From Insights to Action: Three Strategic Imperatives from YCCI’s 2025 InsightsOn Conference

The 2025 InsightsOn Conference, hosted by the Yale Center for Customer Insights (YCCI), brought together leaders in marketing, brand strategy, and consumer insights to explore the evolving relationship between business, technology, and customer understanding. Sponsored by Boston Consulting Group, Morning Consult, and Suzy, the two-day event showcased how companies are turning insight into action across industries.

At the heart of the conference was a powerful throughline: while generative AI may be reshaping how businesses operate, lasting competitive advantage still depends on how well organizations translate insight into action. Joel Renkema, Global Head of Insights at IKEA, emphasized that true differentiation lies not in the insight itself but in a company’s ability to apply it decisively and distinctively: “It's not the insight itself, it's the application that turns it into the competitive advantage.” His perspective served as a reminder that even the most sophisticated technologies can’t replace the human judgment, empathy, and strategic clarity required to turn understanding into impact.

This idea resonated throughout the event, where conversations continually returned to the same underlying truth: technology is only as transformative as the people—and values—guiding its use. Across sessions, three imperatives emerged as central to that transformation. First, AI must listen before a strategy is executed; second, brand experiences must be anchored in purpose, not performance; and third, meaningful change must start from within, by equipping organizations to evolve from the inside out.

AI That Listens First: Understanding Before Execution

While much of the conversation around AI centers on speed and automation, speakers at the conference emphasized that AI’s real power lies in how well it's grounded in human understanding. AI tools can help brands meet consumers at critical moments in the consumer journey— understanding why someone is searching, not just what they’re looking for. Sadie Thoma, Director of U.S. Ads Marketing at Google, explained that “there are four consumer behaviors today in terms of ways consumers are engaging with your brands – streaming, searching, scrolling, and shopping,” noting that these behaviors often happen simultaneously. When insights are activated with purpose, Thoma argued, they allow marketers to engage with greater intent during each of these four moments—fueling not just better ads, but smarter, more transformative businesses. “Personalization,” she added, “is a reflection of the trust that brands actually have with customers.”

Denise Moreno, Vice President of Consumer Marketing at Meta, brought this principle to life with a case study on the launch of the company’s smart glasses. For Moreno, it’s important to “start with the understand phase always,” grounding the campaign in deep insight into seasonality, style, and consumer mindsets. AI then became an amplifier—to signifcantly improve every day use cases with its unique features like open-ear audio and real-time translation—within a full-funnel, insight-led strategy anchored in real behaviors.

This focus on human understanding was echoed by Vanessa Vachon, International Business Transformation Lead at Pfizer, who reminded the audience, “AI is an enabler, [but]... the human still needs to be very, very much at the core [of insights generation].”

The role of AI in shaping consumer insights will continue to grow as the technology, and adoption by industry professionals, increase. Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping the way companies extract customer needs from massive, unstructured datasets—like call center transcripts, online reviews, and interviews, according to Artem Timoshenko, Associate Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. While LLMs can surface patterns that human analysts might miss, he emphasized that they still fall short when it comes to true empathy and contextual sensitivity. The most effective companies, he argued, blend the scale and speed of AI with the critical thinking of human analysts—demonstrating that genuine insight comes from the interplay between technology and human intuition.

Experience with Intent: How Truth and Trust Power Brand Connection

Consumer experience was framed not as a surface-level interaction or a string of tactics, but as a strategic growth engine—one that must be rooted in brand truth and consumer trust to create lasting impact.

Mark Abraham, Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group, shared that firms that are personalization leaders—those which “follow through and deliver on the promises of personalization” by embedding it across the full customer journey—are growing ten percentage points faster than their peers. He stressed that true personalization is about creating experiences that evolve with each interaction and empower customers to achieve their goals more easily. From SonderMind’s tailored mental health journeys to Uber’s context-aware ads, the strongest brands are using personalization to deliver value—not just visibility. Abraham called this approach “democratizing insights”—putting real-time intelligence into the hands of teams who can act on it.

Still, even the most finely tuned experience can fall flat if it lacks a genuine connection to the brand. Devika Bulchandani, Global CEO of Ogilvy, cautioned that purpose cannot be a “veneer layered over marketing”—it must stem from what a company truly offers. She pointed to Dove’s Real Beauty campaign as an example of this principle in action: Dove’s soap was known for its pure ingredients, so the idea of celebrating “real beauty” was a natural, credible extension of the brand. That alignment between product truth and emotional message helped build deep consumer trust.

Kristin Patrick, President and CMO at Marc Jacobs, echoed that message through the lens of brand reinvention. When she joined the company, she realized that many Gen Z consumers didn’t know who Marc Jacobs, the person, was or what the brand represented. To bridge that gap, her team used insights into the media, culture, and aesthetics younger consumers were engaging with to shape storytelling that reintroduced the brand’s identity in a fresh and emotionally resonant way. The experience they crafted wasn’t just about reaching consumers—it was about making the brand feel familiar, relevant, and aspirational again.

Internal authenticity was also central to Leslie Berland, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Verizon, who underscored that meaningful brand experiences must reflect the organization’s internal DNA. When she joined Verizon, she quickly recognized that customers only interacted with the brand when bills were due, and rarely felt emotionally connected to it. Her team began by listening carefully, understanding what internal and external stakeholders valued, and rethinking the brand experience from the inside out. “We couldn’t keep launching against an outdated brand,” she noted. By focusing on how the brand could authentically empower people in their daily lives—at work, at play, and everywhere in between, Verizon began to differentiate in a market where most products feel interchangeable.

Transformation Starts Internally: Readiness Before Reach

While much of the conversation around innovation focused on AI, personalization, and new tools, many speakers made one thing clear: no external transformation is sustainable without internal readiness. That means building not just technical capabilities, but also the culture, trust, and fluency required to implement change in a way that lasts.

Lance Hill, Global Head of Insights, Analytics & Measurement at HP, observed a fundamental shift: unlike previous technologies that gained traction at home before entering the workplace, AI is emerging from the office outward. “AI use is starting at work, but it's being adopted in the home or in your personal life,” Hill noted, adding that this change demands organizations guide adoption from the top down, equipping employees with both the skills and mindset to thrive. “Our relationship with work is not in a good place... only 28% of employees worldwide have a healthy relationship with work,” he warned, underscoring the urgency for employers to foster a culture of fulfillment and purpose to ensure workers feel empowered—not displaced—by new tools and expectations.

Teresa Yoo, Vice President of Brand and Content Strategy at IBM, spoke directly to that need for trust. While business enthusiasm for AI is high, “64% of customers said they would prefer that companies didn't use AI in customer service,” she shared, highlighting a striking disconnect between enterprise adoption and consumer comfort. IBM has taken a proactive approach, forming an AI ethics board in 2019, holding regular use case reviews with clients, and launching widespread internal training programs. “The major benefit of all these efforts is that our employees feel they have permission to try, to learn, to innovate with AI,” creating not just technical fluency but cultural buy-in across the company.

Kate Schardt, Vice President of Global Insights Capabilities and Partnerships at PepsiCo, echoed the importance of mindset. A self-described skeptic, she encouraged teams to slow down and define the problem clearly before applying new tools. “If you scare employees too much, they shut down,” she noted. “But if you don’t create urgency, they won’t act.” PepsiCo’s approach has been to show how data transparency and strategic automation can empower teams, particularly in areas where supplier models previously limited insight.

Looking Ahead: Insight, Intention, and Innovation

AI isn’t just changing how consumers search—it’s reshaping how they make decisions. Yuting Zhu, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the National University of Singapore explained that with generative summaries now appearing before traditional results, the way people “process information and make decisions [has been altered].” In this environment, visibility alone isn’t enough; credibility and clarity have become essential brand differentiators. The growing presence of AI-generated content makes it even more important for brands to deliver messaging that is trustworthy, relevant, and easy to understand.

Christine Barton, Senior Partner at BCG and Chair of YCCI’s Advisory Board, reminded attendees what truly sets organizations apart: their people. Whether navigating breakthroughs in AI, synthetic biology, or periods of uncertainty, she emphasized that sustainable leadership comes from bringing others along—with purpose, adaptability, and clarity. Quoting Peter Drucker, she offered a fitting final charge: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

At InsightsOn 2025, future wasn’t defined merely by technology—but by the leaders bold enough to use it with intention. As Laurie Santos’s session reminded the audience, sustaining boldness requires tending to our own well-being—because impact begins not only with strategic clarity, but with personal resilience.