution of integrated Best Buy ads and marketing campaigns, oversees business affairs and Best Buy Studios, and guides the marketing operations team to drive efficiency and scale while delivering innovative, high-impact creative work across the organization.

Ellie is focused on delivering meaningful brand experiences and accelerating business growth as the customer journey becomes more dynamic, nonlinear, and shaped by emerging technologies.

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