AI Is The Highway: Smarter Marketing Infrastructure

By Andrew Rosen, Head of Industry, Healthcare & Pharma 

Key Takeaways:

• The biggest AI opportunity is making the entire marketing ecosystem smarter, not building another standalone platform.
• AI can help systems interpret context, recognize relationships and coordinate action, rather than simply exchange data.
• Healthcare is a powerful use case because provider, patient, media and measurement data are complex, fragmented and privacy-sensitive.
• The most defensible AI advantage will come from smarter infrastructure and interoperability, not an ever-growing list of platform features.

It seems like every week in our industry brings another AI launch. A new model. A new copilot. A new first-to market planning assistant. Every announcement promises to fundamentally change marketing. And every time I have the same reaction.

“That’s…that’s very cool.”

Then, about five seconds later:

“Is…is that it?”

I’m an AI optimist. I genuinely believe AI is going to transform marketing. What I’m less convinced of is that we know precisely how, or that the future will belong to whichever company builds the smartest model or platform.

Too much of the conversation today is about that: which AI platform is the smartest. And we already know the answer to that question changes week by week and month by month as top model performance continues to converge. I think the more interesting conversation is how AI can make the entire marketing ecosystem smarter.

The challenge has never been a lack of technology; it’s getting all of that technology to work together, and that’s the problem I believe AI is uniquely positioned to solve.

Smarter Connections, Not Bigger Platforms

The first wave of AI has focused on making individual products smarter. That makes sense. It’s the most obvious place to start, and there is real value in helping marketers work faster, uncover insights more quickly, and automate everyday tasks.

But I don’t think that’s where the biggest opportunity lives.

For years, interoperability has mostly meant moving data from one system to another via APIs, integrations, standards, connectors. Necessary work, but ultimately focused on transportation. Now, instead of simply moving information, AI can understand context. It can recognize relationships between systems that were never designed to work together. It can help translate information instead of just transferring it. That’s the real shift; not another dashboard, but translation and coordination.

It’s akin to the difference between a paper map and GPS. A paper map tells you how to get from Point A to Point B, but GPS understands where you’re trying to go and what’s happening around you— traffic, crashes, weather, and alternate routes. It interprets and adapts based on disparate context. Legacy integrations move data, but AI has the potential to help systems understand one another. 

AI has the potential to take that idea much further. Instead of simply helping systems exchange data, it can help them interpret context, recognize relationships and coordinate action across them. That’s the difference between building better connections and building smarter ones.

No marketing team, even with all the right access to all the right data, can understand millions of relationships across identity, media, provider engagement, patient behavior, measurement, privacy, and campaign performance in real time. AI makes that possible.

Why This Matters in Healthcare

Healthcare might actually be one of the best places to prove this idea, not despite its complexity, but because of it. As Viant’s Head of Healthcare and Pharma, I see this firsthand in the many steps required to bring a new treatment to the doctors and patients who need it.

Think about a specialty therapy launch.  Success isn’t determined by a single campaign or a single channel, but by the accumulation of dozens of interactions happening in parallel across completely different parts of the ecosystem.

For example, a physician may hear about the therapy from a sales representative, attend a webinar, read new clinical data, see digital education, and later discuss it with colleagues. At the same time, an eligible patient may see a TV ad, search for information online, visit the brand website, enroll in a support program, and eventually bring that therapy up during an appointment.

None of those interactions happen in the same system. Commercial teams have one view. Marketing teams have another. Media platforms measure one thing. CRM systems capture something else. Identity partners, analytics platforms, and measurement providers each contribute another piece of the picture.

None of those systems are inherently broken.  They just weren’t designed to see the whole picture.

That’s what makes AI interesting.  It creates the possibility for those systems to understand one another without asking every team to work from the same platform or forcing every dataset into the same place.

And that’s especially important in healthcare, where privacy isn’t simply a compliance requirement. It’s part of the architecture. Sensitive data can’t be copied into one massive repository, which means intelligence has to move differently than data does.

That’s where AI has to become infrastructure instead of another application.

The Question I’m Paying Attention To

Every major marketing platform is investing in AI, and they should be.  Experimentation is critical. And there’s no question that AI belongs inside every piece of the tech stack.  

The question is now whether AI makes one platform smarter or whether it makes the entire marketing ecosystem smarter.

The key isn’t choosing the AI platform with the longest list of features— AI is accelerating feature parity faster than ever. The harder problem, and ultimately, the more defensible advantage, is making all of those systems work together more intelligently.

That perspective is central to Viant’s approach to AI. We invest in AI innovation, but just as importantly, we invest in the identity, content, attention and proprietary data infrastructure that gives AI the context to make better decisions. Viant’s AI suite is singularly focused on driving advertiser growth by turning that intelligence into stronger performance and measurable outcomes. 

AI planning tools matter. AI assistants matter.  Smarter platforms matter. But if AI is truly transformational, the biggest opportunity isn’t building the smartest platform. It’s making the entire marketing ecosystem smarter.