Procurement & Agentic AI in Marketing: Session Recap: Key Takeaways from Federico Salvitti at ProcureCon Marketing

Day 3 Keynote Presentation: Procurement: The C-Suite Catalyst For Agentic AI In Marketing

Announcer: Alright without further ado, we'll get started. We have a great presentation on AI from NYU's own professor Federico Sal Vidi. Please welcome him to the stage

Federico Salvitti, Faculty of Marketing: Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Morning everybody. Can you hear me okay? All good. Okay, let's have some fun. I am going to be overly ambitious and see if I can actually see my notes if I put them on the floor. I just wanna make sure that I don't miss anything because this is the first time I actually present in public the research that we have developed.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: And when you do it 50 times, you end up adding things slowly but surely. But in this specific occasion, it's the first time that I do it in front of an audience. Now I've spent so much time in the data that we've crunched that hopefully will come natural. Help me out just in case. I tend to forget something.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: I would like to start, first of all with an observation on one or two things, and then I would like to have your take just in case you wanna contribute. Of the things that I have found interesting observing the conversations at the various tables, observing the presentations. One thing that I found interesting is that during our panel.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: The panel that I was on the first day, lost Track of Time Monday. The concept of not doing a pilot, it's something that I found that was extremely interesting, but also the conversation that stirred to me was fairly logical where that was going. In the sense that, of course, you need to let more time happen so that people can actually learn and understand exactly what they're doing.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Where else in the business those findings can actually be attributed. And the second one is I think a little bit more behavioral whereby and it's a bit of an amber flag that I've noticed. There is a lot of attention that goes towards what we expect our vendors to do for us as opposed to what we expect our internal clients.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: To do for us, our teams. So the marketing team, anybody that marketing and media comes to us with, I'd like to buy this. This is great. And that's normally a lot of the descriptions that you get is just great. So these are the two interesting findings that I I thought of of highlighting and why are they important.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: I've always believed that marketing. So mind you, a little bit of history. I started in Wall Street for the longest time and I've been an equity research analyst for about nine years of my life. But I've always been in love with marketing. So I've gone all the way from studying marketing in my bachelor to a PhD.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: That was specifically geared towards customer relationship management back at the time, just to tell you how much I love the practice of marketing itself. Now, what happens is that when you put these two things together, you end up working in private equity as they do and teaching at NYU. You spend a lot of time on boards.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: You spend a lot of time with CFOs. You spend a lot of time with other CMOs trying to discuss what is the voice of the customer within the organization, where is this coming from? Because it cannot certainly do that. Sales partially, but sales can do it only in certain circumstances. Marketing is the one that, throughout the organization, possesses the voice of the customer on the board.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: And so the reflection that is at the back of this study that we did is how is it possible that such an important part in the ecosystem of an organization? Has an average job tenure of 20 months, which is basically just enough for a CMO to hide until they, they find out somehow. If you think about it or you get another stat, which is terrifying, you get on the, in the national board association, only 2.7% of boards in the United States have one marketing person in them.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Product are created in isolation. Processes are created in isolation. Detachment from a strategic perspective of what the company's doing versus where the market is going. It's a massive issue. And so this is where I decided to dedicate part of the team's time to find out how can we actually change that?

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: The first thing that we wanted to do. We wanted to observe what is going on in the relationship between the CFO and the CMO. What are the shortfalls what are the dynamics of the conversations? And I lucky enough to see it in a lot of earning calls but also had the team observe dynamics with CMOs and CFOs, and we've come to.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: An understanding that was crystallized by McKinsey and by Gartner way more eloquently than I could ever do in four simple words. CFO wants accountability, marketing wants impact. These two things might seem interchangeable, but they are profoundly different. One is about the backward observation of how things have happened, which is a lot safer.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: The other one is about the future guessing of where the market is going to go and have its promise results. These two behaviors, until the day they merge, this DIC relationship simply cannot be unraveled. Why? Because the CFO is the investor's best friend and more often than not is the CEO's best friend.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: The CO is not alone. Chief product officers are exactly in the same boat. Chief supply chain officers are exactly in the same boat. If you think about it, any role that is forward looking is any role that is inward looking. Statistically, if you're studying the past, you have a better chance to look good.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Are you? So we started with this observation and we decided to spend a little bit of time to understand what is the root cause of this and what could we possibly change. I am pa very passionate about technology. I've been in artificial intelligence since 2012. So right now is the heydays of everybody's talking about ai.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: I have, I was actually one of the guys in the back room. Actually doing the project for Proctor and Gamble to decide the routing of the trucks in Europe for optimization. In just one year, we actually saved 366 million euros on gas alone. So imagine also the environmental impact of something that started as can we optimize roots?

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Simple task. By what period? 2013. What is gonna be our metrics? Gallons of fuel. I'm telling you this because the goals that AI needs, AI projects need succeed. They have to be that simple. They cannot be, I wanna sell more. No shit you wanna sell. Really? Oh my God, that's groundbreaking. So what we've decided to do, I know that accountability and the emergence of all the insight that create the accountability already exists in the processes of marketing.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: They are already there. The only thing that marketers do not have the time to do, they're not wired to report with the same structure and. They quite frankly have to chase a lot of different object constantly. They're not wired in such a way that they can report them as efficiently. So one of the things that we start to think is what if AI could work alongside the marketing departments and have all that insight emerge?

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: What are the most common. Places in which marketers can invest money to start creating that bridge with accountability. So we put a team analyzed 212 AI implementation applied to marketing. Some of the examples can be call center analytics and how do they get immediate reporting into marketing and sales for segmentation and for personalization purposes.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: I divided this into three because these were three sequential projects, but they only belonged to one of the 212. This is for prolonged period of time for about 16 to 18 months. We did this in 86 different organizations. Now, there is going to be a little call to action at the end of the presentation because I am going to ask you to contact me because we might do with another 50 companies to analyze and another about a hundred.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Between marketing and media, preferably now media because a lot of the research that we did is skewed towards marketing. We could do with more media right now to help us form and add more weight to what I am about to show you, which is a very simple tool because tools are supposed to be simple. So the point of this all intro and presentation that you're going to see is that what we found out in that observation is that it's not about skills.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: It's not about traits, it's not about the dynamics of the board meetings and the government, so there's none of that. It's just key behaviors. A lot of people in procurement and people in marketing, we've observed. They have a tendency of having exponential behaviors. Let's do a project for the entire organization and let's make it big and massive justification.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Seven months, 12 months. Technology has changed 12 times in the meantime, so you're gonna have to start from square one again. So those are typical traits of exponential behaviors, and we are actually suggesting that we should apply slightly more incremental behaviors. That tend to be very simple and they tend to get in their own way, developing their own way.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Every team takes them differently. So what I would like to walk you away with today is a simple framework on how to prioritize AI investments in marketing and media. How to visually represent it so that people can understand and what are the visual tools for simplicity we have taken away seven.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Otherwise, if you let analytics people do this kind of job, it's the end of the world. And we're providing you with 10 simple questions that you can ask anybody from the marketing team that comes to you to have one of those projects approved. Now, it can work with procurement, it can work with, if you're a vendor and you're trying to ven to sell to these people, why?

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Typical key point, the moment of truth in consensus building is making sure that you understand the job to be done, that your decision makers need to do to get across the line, to sign on the dotted line. So if you are the one to provide them with a framework that can actually facilitate a lot of the sifting of the logic that these people have to go through.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Guess what are they gonna remember the day that they have to assign who wins the RFI or who wins the RFP? So even if you're a vendor, this is extremely applicable to you. And and that's what I'm going to, that's what I'm going to, I completely forgot about this. This is what the metrics looks like.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Now, the way that I would like to, for you to observe, first of all, on the Y axis. You have the statistical accuracy needed. What do I mean by that? The job that the marketer is coming to you to automate, let's say, or to create or to apply artificial intelligence to will have a certain degree of statistical accuracy that it needs to be completed.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Let me give you a practical example. Invoice matching. Invoice matching. It needs to be 99.99. Periodical level of accuracy. Does generative AI work in that context? No. So if somebody comes with that kind of request, generative ai, you need RPA for that. Now, the further down you go, in fact that you see the line is 90% anybody, anything that is payment matching.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Above 90%. Generally speaking, is not Gen AI friendly. What are the things that are more let's say, friendly to our future investments? They tend to be on the right hand side, but y are they on the right hand side? They're on the right hand side because at the bottom in the X axis, we see ease of implementation and use.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: What do we mean by ease of implementation and use? This is a conversation that we need to have with these people, with our folks in the marketing team. What I have seen, I heard a lot of you refer to as internal client or colleagues, which is another way of putting it. You need to have an open conversation to try and understand and put them in front of a matrix similar to this to say, how do you want me to prioritize?

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Because there are different levels of risk here Then. The size of the bubble is represented by the return on investment planned by the marketer or the media person that is forecasting to use the specific tool. And so you will have media planning hypothesis builder, which is one of the easiest thing to do if you get all your media data together in one place.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Mint is a great company to do that for. Adobe does a great job from a creative perspective. There are several tools out there that can help you do that, and it's actually fairly easy. Then you have campaign reporting, definitely massing taxonomy compliance that traditionally speaking, is always been seen as a smaller bubble, and I do not understand why, because if you don't do taxonomy compliance properly, you cannot do any of the things in that bubble.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: So that's an interesting point now. Then the color is the anecdotal feeling that the marketer coming to you and the teams coming to you is gonna give you as to how easy they think is going to be. Why if we make this whole process to data-driven and scientific and we do not add an element of anecdotal analysis, it's going to lose.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: We've noticed that credibility with the receiver. Because they are going to have to be in a position to say, no, we can definitely do that. And so put it as green. There is an element of trust building. So now why do I think that procurement in this specific case can play a massive role? So I take, took a step back and realized that it's a matter of skills.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: And it's a matter of personal traits. Marketing people have a tendency of chasing things and running fast, looking for impact. They're not necessarily wired to be the one in the classroom to actually take their time and truly study fundamentals of applied statistics. Why? Because they wanna do campaign one and campaign two and brand management and this and that.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: And that's fantastic because that's what they should do. So fundamentals of applied statistics, it's something that those who are used to numbers will definitely be more inclined to understanding. Some people on the marketing team are going to be our friends because people that manage campaigns day in day out and people that manage the reporting day in, day out will be our friends.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: So we can actually get to a point in which we can collaborate with them. The other fundamental skill that is extremely important that marketers historically have not displayed in our observation and guys 212 projects is a lot, is the fact that if their life dependent on it, they would not be able to do a process design document, even if you paid them a million dollars.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: The only way that process design document would look like is a perfect straight line. This person decides this gets approved by this, and we all go to lunch. That's normally how their idea of process and design documentation looks like. Now, on the other end, in procurement, not only we have all the exposure to all the other technology investments that we have to do to the various divisions.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Not only we have access to the one key, most important first step that in investing in the investment world we do, is the analysis of contracts and service level agreements. So whenever I am asked to join a board, the first thing that I normally ask is, can you send me three to five examples of your SLAs and your contracts?

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: And that's where I start. You can understand 70% of an organization and how it's structured from those two documents. Everything else is good stories. Okay? So your job and our job, it's fundamentally important because we can bring down to a procedure business p and l conversation. Every single new project that is going to be around artificial intelligence with every CEO is looking at right now, why they want to report it to Wall Street.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: They want to be seen as the innovators. There is another point why I am fixated with media now in the next 50. 'cause I saw the statistics from the McKinsey CFO survey that stroke me. I thought it was extremely, it took me a while to actually realize it.Federico Salvitti, Faculty of Marketing: Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: 80, roughly 82% of CFOs deemed media as a problem to solve, only ranked about seven or eight up until 2023. 20 24, 20 25. It's number two. For 73% of CFOs, what does that mean? That the days of spray and pray, the days of, I don't know how to report on my programmatic. I don't know how to report on my media, which on average tends to be between the second and the fifth largest budget than a large organization.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Deploys are gone. Those days are gone in the sense that the CFO now is demanding. Demanding to have access to that information and your help is fundamentally important in bridging the gap between the CFO and the CMO. Because you bring that level of realism from a p and l perspective that marketers normally do not have in large masses, you get two or three people out of 20 that will have it in a marketing team.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: I bet you in procurement you get 90% of the people that will have those skills. Okay, now, just to leave you behind, it's something that I have learned working with a lot of these implementations. 'cause otherwise they look like you've been struggling things together. You've just been gathering things together, innovate while you can, not when you need.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: And so whenever A CFO tells me. Do we really need this now? We could do it in six months and do it really bad. So yeah, we do. And how do you know? We've done the analysis. This is our roadmap. No vendors has come to us to tell us what we needed. This is our roadmap. We have to find the vendors for it.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: This is what we want to do. It's not vendor led anymore. There is a level of responsibility at a higher different degree because we end up owning our roadmap and procurement has a key role in making sure that roadmap exists, that level of innovation exists. Now, what are the questions? I hope you can see them, by the way, I didn't realize I shouldn't made them bigger, or I am house blind, one of the two.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: A lot of the questions that you see here are business questions. Procedural questions. I'll send them to you if you want to. And they're data questions. Why? What percentage of the process already exists on a screen or, and needs to be re-engineered? If a process needs to be re-engineered, guess where it's going to go?

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: It's going to go to the left of the graph. Why? It's on the no go part. We need to re-engineer an entire process because we have no data or no systems of engagement in which we input the data too much to build. We can find other areas of investment where we can shine a little bit faster. 'cause it's all about shining right now.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: No one has figured this out yet. What percentage of the data we must get elsewhere? And how can it we integrate it versus what we already have. That's fundamentally important. Now, MCP, I don't know if you're familiar with some of this terminology, is in agen AI is the ability for agentic agents to take information from other databases and other software.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: We don't necessarily have to create an integration, so this brings costs down. From, you wanna change anything on Salesforce, you still have to pay 80 grand. You want to change anything on any other CRM that decided to embrace MCP costs you maybe 800 bucks. See what I mean? Because the time to execution is nothing.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: It's three hours, four hours. Do we have the skills in house or will the vendor provide them? Now this is an important point. We are going into a world in which we need to start treating our vendors, our partners. Why the skills required for us to win down the road. We cannot possibly afford them. We don't want to afford them because we want them to learn very specific things that we're never gonna be ninjas at.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: So we need to start treating our partners, our vendors, our partners. I think it's extremely important. Will we get training and how Now? These are the business questions that I personally love because are the ones that. Put the team in a corner, which is when do you need this tool buy in full production?

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Because that will determine the backward engineering of the entire implementation. And, basic things like what strategic initiative is this project that you are bringing me related to? Is it related to something that the CEO said? So you need to help them create a median, linear relationship between the initiative that they want to do and where the strategy of the organization is going, because that's how those budgets are gonna be easier to justify.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Marketers do not necessarily do that now. If you wanna have access to this information, feel free to contact me. You can do it on your code, probably check me out on LinkedIn. I'll send it over to you. And if you feel like there are projects in which you could benefit from having someone on my team to come into the call, participate to the discussion that bring to the filling of the of the prioritization framework.Federico Salvitti, Faculty of Marketing: Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Sign me up. We want to increase as much research as we can. Do you guys have any questions? I know that we're at time, but I don't know if you have any questions.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: See, you can try.

Audience: You don't have to answer this question. Because it may be a conflict.

Federico Salvitti, Faculty of Marketing: Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: That's a philosophical conundrum there.

Audience: So your background in private equity in the beginnings of ai, where is it going? You have Mike Burry short selling now,

Federico Salvitti, Faculty of Marketing: Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: so I,

Audience: I can tell you, you investments you have trial balloons that we're gonna backstop AI investments for open AI because they spent too much money.

But all the CEOs want this. And is it gonna work? Because we're the people in the room who are like is the investment justified? Is this gonna work? What are we promising? What's gonna deliver? So where is it going?

Federico Salvitti, Faculty of Marketing: Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Some companies will thrive, some others won't. There is a common denominator across those who will not.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: And I think he's wonderfully explained by I don't know if shelly Palmer. If you've ever heard of Shelly Palmer, I would recommend that you actually follow Shelly because he is an absolute, he's super funny, but he's also a genius. He calls it the the middle management mafia that tries to stop everything that could potentially change anything.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: And so my recommendation is that those who will win are those who create new behaviors. Internally within the organization, and you stop expecting things from vendors and you start expecting things from marketers. Where are you taking the team? This is why during the panel the other day, I said, what happened to excellence?

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: What did, what do you call it? Excellence team or central of excellence. I remember when I worked with, at the, when we built with the CMO of Vodafone in the uk. The center of excellence for artificial intelligence back in 2014. She became the CE O2 years after because of her influence on key behaviors that brought the organization to innovation.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: So we keep on thinking that skills and technology are the core of everything. Behaviors are of the core of that success. Now, if you, then you want the answer to be from a technology perspective, I can talk, do you have another hour and 45 minutes? Is there any other ques Do we have time for one more question?

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: There's one over there. More

Announcer: question.

Audience: Thank you for the presentation on your research. That was really eye-opening for me personally.

Federico Salvitti, Faculty of Marketing: Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Good.

Audience: I had a question on the agency review aspect. Yes. Of the graph, does that include like media audits or have you, if not in your research, has that come up?

Federico Salvitti, Faculty of Marketing: Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Yeah, so that's a very interesting question and it's a very broad topic, yet it has come up.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: What I think that artificial intelligence can be extremely helpful with is the gathering of the data. Normally tends to be anywhere between 30 to 50% of the cost of an audit. And versus the insight, you still need expertise. It's just that now those playing with the insight can actually q and a with generative multi-agent.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: Systems that have been built with very specific roles. So I think that the speed and the frequency of auditing is going to improve dramatically, which is going to improve the quality of our investments. So auditing is fundamentally important. And that in that specific realm, I'm very passionate because I think that audits need to be done on a monthly basis for very large budgets and maybe at least quarterly for smaller budgets.

Marketing Fundamentals, Data Strategy and Business Strategy – New York University: So if you ever want to have a separate conversation specifically on that, there is some very interesting behaviors that I've seen.

Announcer: Great. I think we are all out of time. Yes. But thank you so much, Federico. That was so great.