In a new Retail Week feature on how AI is changing advertising and brand storytelling, Carat UK Chief Digital Officer Charlotte Crook shares her view on where the technology earns its place, and where human judgement still matters most.
Charlotte argues that AI is already helping teams make decisions more quickly and with greater confidence, from generating content ideas and scaling production to pre-testing creative. Her team also uses contextual intelligence tools to spot peaks in content consumption, letting retail brands react in real time across content, creative and budget decisions.
But her position on strategy is clear. The successful approaches she's seen come from people deciding what matters and how a brand should present itself in a way that's genuinely its own. As retail media networks begin deploying agentic campaign workflows, she says the real discipline is knowing how to separate genuine growth opportunities from hype, and anchoring experimentation to actual business problems.
Read Charlotte's full commentary on Retail Week.
