| Cars Commerce is a behemoth digital automobile sales company, with consumer-facing Cars.com as its flagship offering. But it also features industry platforms for dealers to create websites and marketing campaigns, as well as conduct appraisals and wholesale cars between dealerships. To manage such a broad portfolio, Cars Commerce CMO Jennifer Vianello has used AI for a variety of applications. She talked to me about the solutions she’s found, the challenges she’s facing, and how AI is developing. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. How are you using AI now in the Cars Commerce marketing department? Vianello: It’s that creative and production team, in marketing specifically, that has been innovating the furthest the fastest. We’ve done dozens of different pilots. The really important thing here, in terms of just taking AI as a concept and cutting it down to size, is [asking] what is the task that I’m looking to perform? And then, what are the available technology solutions to make that task smarter, faster or cheaper—ideally all three—and did it work, or not? Then you scale. Fundamentally, AI is like anything else that’s hit marketing in the last 25 years: What’s the task? What’s the technology solution? Test, learn and scale. It’s just the speed at which this is coming. It is remarkably different. And on that notion of smarter, faster, cheaper, I have asked my teams to keep an eye on making sure that we’re not trading off smarter for faster and cheaper. Where there has been great application is things like photo editing, copywriting, color correction. Speeding up those rote tasks has been great. There are a lot of really great applications when it comes to the handoffs from marketing to other functions: marketing to product marketing to sales enablement and then to sales. You can have a more connected customer experience in terms of making sure that all the messages they hear are consistent. That’s an area where I’m bullish. There are a lot of applications when it comes to creating big campaigns for consumers from a big consumer brand. There’s a lot of the production aspect that can be automated, improved. There are areas that we couldn’t do before that now we can. There’s millions of VINs in the country, and we can take photos of individual cars that come from car dealers or private party sellers, and use those in a variety of different ways across our marketing and our product. What’s never been possible until recently is being able to create videos of a specific car, especially a used car; there’s no way to scale that up. That is something that’s starting to change, and that’s one of the most exciting things that we have been discovering and testing. What are the biggest challenges you see with AI? We are a digital technology company, so if we’re not going to be using the latest digital technology that’s coming out, then I would say everybody in our company is in the wrong business. I don’t think we’ve had barriers in terms of interest, testing and adoption. As you would expect, we are in many ways ahead of a lot of companies there, as we should be. There’s two things I’m keeping an eye on. One is the profile of talent that’s going to be necessary in marketing is going to shift. As the number of different channels and specialties has proliferated in the last 15 years, there are a number of career paths that have become very channel or vertical specific, or subfunction specific. What has been the hardest skillset to hire—and now I think it’s going to be very much a necessity—is generalists, particularly at early stages in their career. Prior to this role, I was agency side for several years, and it was a challenge in that capacity, too. Agencies specialized by channel earlier than clients, and it was challenging in that environment to find people who could really understand the client’s business issues, how to translate that into marketing needs across channels, and have enough depth of knowledge in every single channel—but not too much that they were highly specialized. That [need is] going to go into overdrive. We are going to be in a position where we need to be hiring for strategy, critical thinking and connecting the dots. It’s going to be a challenge for our colleges. It’s going to be a challenge for hiring. It’s going to be a challenge for training, because what AI cannot do today very well is connect those dots across and apply some critical thinking and some wisdom, and I think that might be part of why we’re starting to see entry level roles get hit first with automation—at the moment, they’re too highly specialized. We’re keeping a very close eye on what’s happening with the shift from SEO to AEO. There’s risk and opportunity in that. It doesn’t worry me so much for Cars.com. We have the benefit of an exceptionally strong brand and brand name. Our largest consumer acquisition channel is people who come to Cars.com directly. However, SEO is an important channel, and it’s shifting to different platforms and completely different consumer behavior. Basically, we have one channel declining and another new one on our hands, and that’s an incredibly fluid situation. One of the interesting things that we have seen is we are at Cars.com both a publisher and a marketplace. We have decades of editorial content, which is a great asset to have in this shift. Content that has been optimized specifically for SEO needs to pivot to have much more long tail mid funnel [appeal]: The structure of the content, the depth of the questions that it’s answering needs to pivot. Interestingly enough, we’ve seen that SEO has become a higher converting channel for us from a marketplace standpoint. Consumers are still coming in from SEO, they’re just more qualified. They’re lower funnel. We’re finding it to be a smaller channel in terms of total consumer acquisition, but it’s not really bearing out in terms of qualified traffic coming into our site and providing value for our customers. What advice would you give to a CMO who isn’t quite as advanced with using AI in different functions as you are? If you want to be in marketing, then you need to know the tools—or at least enough to be dangerous. I think that has been always true. I don’t think that the fundamentals change. You have to be curious. You have to understand your audience. You have to be able to translate that into how you’re going to connect with them in a relevant way. And you have to know all the available tools that exist to do that. If you’re not doing that day in, day out, you’re in the wrong function. I had the great benefit of my early days in marketing during the dawn of digital marketing, testing out all the social tools that were coming out—paid search, mobile—and having a front row seat to all of that. It’s really a lot better to think about your career path as scaling a mountain range than climbing a ladder. If you’re just chasing [the goal of] climbing a ladder, you’ll end up getting to the top of it and finding that it’s very short, and you can’t hop to another ladder. What will be true is that there will be jobs that exist in five years that nobody imagined today, just like there are jobs that exist today that didn’t exist five years ago. As long as you follow your curiosity, you’re going to find your way through that. | 
