While most discussions about AI focus on productivity, Suzie Cardwell is even more interested in what the technology can reveal about customers.

As Chief Data, Product, and Technology Officer at Nine Entertainment, Australia’s largest media company, she sees AI as a powerful lens into audience behavior, and a way to build richer more meaningful connections. While Nine is still in the early stages of its agentic AI journey, the potential is already starting to show, with new ideas and use cases emerging across the business.

From content creation to customer understanding.

Adapting content for different channels and formats is one of Nine’s earliest uses of agentic workflows. Here, AI helps automate much of that work, making it easier to distribute content across an expanding number of platforms. Cardwell is particularly interested in applying AI to content workflows to boost personalization.

“We’re already seeing the benefits of delivering more personalized creative experiences to different audience segments,” she says. “AI lets us scale those experiences much more broadly while maintaining relevance at an individual level.”

For a media company like Nine, relevance depends on understanding how audiences engage across a diverse portfolio of brands and platforms. A single consumer may subscribe to The Sydney Morning Herald, stream content through Stan, and regularly watch programming on 9Now. Bringing those interactions together creates a more complete picture of what people value and how they consume content.

Nine uses Adobe Real-Time CDP, part of Adobe Experience Platform, to create that connected view of the customer. By bringing audience signals together across its brands and properties, the company gains a deeper understanding of customer preferences and behaviors, helping teams deliver more relevant experiences across its portfolio. It has also helped Nine increase its digital data revenue by 265% over four years.

The same data foundation is also helping Nine explore broader AI opportunities. The company is experimenting with using AI to surface insights and identify connections between audience segments that may have otherwise gone unnoticed, leading teams to uncover new opportunities for engagement and creating a foundation for predictive models.

At the same time, Cardwell believes in balancing relevance with trust. Nine aims to create more relevant experiences while being transparent about its data practices and giving consumers control over their information. This combination becomes especially important as organizations move beyond campaign-based marketing and toward customer lifecycle management. By understanding how engagement changes over time, Nine can identify signals that suggest an audience member is disengaging and create opportunities to reconnect them with content and experiences that match their interests.

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Where AI is creating new opportunities.

The same data that powers personalization also creates new opportunities for AI. For Cardwell, some of the technology’s most valuable applications have little to do with speed.

Pattern recognition is one example. Nine is already seeing cases where AI identifies relationships between audience segments that would have been difficult to uncover through traditional analysis alone.

Another opportunity lies in making data more accessible. The company is exploring how marketers and business users can interact with data using natural language, making it easier to find and use insights without requiring deep technical expertise.

“One of the most exciting opportunities is how fast we can learn,” says Cardwell. “AI allows us to test and adapt much more quickly as audience needs and behaviors change.”

Marketers are no longer limited to traditional A/B testing or a handful of test scenarios. They’re exploring a broader range of creative approaches and using those insights to continuously improve customer experiences.

Data literacy remains the differentiator.

As AI becomes more capable, Cardwell expects leading organizations to distinguish themselves through how effectively they use data.

“Successful marketers know the data they’re working with as much as their data teams do,” she says. “They work closely together to identify the right signals and determine how to act on them.”

The technology is changing quickly. Understanding customers remains a constant.

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