– AI in advertising. Last year, at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, Google exec Vidhya Srinivasan remembers a lot of talk about the possibilities of AI in advertising. “People were experimenting with it and thinking about what’s possible,” she recalls. One year later, in the South of France last week, possibility had fully become reality. “It’s actually transforming every aspect of advertising today,” she says.
Srinivasan is the person responsible for making much of that transformation happen. At Google, she is VP/GM for both advertising and commerce. She oversees Google Shopping and advertising products across Google Search, maps, YouTube, and more—a vast portfolio of fast-changing products with more than $66.9 billion in revenues in Q1 alone.
Srinivasan added commerce to her portfolio at the beginning of this year, a remit she took on as consumers demand hyper-personalization while shopping, and as advertisers seek it as they target shoppers.
AI in advertising and commerce can mean wildly different things. It’s a vast portfolio of ad tech products and rapidly AI-generated, targeted advertising. “We’ve always wanted to serve the right ad to the right person at the right time…Now you can come up with a perfect creative at the moment for the person, because the AI is able to generate things on the fly,” she says. “It’s changing the game on what is possible in any given moment.”
It’s also an entirely new shopping experience—a consumer can describe a garment they might want, see an AI-generated version, and then shop for similar products that already exist. “Customer journeys are completely unpredictable,” Srinivasan says. “Users now want a far more relevant, immersive experience in everything they do.”
Adweek last year described Srinivasan as having the “toughest job in advertising.” She’s at the center of a lot of trends: fast-changing activity on Google Search, as more consumers go straight to ChatGPT or other chatbots rather than Google something; advertising anxieties about the future of creative and the industry; and the vast workforce changes that are happening in both sectors.
Srnivasan says that her past experience at Amazon Web Services helped prepare her for the challenge. Starting at AWS in 2012, she was tasked with bringing the first cloud data warehouse to market. “The charter was, I should be able to start a data warehouse in the time it takes to get a coffee or buy a book,” she remembers. It seemed impossible at the time. “People were very skeptical that cloud was a real thing when I started there and now, of course, you look back and you’re like, ‘Of course that had to happen.'”
But she doesn’t minimize the anxieties in the advertising world right now. “Bringing people along, not just internally—bringing our customers along—there’s a lot of responsibility associated with all of that,” she says. “I take that quite seriously.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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