Marie Aiello, SVP at ContinuumGlobal, shares insights on AI driven personalization, human oversight, and building actionable marketing strategies.
Welcome to MarTech Cube, Marie. We’re delighted to have you. To begin, can you share a brief look at your professional journey and what led you to your current role at ContinuumGlobal?
I’m excited to be here; thank you for having me. My career has taken me across nearly every facet of modern marketing, from engagement and lifecycle strategy to operations, analytics, and client services. Over the past 25+ years, I’ve led and scaled marketing programs at organizations such as Zeta Global, Suzy, and Deloitte, helping enterprise brands harness data, technology, and emerging capabilities to improve customer engagement and drive measurable business outcomes.
Those experiences ultimately led me to ContinuumGlobal, where I now serve as Senior Vice President. What first drew me to ContinuumGlobal was the culture: an entrepreneurial, builder-oriented mindset and a genuine openness to innovating ahead of the market. That foundation has allowed us to evolve quickly and lean into new capabilities as they emerged. Today, that same culture is what empowers us to make AI truly actionable for marketing, using creative intelligence and generative AI to enhance personalization, accelerate workflows, and deliver measurable impact across the customer journey. It’s been exciting to help shape this transformation and bring new possibilities to life for our clients.
AI has been widely adopted across industries, but results vary significantly from business to business. Why is a tailored approach to AI so important, and how can organizations begin building AI strategies that fit their specific needs?
A tailored approach to AI helps businesses take full advantage of the AI tools they are using. When businesses use an AI engine that customizes the experience to their specific business goals, they can work more efficiently, more creatively, and with less stress. As marketing budgets and teams shrink, this is necessary for teams to do more with less.
This is exactly why we built the Smart Marketing Engine, a customized AI platform, to give businesses the tools they need to hyper-personalize their marketing. This tool gives marketers the ability to build and run marketing campaigns using an AI platform that is tailored to their company’s specific goals, program, customers, and content, all using their first-party data.
“AI needs human oversight” has become an increasingly common belief. From your perspective, what are some of the risks of relying on AI without proper human involvement, and how can teams strike the right balance?
AI has advanced rapidly, but the idea that it can, or should, operate without humans is fundamentally flawed. The biggest risk is not that AI makes mistakes; it’s that organizations assume those outputs are automatically correct, relevant, or on-brand. Without the right human involvement, you see predictable pitfalls: hallucinated insights, generic creative, misaligned messaging, and decisions that don’t reflect real-world context or a brand’s strategic intent.
But the deeper risk is structural. If teams over-rely on AI, they can unintentionally erode critical thinking, weaken customer understanding, and lose the nuance required to drive meaningful personalization. AI is extraordinarily capable, but it has no inherent sense of judgment, cultural awareness, or brand empathy. That’s where humans are irreplaceable.
Striking the right balance starts with redefining human roles, not removing them. Marketers and strategists must shift into orchestration roles where they set the guardrails, provide the context, evaluate outputs, and guide the system toward higher-value outcomes. Teams should be deeply involved in the upfront configuration: training models with brand guidelines, product knowledge, data signals, and performance insights. This ensures the AI isn’t just fast but it’s accurate, contextually aware, and tied to real business goals.
When AI and human intelligence work together, you get the best of both worlds: scale and speed from the machine, and strategic clarity, creativity, and empathy from the human. That combination is what ultimately makes AI actionable for marketing.
You’ve spoken about the value of working with trusted partners when adopting AI. What should companies look for in a partner who can help them execute AI responsibly and effectively?
Companies should look for partners that focus on making AI work for them, not the other way around. AI is a tool that is meant to make work more efficient and streamlined, but it needs to fit into the unique workflows of the organization. It’s imperative that partners who are collaborating to bring AI into a company should focus on the specific needs of that company, because it will vary. When engaging with a new partner, look at how they are planning to make AI work for your specific goals and needs so that it can be implemented in a way that will benefit both your team and your bottom line.
Marketing today demands hyper-personalization. In your view, what does true personalization look like in 2025, and how can brands move beyond generic segmentation?
True personalization is about creating content across mediums and channels that is on-brand, specific for each audience, and channel ready. More and more, customers are expecting this from the brand content that they consume. As this demand rises, the need for more content also rises. This is where AI is table stakes for driving personalization. With AI that is tailored to an organization’s unique goals, data, and history, marketers can personalize at scale, tailoring subject lines, headlines, or ad copy to micro-segments of audiences.
Email marketing often gets treated as a check-the-box tactic. What are the key elements of building an email marketing strategy that drives measurable impact instead of becoming a “set-and-forget” channel?
Email’s biggest misconception is that once a program is built, it can simply run on autopilot. Nothing in email should ever be “set and forget”; audiences evolve, motivations shift, and customer expectations change faster than most marketers realize. When email is treated as a box to check, it often leads to disengagement, fatigue, or even active alienation of your audience.
The most important shift is recognizing that email only works when we understand the why behind customer engagement. People don’t open emails at random, they open them because the message aligns with a need, a moment, or an intention. When marketers overlook this and rely on old assumptions or stagnant flows, the channel quickly loses relevance. Understanding the underlying motivation is what prevents email from becoming static — and static email quickly becomes irrelevant.
To avoid this, teams need to build email programs that are dynamic, insight-driven, and continuously optimized:
- Start with an understanding of your audience.
Beyond demographics and open rates, marketers need to know the motivations behind engagement. Use behavioral signals, qualitative feedback, and real interactions to understand what customers value, not just what they click. - Accept that audiences evolve and your strategy must evolve with them.
A message that resonates today may fall flat in six months. You must continuously re-evaluate segments, preferences, and content performance. This is where ongoing testing, not one-off experiments, becomes essential. - Align customer insights with business goals.
The most successful email programs live at the intersection of what your customers want and what your brand needs to drive. That alignment informs your content architecture, cadence, and creative identity. - Treat optimization as a muscle, not a moment.
Fresh creative, new designs, updated CTAs, refined sequences, and smarter automation flows should all be part of a regular operating rhythm, not a quarterly cleanup exercise. Small, consistent improvements compound into meaningful impact. - Use AI as an accelerator, not a replacement.
AI can help with scale, speed, and pattern detection, but human marketers are the ones who provide the context, judgment, and strategic nuance. AI makes execution more efficient; humans ensure it remains relevant.
Ultimately, email should never run on autopilot. When marketers stay close to their audience listening, learning, and iterating, they transform email from a routine task into a high performing channel that continuously drives measurable impact.
Can you share a real-world example—without naming names if confidential—where AI and personalization worked together to significantly improve campaign performance? What was the breakthrough moment?
We’re seeing a lot of clear trends emerge in how AI creates impact across marketing functions when it prioritizes personalization. For example, AI platforms are increasingly capable of producing on-brand, channel-ready copy in minutes. Then, it can take it a step further to personalize variations to meet the specific needs of unique audiences. These variations include tailored subject lines, headlines, and ad copy. Early adopters of our Smart Marketing Engine platform have reported 10-13% higher engagement rates when personalization is automated using AI.
On a personal level, what is your guiding strategy as a leader when you’re helping brands adopt emerging technology and modernize their marketing operations?
When helping brands understand and adopt new technologies like AI, I think it’s important to meet people where they are. People are going to have questions and they’re going to have skepticism. That’s all okay, and expected.
When I’m speaking to a new potential client, I try to understand what their challenges are with adoption, as well as their needs and goals. Once we get on the same page about that, I can better share insights about how AI can help them meet their goals. I can share examples of how it can drive measurable impact in the ways that are most important to them. I can explain how human oversight will be implemented to ensure that it’s not going to create challenges. It all starts with that first stage of connection and alignment around goals.
For business leaders who are just beginning their AI journey in marketing, what is one piece of advice you would share to help them avoid common pitfalls and set themselves up for success?
For any marketer getting started with AI, my first piece of advice is to find the problem, not the solution. What I mean by this is: AI is not going to be the solution for every single business problem. If you’re trying to adopt AI for the sake of adopting AI, it’s not going to be the most effective. Instead, focus on determining what your core business challenges are, then find a solution that solves them. When you focus on the problem, it’s easier to find the right solution to actually solve it. Then, you can adopt it across the entire team and find the true value of AI.
Finally, Marie, what are your closing thoughts on the future of AI-powered marketing and what can we expect next in this rapidly evolving landscape?
We’re at a pivotal moment where AI is becoming a natural part of everyday marketing, but its true value depends on how marketers choose to use it. The future won’t be about replacing marketers — it will be about elevating them and freeing teams to think more strategically while AI handles the heavy operational lift. Over the next few years, we’ll see AI make omnichannel execution faster, smarter, and more precise, but it will still require human intelligence to provide context, judgment, and brand empathy. Nothing will be “set and forget”. The organizations that succeed will continuously refine, guide, and calibrate AI against real customer needs. The next evolution is moving from using AI to operationalizing it so it becomes truly actionable and tied to outcomes. When you combine AI’s scale with human insight, you unlock a new level of personalization, performance, and customer connection.
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Marie Aiello, SVP, ContinuumGlobal
Marie Aiello is Senior Vice President at ContinuumGlobal, where she leads high-performing teams and global delivery partners to deliver scalable, multi-channel marketing programs. With over 25 years of expertise in engagement marketing, lifecycle, operations and client services, she now focuses on applying creative intelligence and generative AI to drive personalization, efficiency, and measurable impact across the customer journey and marketing workflow.LinkedIn.
