AI is Turning Bank Marketing Upside Down: What It Will Disrupt First, Second, and Then Third | The Banking & Payments Show

Summary

Behind the Numbers: AI is Turning Bank Marketing Upside Down

Episode Release Date: July 8, 2025
Hosted by: Rob Rubin, Head of Business Development at eMarketer
Guests: Jacob Bourne (AI Analyst) and Lauren Ashcroft (Banking Analyst)

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Overview

In this insightful episode of EMARKETER’s "Behind the Numbers" podcast, host Rob Rubin delves into the transformative impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on bank marketing. Joined by AI analyst Jacob Bourne and banking analyst Lauren Ashcroft, the discussion explores how AI is reshaping advertising strategies, customer engagement, and operational efficiencies within the financial services sector.

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1. Personal Reflections on AI

Timestamp: [01:00 - 02:17]

To kick off the conversation, Rob Rubin engages the guests in a light-hearted discussion about their personal interactions with AI. Jacob Bourne shares his experience using AI to generate baby name suggestions, saying, “I recently gave it characteristics of names that we're interested in and asked it for, like 10 suggestions. I hated them all, but I thought it was a fun process.” Lauren Ashcroft adds, “It's nice to be able to just ask AI the most random questions that wouldn't really necessarily be appropriate for a traditional search query.”

Rob contributes by mentioning how he used ChatGPT to imagine his dog, Buster, as a human, highlighting the playful and creative potentials of AI in everyday life.

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2. Story by Numbers: US Financial Services Digital Ad Spend

Timestamp: [02:22 - 03:21]

Rob introduces the segment "Story by Numbers," focusing on a staggering $42.6 billion forecast for US financial services digital ad spend in 2025. He emphasizes that this translates to approximately $165 per adult annually, underscoring the substantial investment in digital marketing within the sector. Rob poses a critical question: "How has AI changed the financial industry's approach to advertising?"

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3. AI’s Evolving Role in Bank Marketing

Timestamp: [03:21 - 05:42]

Jacob Bourne explains that AI has kept bank marketers in a state of constant evolution, primarily by enhancing personalization and targeting capabilities. He notes, “Agentic AI is starting to happen in the banking industry and that will change by making, for example, chatbots way more able to completely manage customer situations from beginning to end” ([04:00]).

The discussion shifts to SEO and generative search engines. Jacob highlights a significant shift: “You have to tailor your content to answer questions that people are using generative search engines for” ([04:55]). This represents a departure from traditional SEO practices, requiring marketers to adapt swiftly to stay relevant.

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4. Industry Examples of AI Integration

Timestamp: [05:42 - 08:40]

Lauren Ashcroft provides concrete examples of AI in action within the banking sector. She cites Wells Fargo’s Gen AI-powered Fargo Assistant, which recorded 245.4 million customer interactions in 2024, exceeding expectations and demonstrating high user engagement ([06:05]). In contrast, Bank of America’s Erica has not yet integrated generative AI, though it remains more popular than Wells Fargo's offering.

Lauren also discusses MasterCard's success with AI-powered programmatic advertising, which saw a 254% increase in click-through rates thanks to real-time behavior analysis and cross-channel optimization ([06:48]). Additionally, Reddit’s AI insights feature has boosted advertisers' click-through rates by 19% by summarizing user conversations and enhancing ad relevance ([08:16]).

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5. Synthetic Customers and Digital Twins

Timestamp: [08:44 - 09:33]

The conversation moves to the concept of synthetic customers or digital twins. Lauren Ashcroft explains how AI can generate entire customer bases to simulate and predict responses to marketing campaigns. Rob Rubin emphasizes the power of these simulations for optimizing campaigns pre-launch, stating, “It's pretty powerful” ([08:49]).

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6. Limitations and the Need for Human Oversight

Timestamp: [09:33 - 11:20]

While AI's potential is vast, both Jacob and Lauren express skepticism about fully automating marketing content without human oversight. Jacob points out the critical need for compliance in banking: “The amount of human oversight needed for content before it goes into an ad is very important” ([09:33]). Lauren echoes this sentiment, highlighting that AI, despite advancements, “still needs that oversight” to ensure contextual understanding and compliance ([10:26]).

Rob Rubin challenges this by questioning whether AI could eventually match or surpass human error rates, but Lauren remains cautious, emphasizing the nuanced understanding humans bring: “You always want a human in the loop because people understand people on a fundamental level that AI might not ever” ([11:00]).

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7. Future Disruptions: Ranking AI’s Impact on Bank Marketing

Timestamp: [11:20 - 22:40]

In the final segment, Argue Nicely, Rob Rubin presents five potential areas where AI could disrupt financial services marketing:

1. Bundling Products Dynamically
2. Predicting Churn
3. Generating Marketing Content at Scale
4. Testing Marketing Campaigns
5. Helping Prospects Choose Products

Lauren Ashcroft’s Rankings:

1. Helping Prospects Choose Products – High impact due to enhancing customer experience.
2. Generating Marketing Content at Scale – Saves time and reduces costs despite needing human oversight.
3. Synthetic Customers – Promising but requires time for adoption.
4. Bundling Products Dynamically – Less immediate due to technological constraints.
5. Predicting Churn – Dependent on actionable policies post-prediction.

Jacob Bourne’s Rankings:

1. Bundling Products Dynamically and Helping Prospects Choose Products – Already emerging in fintech applications.
2. Predicting Churn – Essential for customer retention amidst rising competition.
3. Testing Marketing Campaigns – Important for optimizing strategies.
4. Synthetic Customers – Growing potential for future use.
5. Generating Marketing Content at Scale – Skeptical about fully removing humans from this process.

Rob Rubin’s Insights: Rob aligns with the high impact of product bundling and customer assistance, projecting that by 2029, trust in AI recommendations will grow, especially among Gen Z. He also highlights that while predicting churn is currently a focus, it may become a standard practice rather than a differentiator in the future due to its foundational role in customer retention.

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8. The Path Forward: Balancing AI and Human Expertise

Timestamp: [20:39 - 23:58]

Lauren Ashcroft emphasizes a balanced approach: leveraging AI for its strengths while maintaining human relationships in customer-facing roles. Rob Rubin and Jacob Bourne agree that the rapid advancements in AI necessitate continuous adaptation by bank marketers to stay competitive and effectively meet evolving customer needs.

Jacob shares a compelling observation about AI-generated content's realism: “I saw a video that I would bet all of my money that it was a real cast of actors and a real set. It was 100% AI” ([22:15]), underscoring the blurred lines between AI and human-generated content.

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Conclusion

Rob Rubin wraps up the episode by thanking Jacob Bourne and Lauren Ashcroft for their valuable insights. He reiterates the significance of understanding AI’s role in transforming bank marketing and encourages listeners to stay informed through future podcast episodes.

“It's going to be harder to really distinguish between what's AI-generated and what's human-generated,” Lauren Ashcroft remarks, highlighting the ongoing evolution and integration of AI in the financial marketing landscape ([23:58]).

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Key Takeaways

• AI is Revolutionizing Personalization and Targeting: Enhancing customer engagement through personalized marketing strategies.

• Generative AI and SEO are Redefining Content Strategy: Marketers must adapt to new search behaviors driven by AI-generated queries.

• Balancing Automation with Human Oversight: Ensuring compliance and maintaining the human touch in customer interactions remain critical.

• Future Prospects of AI in Banking: From dynamic product bundling to predictive analytics, AI offers numerous avenues for innovation but requires careful implementation.

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Notable Quotes

• “Generative AI is starting to happen in the banking industry and that will change by making, for example, chatbots way more able to completely manage customer situations from beginning to end.” — Jacob Bourne ([04:00])

• “You always want a human in the loop because people understand people on a fundamental level that AI might not ever.” — Lauren Ashcroft ([11:00])

• “I saw a video that I would bet all of my money that it was a real cast of actors and a real set. It was 100% AI.” — Jacob Bourne ([22:15])

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Stay ahead in the rapidly evolving digital media landscape by tuning into EMARKETER’s "Behind the Numbers" podcast, available Monday through Friday on all major podcast platforms.

Transcript

[Rob Rubin]

In marketing, everything must work seamlessly or efficiency, speed, and ROI all suffer. That's why Quad is obsessed with making sure your marketing machine runs smoothly with less friction and smarter integration. Better marketing is built on Quad. See how better gets done at www.quad.com BuildBetter Foreign hello everyone, and welcome to the Banking and Payment Show, a Behind the Numbers podcast from eMarketer made possible by Quad. Today is July 8th, 2025. I'm Rob Rubin, head of business development at eMarketer and your host. Today we're going to talk about how AI will transform bank marketing. I'm really excited to have AI analyst Jacob Bourne and banking analyst Lauren Ashcroft join me for this discussion. Hey, guys. How are you today?

[Jacob Bourne]

Good. How are you?

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Pretty good. Glad to be here.

[Rob Rubin]

I wanted to ask you guys just before we jump into the topic to warm us up, what's the most fun thing you do with AI in your personal life? Playing with it. What do you enjoy? What's the most fun?

[Jacob Bourne]

Well, I'm having a baby in October. I don't know if I told you.

[Rob Rubin]

I did not know that.

[Jacob Bourne]

I'm so sorry that didn't happen. Congratulations. Thank you. I recently, like, gave it characteristics of names that we're interested in and asked it for, like 10 suggestions. I hated them all, but I thought it was a fun process.

[Rob Rubin]

Okay.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Yeah. I don't know if I always use the word fun, but I think in general it's nice to be able to just ask AI the most random questions that wouldn't really necessarily be appropriate for a traditional search query and might not want to ask other people. And you can just ask AI.

[Rob Rubin]

I'll take that to my example.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Okay.

[Rob Rubin]

Which is My dog's name is Buster and his full name is Mr. Buster Snuggles.

[Jacob Bourne]

That's adorable.

[Rob Rubin]

Mr. Snuggles if he's misbehaving. So I asked ChatGPT what Buster would look like as a human.

[Jacob Bourne]

Oh, I like that.

[Rob Rubin]

And it was hilarious. Yeah, chatgpt nailed it.

[Jacob Bourne]

Oh, my gosh. You're going to have to share that with us after.

[Rob Rubin]

It is hilarious. Anyway, let's get right to our first segment today, Story by Numbers. In Story by Numbers, I pick a few numbers or a number to help us frame bank marketing. And today I picked a huge number. $42.6 billion. And that is US financial services digital ad spend. It's our forecast for 2025. Now, that's not all B2C spending for sure, but 42.6 billion divided by the number of adults in the US is $165 a year for every adult. So they're spending a lot of money already. So let's talk about how AI is getting itself involved because there's a lot of money there. How has AI changed Fincer's approach to advertising? Or has it really.

[Jacob Bourne]

I feel like it's, it's really just kept bank marketers constantly in an evolutionary state because it started off allowing banks to better personalize, better target. And there is some content creation, although it has to be heavily, heavily vetted and edited by humans to stay compliant. For example, agentic AI is, is starting to happen in the banking industry and that will change by making for example chatbots way more able to completely manage customer situations from beginning to end.

[Rob Rubin]

But will that change the way they advertise?

[Jacob Bourne]

I do think there's some possibilities with like allowing better understanding of customers through that which can feed back into data driven marketing. But what's really about to change bank marketing? I think it is something that is a challenge is being able to have your content show up in generative search search engines because it's a completely different game than having like a great SEO score or showing up in regular search engines. You have to tailor your content to answer questions that people are using generative search engines for. So that's new. And maybe two months from now there's going to be completely new things that bank marketers have to keep thinking about. So it's just constantly changing. That's how AI is impacting bank marketing right now.

[Rob Rubin]

So right now it's in you're saying, and that's really. I hadn't even thought about it, but all of the SEO people are trying to quickly learn how it's different so that they can become AI experts.

[Jacob Bourne]

Yeah, definitely. And the article that we just published, there's a lot, we have a lot of tips in it, but it seems to be really important to be writing content just to answer questions to kind of preempt customers questions about banking. And then when they search answers for those questions, your bank will come up in the search. So there's completely different tactics that bank marketers aren't necessarily already employing. And who knows what those challenges will be a couple months from now.

[Rob Rubin]

Will they use AI to answer the question so that AI.

[Jacob Bourne]

Yeah, just an endless loop of AI.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Well, one good example of that is actually Wells Fargo with its gen AI powered Fargo Assistant that it's actually getting, getting a lot of traction in terms of customer use. I mean it had, in 2024, it had 245.4 million customer interactions, which I guess was.

[Rob Rubin]

I read that too.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

It was double what they thought it would be, which means that people are using it and also I guess having longer conversations than they, than they thought they would.

[Rob Rubin]

Is Erica from Bank of America also Gen AI? Because I read that it wasn't.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Yeah, I have not heard about a Genai integration with Erica yet. So that might be.

[Rob Rubin]

Yeah, I don't believe it is, but it's still more popular than Wells Fargo.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

In terms of use. I mean, it's been around longer. Right? I mean Fargo, Genai Fargo is new, so.

[Rob Rubin]

Yeah, no, that's a lot of queries. What about other industries? Like, how are we seeing other industries build AI into their marketing stacks?

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Yeah, I mean we're seeing AI all over other industries, you know, especially in marketing and programmatic advertising. Another financial services example with programmatic advertising is MasterCard, which actually saw a 254% increase in click through rates using AI powered programmatic advertising. And that's because the AI algorithms can just analyze, you know, behavior patterns in real time in matter of seconds, which.

[Rob Rubin]

And re optimize.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Re optimize, exactly. And across multiple channels simultaneously. And you know, we're seeing this across the major platforms with, you know, Google, Amazon, you know, Meta using AI, you know, Google's Performance Max and Advantage plus got, you know, AI enhancements and do a similar thing, making these split seconds.

[Rob Rubin]

And they do target, they're doing target bidding now. And also the next wave is potentially profit based bidding. So AI, if they had a little understanding of some of the costs and margins of products and when they're advertising, they would be able to also start bidding based on achieving profit goals.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Yeah, yeah, interesting. I mean, it seems like there are potentially limitless applications for AI and we're certainly seeing a lot of exposure experiments. A recent one on the social media front is Reddit that launched its AI insights to read through conversations of users on this platform and create summaries of what people thought about ads or product descriptions. And that actually gave Advertisers Apparently a 19% boost in click through rates. Because people are not just seeing the ads or seeing what other users are saying about them. And AI is allowing that to happen.

[Rob Rubin]

So that leads to like another area, like synthetic customers.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Yes, you know, digital twins using AI.

[Rob Rubin]

To predict how a campaign might work.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

That's a huge, huge area. The digital twin simulations where you can have AI, you know, generating entire customer base and also in predicting how they're going to act, how they're going to respond to a particular campaign. And then you can re optimize that campaign before you launch using the kind, kind of the data that you get from that simulation. So it's. Yeah, it's pretty powerful.

[Rob Rubin]

So it feels like AI is here.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

It's here.

[Rob Rubin]

Oh yeah, it's getting, it's definitely getting used in a big way. But at the same time, it's still early days, right? Like we're still, we haven't scaled. Like the idea of, of producing marketing content at scale is not today.

[Jacob Bourne]

That's what, that's the, that's what I'm most skeptical about. Just from the compliance aspect of banking, just the amount of human oversight needed for content before it goes into an ad is very important.

[Rob Rubin]

But couldn't you have like, as we move to agency AI, can a bank have a compliance agent that is working with the marketing?

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Well, I mean, that's the dream, right? That's the dream of agentic AI is that you have the power of generative AI and then you also add this powerful automation. But I think the thing is, Lauren's right. You still need that oversight. And once you have that oversight, it's still not fully automated. So it's. Yeah, it's incremental improvements and we're seeing it happen. But it's. I think we're a long way long if we ever do get to lack of human oversight completely. I'm not sure. But certainly there's still quite a bit.

[Rob Rubin]

That'S needed if you had oversight, right? Like if human oversight led to a 1% error rate. Right. So we have 1% of errors because we have human oversight, which is, let's say that's good right now, if AI can beat that, why would we have human oversight? In other words, if AI can do it as well, same error rate or better, why would we want to pay a human to do it?

[Lauren Ashcroft]

And that's a very compelling argument. I don't think we're there yet. I'm not sure.

[Rob Rubin]

No, but you said never. I'm challenging never.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Well, that's a powerful data point, but there's always the question as to whether the AI fully understands human context. And so while that data point might be true in a way, it could be that you always want a human in the loop because people understand people on a fundamental level that AI might not ever.

[Jacob Bourne]

That's true.

[Rob Rubin]

Now let's take it a step further in our final segment for argument's sake, where we will argue nicely. And I can feel the temperature already up there. So I'm happy about it, about How AI is going to actually disrupt finserve marketing. So what I've done is I've created five potential areas that we've been chatting about where of marketing, where AI is going to be disruptive. And what I want us to think about is which area will AI take over soonest? So what we're going to do, and we've already done this, I'll explain it to everybody listening is I'm going to read these five out. We've all ranked separately but not shared. We what we think is going to be the most impactful to least impactful in 2026 and then re rank them again and what we think for 2029 so we can see how we think it might evolve and where we're different. So the first one is bundling products dynamically. So being able to analyze transaction history, their demographics, their life events to be able to dynamically suggest product bundles and that those offers evolve with their needs as their needs change. So that's the first one. The second is predicting churn which we kind of talked about, right. Models trained on behavioral data to create like early signals of any kind of dissatisfaction or churn because retaining a customer is a lot more efficient than acquiring a new customer. So trying to keep churn down, generating marketing content at scale, something we've talked about. So AI to produce compliant brand aligned marketing content like ads, emails, landing pages really fast and much lower cost than what we have today. Testing marketing campaigns. So AI simulating campaign outcomes through hundreds of variations to optimize creatives and channels before launch and then helping prospects choose products. So enabling prospects to explore banking products in a chat. And the bots can gather information, pre qualify leads and then even pass them to human agents at the right moment. So Lauren, why don't you start with your list. What's your number one in 2026?

[Jacob Bourne]

So I kind of combined bundling products dynamically and helping prospects choose products because.

[Rob Rubin]

We that's what I did too.

[Jacob Bourne]

Yeah. Oh awes. Great minds think. Yeah I ranked them first because we in 2026. Yeah.

[Rob Rubin]

Okay.

[Jacob Bourne]

Just because some of that's already happening especially in some more powerful like financial apps, fintech apps.

[Rob Rubin]

All right.

[Jacob Bourne]

And I think it can only get even better from there.

[Rob Rubin]

Jacob, were those your firsts?

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Well I do are not mine. I do have helping prospects choose products as the number one. But I actually for 2026 I put bundling products dynamically as like number four. Not because I don't think it's impactful but because I don't think the Technology is quite there to be able to do that effectively all the time compared to a human. Just in terms of what I. What I've heard about AI analyzing financial data, it can be hit or miss at times. And so I think while very impactful, it's kind of a bit down the road on that one.

[Rob Rubin]

So that's sort of where I went. Whereas 1, I put them together both in 26 and 29, I put bundling and chat sort of as the same together, but I put them as the least impactful for 2026 compared to predicting Churn as the most impactful. I think that it's the easiest one for them to do. Yeah, like to be able to find the signal to do a better job finding signals for Churn and then producing marketing content. And the difference is that I don't think that they're producing it yet, like when I say at scale, but I have to believe that they're running their. Whatever they edited, they're asking some AI to clean it up. So they're shortening the time that it takes them to generate content at a.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Minimum, which in itself is hugely impactful. So I actually put that at my number two because I think the technology.

[Rob Rubin]

Is there at number two as well.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Despite needing human oversight still. So it's saving a lot of time and money.

[Rob Rubin]

Lauren, which were your least impactful for this year then? Was it synthetic customers or what?

[Jacob Bourne]

No, I actually. I had testing marketing campaigns as number three, predicting churn. I had number four. I want to see more of this. I actually just wrote an article about how banks can, for example, predict that their senior customers are facing cognitive decline with a couple of different patterns for their buying. I would love to see much more of that because there's a lot of opportunity to build stronger relationships with customers and their families and loved ones, especially with. With things like that. And then generative marketing is just my personal thing. I'm most skeptical of humans being taken out of that process soon, but I think by 2029 I bumped it way up in my list because I do think that ChatGPT has already improved so much over the last few versions that I actually have no idea what it'll look like by 2029. But by then maybe it will stop hallucinating as much.

[Rob Rubin]

So in 2029 I had the being able to help customers pick products and bundling as one and two like that. By then the technology is going to be there, people are going to trust recommendations more than they might trust them today. And then we have a generation that's growing up with it. And they'll be more ready to buy and use AI. I think I read an article that you wrote about how. How Gen Z are really interested in self serve.

[Jacob Bourne]

Yes.

[Rob Rubin]

So the idea that they'll be able to buy without having to talk to a human might be appealing. And then even though I put predicting churn as number one in 2026 out of this list of five, I put it as the last, the least impactful in 2029 just because I thought it was sort of the. One of the easier things to accomplish today and it'll be table stakes.

[Jacob Bourne]

That makes sense.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

I actually put predicting Churn in number five for both lists and the reason why is because you can have an AI that can do that. Sure. But it's ultimately up to the company's policies about whether they are going to take action. And I think you do need a human to take action on that. And I think so often we don't see companies taking action on that point.

[Rob Rubin]

I think that's right.

[Jacob Bourne]

Yeah.

[Rob Rubin]

I think that's like a structural challenge. Just having worked with banks is that the people who would take action on it would be the local branch people. Like that's how a bank would think about it. And the local branch people are not incented for that. They're incented to sell products. Right. That's just not their incentive. So it's hard to get them to do that. And, and for a lot of banks traditionally Churn's been pretty low sort of on the scale of other businesses.

[Jacob Bourne]

Yeah.

[Rob Rubin]

Right. So it's not necessarily been one of their biggest issues. But as customer acquisition gets more and more expensive, as the tentacles of technology get deeper and deeper into people's lives, it's harder to switch.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Yeah.

[Rob Rubin]

So if you have someone that's leaving, you ought to be able to help them not switch.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jacob Bourne]

If it were a ranking of what I think is most important, that would definitely be towards the top of my ranking. Just because the tools are there and it is so important especially as, I mean Klarna is becoming more of a bank. All these huge fintechs are inching more into banking territory and competition's just constantly heating up.

[Rob Rubin]

If you want, can I read in one of your articles that, that I'm plugging you and we're going to put all these articles in the show notes. How's that? But that that fintechs have more personal loans than banks or credit unions in terms of the num, the percentage of personal loans that are out there. They're owned by fintechs, they own that space.

[Jacob Bourne]

Yeah. And ironically, if banks use AI to enable their customer facing staff to be the knowledgeable, empathetic humans that they are, that's the differentiator right there. So I think predicting churn and having like a really nice human that knows you at your local branch reach out and touch base, I think that would be an important strategy.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

I mean I think that's a. Lauren, that's a great example of just using AI, maximizing the strengths of AI and then also keeping humans in the loop and maximizing the strengths of the human. I think that's use is let AI do what it's good at and keep humans with the relationship facing end of the end of the job.

[Rob Rubin]

Definitely that seems like a great place for us to try to just sum up where we are with the list. And I think that in terms of helping consumers choose products and even bundling those products together, we all agreed that that's super impactful. And I think where we were a little bit different is whether we think the technology is quite there yet and the consumer trust in using that purely AI advice to act on. And then the other one we talked a lot about is using it to predict churn and I think we all agree it would be impactful or it would be important, but we maybe didn't always agree if it would be hugely impactful. I think it was the word impactful that was mess us up there. And then on the marketing content at scale and using synthetic audiences, we didn't actually touch on it that much because it's mid tier. Right. It's not going to be the most impactful or the least impactful, but it's going to be out there. Yeah, I think with the synthetic customers, I think we're going to have like third parties that build synthetic audiences that they license.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Yeah, I mean I had that as my number three for 2029. I think it's going to be very impactful and the technology is getting there. But I think this whole notion of using digital twins for that purpose is. It's fairly new and so I think it's going to get, there's, there's going to need some time for, for companies to start actually experimenting with it.

[Rob Rubin]

I feel like scientific data, like synthetic medical testing might be really impactful, but helping banks figure out how you might react to a campaign.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

No, I think you're right. I mean the whole digital twin simulation use that started it as a scientific and industrial use case case, it's only like over the past year that it's even been talked about for marketing. And I think you're right. We do need that synthetic data created first. But I think it will become more impactful for marketing as time goes on, as AI gets better, as people start to trust it for various use cases more.

[Jacob Bourne]

Just an example of how much AI has changed just in the last couple of years. In my previous life, I was a marketing copywriter and we would laugh at AI generated ads because it's like people with 17 fingers and like endless loops of cheese when people are eating pizza. And now I saw a video that I would bet all of my money that it was a real cast of actors and a real set. It was 100% AI. So I have a hard time even imagining what's shortly down the road, like next year. No idea. But I do know that bank marketers will have to constantly be updating what they think they know.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Yeah, no, that's. I mean, that's AI right there. I mean, it's accelerating so quickly. I mean, it was just, I think last month that Google released its VO3 image generator that floored everybody in terms of the photorealism. And it's. But it's a recent release and so I think we're going to see more, more ads created using it. And I think it's going to be harder to really distinguish between what's AI generated and what's human generated.

[Jacob Bourne]

Totally.

[Rob Rubin]

That's going to be a tough one. I want to thank both of you for today. I had the best time. So, Lauren, Jacob, thanks for the discussion. It was really so insightful. And thanks everyone for listening to the Banking and Payments show, an E marketer podcast made possible by Quad. Also, thank you to our studio team that puts these episodes together. Our next episode is going to be on August 12th, so be sure to check it out. See you then. Thank you, everybody.

[Jacob Bourne]

Thank you.

[Lauren Ashcroft]

Thanks.