Ikea’s CMO sees LLMs as the newest place a brand has to hold its line

“It’s not only about communication anymore, it’s also about other elements that go and get fed into the algorithm,” Vincenzo Riili, global CMO of Ikea Retail told Digiday in an interview arranged by Dentsu around its annual CMO survey.

LLMs, in his view, give a brand a new way to reach people but the brand itself still has to come from the company. He described the job as “using LLM, for example, to distribute your brand not to create your brand.”

Rilli believes Ikea is well placed for that. He said the company has stayed consistent in its value and proposition across every touchpoint for years, summed up as “beautiful, affordable furniture for many people.” Brands that “tactically had chosen to actually have different kinds of propositions just because in that given moment would actually give an extra target sales”, are struggling now, he said, because a model can’t work out what they stand for.

A similar argument surfaced at Digiday’s Media Strategies event in London yesterday (Oct. 13). Jon Roberts, chief innovation at People Inc., said publishing has moved on from its website era into a “brand era.” His point was that the brand travels further than any single channel. People Inc.’s sites now sit alongside Instagram, YouTube and TikTok followings and some of the biggest email lists around. “So the business is not the website,” he said. Size alone won’t protect anyone either, in his view. “I’m very sorry to tell you that AI just scales bigger and cheaper than you will ever do.”

Roberts was talking about publishers, though the logic carries over to marketers. If AI will always win on scale, the advantage sits with whatever a brand has built up over the years that a model can’t reproduce cheats. That’s an unfashionable place for a marketer to stand right now. Plenty describe the field in engineering terms, and Rilli himself said marketing sits “very close by to engineering”. His emphasis still falls on the fundamentals.

He learned that at Unilever, before a spell at Google and then Ikea. “The old basics of emotional connection, distinctive proposition, and consistency in the way you show up with different touch points becomes even more important than before,” said Rilli.

AI’s job, in his view, is to carry those basics further and faster. “The algorithm AI can help you executive that in a faster scale in a more local relevant way,” he said. 

Inside Ikea that has played out in phases. 

The first was about speed. “It’s about productivity and trying to adapt the work faster,” Rilli said, giving the adaptation of local content as an example. The next phase is about effectiveness such as whether AI can help his marketers make better decisions and build stronger relationships. “I think we are still in the phase of learning the best way to do that,” Rilli added.

There are limits on what he wants to hand over to AI. Leaning on it too heavily, he said, risks a brand losing its distinctive way of showing up, which he called extremely important for Ikea. Nor does he think marketing is ready to automate creative work. As he explained: “I think in marketing we are still not there when it comes to creative and when it comes to producing content.” For now, he sees AI as “a companion.”

Creators are one of the areas where that consistency is being tested hardest. Because Ikea operates in so many countries, it relies on creators spread across its markets, Rilli said, and that can extend to creators working at the level of individuals stores. Some are Ikea staff. “We have our own co-workers. Some of them have a million views on TikTok,” he said. “They show up and show up a product because of pure passion.”

For creator partnerships, Rilli said the deal has to be a “win-win” for the brand, the creator and the consumer. Creators should get freedom to talk about Ikea in their own voice, he said, with non-negotiables on the purpose and values the company wants carried through.

Rilli isn’t alone in putting brand at the center of the AI conversation. Dentsu Creative’s latest CMO survey of 1,950 senior marketers found 81% expect AI agents to make strong brand preference more important than ever, and 78% worry those agents will make their brand experience invisible. The same survey asked which tasks marketers would have done as an agent. Thirty one percent said they would be very comfortable letting them develop their annual reports on their own.

“I think we’re going to switch from having a brand book to having a brand brain ultimately that impacts every part of the organization, from the decisioning, the next action that it takes, how people are incentivised and how they’re structured,” said Patricia McDonald, global chief strategy officer at Dentsu Creative. “So, I think the brand will become much more important than it has been for decades.”