Beyond Marketing: Building Trust in the AI-Powered Age
Our CRM Specialist Coralie attended SXSW Sydney this year. She came away excited, inspired, and a little bit wary of what’s coming, especially in AI.
Over the coming weeks, she will be sharing her key takeaways and learnings starting with Building Trust in the AI Powered Age. Over to Coralie...
From Accenture’s keynote on AI hallucinations to the rise of “AI agents” in our everyday life the message at SXSW Sydney 2025 was clear: marketing’s future depends less on new tools and more on the quality of the intelligence we feed them (aka the data).
As AI becomes the backbone of customer experiences, personalisation and measurement, marketers are being forced to answer a hard question: can we trust the inputs powering our AI tools?
This creates an opportunity for us to learn how to navigate the rapid change and evolution of this AI world with transparency and accountability. Let’s dig into this.
AI makes us faster. Now it’s time to make it credible.
Accenture described the rise of “AI hallucinations”: systems generating confident, convincing and completely false insights! As these tools spread into healthcare, finance and marketing, the challenge isn’t adoption anymore. It’s accountability.
The urgency of that challenge was made painfully clear last month, when Deloitte’s AI-assisted government report hit national headlines. The consultancy admitted that a report it produced for the Australian government contained fabricated citations, non-existent references and even a made-up court quote. It was later revealed that sections had been generated using GPT-4. Deloitte refunded part of its fee and reissued the report. Unfortunately, the reputational damage was done.
The irony? The report’s findings may still have been correct. But the credibility had gone.
This story captures the inflection point we’re all standing on: AI made us faster, but now it must make us truthful.
For marketers, that means three things:
Design for provenance. Know exactly where your data, insights and content come from.
Disclose your tools. Transparency builds trust, secrecy erodes it.
Keep the human in the loop. AI can draft and detect, but only people can discern.
The Deloitte case isn’t about technology failure, it’s about governance. The same applies to every brand experimenting with generative content or predictive analytics. Speed without verification isn’t progress; it’s risk at scale.
Transparency is only the first step. Accountability is what will decide which brands keep trust in the long term. At SXSW, conversations around AI governance dominated. The shared conclusion: AI doesn’t need more hype, it has enough, it now needs oversight and the faster, the better.
From gut feel to grounded decisions
KPMG’s session reinforced that “CMOs can’t afford gut feeling anymore.” That doesn’t mean removing intuition, it means grounding it. How? When marketing, sales and operations work from the same connected data foundation, decisions stop being reactive and start being commercially intelligent.
At Divide By Zero, we see this every day with our clients: the brands who grow faster are the ones who build data architectures that blend human context with machine precision.
Marketing to machines (and still staying human)
We’re entering a new era: B2A (brand-to-agent) and A2C (agent-to-customer). Your next audience might not be a person at all, but an AI assistant deciding which brand to recommend, display or buy from. For example, when booking your next holiday, from the hotel to the rental car companies – how much will be human assisted, how much AI Agent? Will you know? Will consumers care?
That means brand trust needs to exist at two levels: human and machine. Structured data, credible content and transparent ethics will determine whether your brand is recognised by both.
The DBZ perspective
AI won’t replace marketers. It will expose the marketers who rely on shallow data, vanity metrics or disconnected reporting.
The future of growth lies beyond marketing. It lies in the ability to connect what’s automated with what’s authentic. From transforming data pipelines to AI models and customer journeys into systems that serve people, not the other way around. If you still have a bit of creativity in you: use the technology as the brush, not the painter to build Marketing campaigns that feel human.
At DBZ, we're already helping organisations build Martech ecosystems that are not just intelligent, but trustable: by brands, for customers. Because intelligence without integrity isn’t progress; and progress, as the Oxford definition reminds us, means advancement with purpose, not just movement for its own sake
This article has been written by a human and revised by an AI, a Team Lead and a Practice Director – Marketing for your trust.
Insights based on the following SXSW 2025 sessions:
Creativity + Marketing + AI = Business Imperative
Safeguarding Brand Integrity in an AI World
Human First, AI Forward
Enterprise Intelligence: The Future of AI in Business