Hilton’s Chief Marketing Officer Sees In-Person Experience as the Key to Staying One Step Ahead in the Age of AI

"What is the antidote to a world where everything online you can't necessarily trust? You're not sure if you're talking to a human or a computer, if the image you're seeing is real or not. The antidote is having an in-person experience."

The world may be changing rapidly thanks to the runaway train of AI, but for Hilton’s chief marketing officer Mark Weinstein, that just serves to make the role and purpose of the global hospitality brand all that more solid and steady. From his perspective, the technology will help the brand find new ways to connect with customers and enable 500,000 team members to take the friction out of travel and spend more time interacting with guests on a human level.

“Make no bones about it. We are in the business of people serving people. And I don't see that going anywhere, nor would I want it to,” he says.

Mark’s speaking to Omnicom Advertising Group’s President and CEO Troy Ruhanen as part of a brand new series of interviews with the world’s most ambitious marketers. One Step Ahead explores innovation and how go-to-market strategies are changing and seeks to unearth tips and words of advice for all of us as we navigate an ecosystem in flux.

In the conversation Mark shares how the fundamentals of marketing, knowing who you really are as a brand and having that clear compass creates a lens for decision making. He also reflects on what drives innovation across his team and through the company. Recognising and rewarding curiosity internally is key, as is the importance of earning trust and buy-in to long term transformation and innovation through hitting short term business goals.

“You have to deliver the short term to earn the opportunity to innovate for the future,” he says. “The innovation [and] the ability to do that comes from knowing that you've got the business under control today. You can take more risks if it's not necessary to deliver today's performance.”

In the conversation, Mark shares his “relentless restlessness” that drives him to keep questioning how the team can do things differently - a trait that he admits “makes my team nuts, probably”. Counterintuitively, perhaps, in the pursuit of what’s new and next, sometimes staying one step ahead involves taking a moment to recognise how far you and your team has come.

“You have to make sure to stop and celebrate some really great successes on that journey.”

Watch episode one of One Step Ahead here.