Katie O'Neil's Closing Keynote on the "Meaning" Strategy in the Age of AI
Dateline: MarketingProfs 2025 Conference
After days filled with sessions on marketing operations, storytelling, and creativity, the MarketingProfs conference closed with a powerful keynote that aimed to unify these disparate elements.
Katie O'Neil took the stage to challenge attendees with a critical perspective: the real work of AI in marketing isn't about generating more content, but generating more meaning.
O'Neil argued that whether marketers are dealing with AI dashboards, content governance, buyer journeys, or culture, these disciplines all form a ring around what things actually mean for people.
She positioned the meaning as a unifying force, asserting that AI, content, and measurement only matter if they signify something meaningful. In her view, "meaning isn't just an accessory to your strategy. Meaning is the strategy".
The Cautionary Tale of Scaling Without Intent
To illustrate the profound impact of encoding systems without careful consideration of meaning, O'Neil pointed to the Amazon Go "just walk out" store concept. While acknowledging the extraordinary technical achievement, she highlighted a specific detail in the onboarding process: users are instructed not to take items off the shelf for anyone else, lest they be charged personally.
O'Neil noted that helping fellow shoppers reach items is a nearly universal human experience. By designing a system that disincentivizes this helpfulness, Amazon is potentially altering behavior as it scales this technology to thousands of locations, perhaps training us to forget to help one another.
"Experience at scale is culture," O'Neil declared. This makes it crucial for marketers to be intentional about the purpose and decisions encoded into the algorithms, data models, and AI tools they use.
Machines Generate Expressions; Humans Generate Intent
Drawing on her background as a linguist, O'Neil emphasized that meaning occurs at the intersection of the message sent and the receiver's understanding based on context.
She shared a personal anecdote from her time as a tour guide to demonstrate this. Once assigned a Greek-speaking group for a German-language tour, the system had failed. However, the humans adapted; a bilingual tourist stepped up to translate, creating a shared rhythm and connection that resulted in one of her highest-rated tours.
The lesson, O'Neil stressed, is that while systems may break, humans connect through shared intention. Meaning doesn't come just from words, but from shared context and interpretation.
This distinction is vital in the age of AI. O'Neil noted that while AI can generate many words, it often misses the meaning. "Machines can generate expressions but humans generate intent," she said.
A Blueprint for the Future
Looking ahead, O'Neil suggested a blueprint combining the macro lens of marketing meaning at scale with the micro lens of human context.
She argued that in the future, meaning will become the key differentiator, and teams will need "semantic literacy" in addition to technical literacy. B2B brands will win by being the clearest, not the loudest.
O'Neil advised using AI for what it excels at—scale, speed, and synthesis—while reserving humans for intent, interpretation, context, and care.
Key Takeaways for Marketers
O'Neil closed the conference with specific charges for different marketing roles:
Practitioners must act as "Guardians of meaning." When using AI content, they must ask if it reflects their intent and rewrite it if it does not.
Managers should bring "meaning checks" into their processes to ensure cultural coherence.
Executives can transform their roadmaps by adding one question to their AI evaluation criteria: "Does this enhance The Human Experience?".
Ultimately, O'Neil concluded, humans cannot leave the determination of meaning up to machines. Our charge is to design a future that is "not just more efficient, not more effective... but more human".
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