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GrabAds CMO Circle Masterclass unpacks how AI, data, and human intuition are foundational for future-ready marketing 

MANILA, PHILIPPINES – As marketing continues to evolve at unrelenting speed, today’s marketers must adapt, upskill, and embrace smarter tools to stay ahead.

On May 15, 2025, GrabAds CMO Circle Masterclass, hosted by GrabAds and in collaboration with adobo Magazine, brought together leading marketers, brand leaders, and industry change-makers for a masterclass on harnessing AI and first-party data to fuel meaningful engagement. Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila in Taguig City, the evening served as a platform to explore how innovation and insights can power the next era of marketing.

The new marketing mindset

In a time when AI is transforming how businesses operate, many leaders are balancing excitement with the challenges that emerging technologies bring. Though AI remains a divisive topic, business and marketing leaders are starting to embrace its value — especially in automation and data-driven decision-making.

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For Sulin Lau, Grab’s Regional Head of Brand and Country Marketing, the shift is deeply personal. With years of experience navigating the waves of change in the industry, she’s witnessed the industry’s constant reinvention firsthand. Rather than resist AI, she chose to lean in — confronting what she playfully described on stage as a “beast.”

She understands the hesitation. AI can feel fast, complex, and risky. But that’s precisely why she believes senior leaders are more crucial than ever. Speaking to her peers, she urged them to challenge outdated norms. What worked in 2019 may be irrelevant by 2025. She encouraged marketers to rethink so-called “best practices” and examine whether they still serve today’s needs or just offer outdated comfort.

Traditional metrics, she warned, can mislead. She expressed that marketers must be “paranoid” about what they measure. At Grab, this led to the creation of tailored frameworks like their digital asset sufficiency report card to track what truly matters.

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The marketing function itself is evolving. No longer just about external visibility, modern marketing is a data-centric discipline. Sulin describes this as moving from storytelling to signal-reading: interpreting data, spotting patterns, and transforming insights into strategy.

“With a little marketing imagination, if you become a data person as your primary role in marketing, almost any insight-based innovation is possible,” Sulin said. 

At Grab, this approach has paid off: from identifying a 13-hour untapped demand gap in Vietnam that led to the launch of Grab the Night, to forecasting emerging trends like the rise of single-person households. Today’s marketers must think like data scientists, using creativity to transform raw signals into growth-driving strategies.

Grab’s supertool: Mystique AI

One of AI’s biggest contributions to Grab is “Mystique AI” — an in-house tool built to automate high-volume, low-creativity marketing tasks. Its primary role: generating personalized communications for millions of users, tailored to their behaviors, issues, and queries.

Designed to save time and boost efficiency, Mystique has delivered standout results: a 99% reduction in time spent on junior copywriter-level work, a 30–50% increase in consumer communications, and an 80–200% jump in engagement with merchants and driver-partners.

But Mystique isn’t just fast — it’s thoughtful. It ensures brand consistency and warmth across languages and time zones, making every message feel human and on-brand. It’s a cornerstone of Grab’s strategy to build marketing that’s not only efficient, but deeply empathetic.

Interestingly, Sulin believes Mystique can be empathetic like humans. Speaking exclusively to adobo Magazine, she underscored that humans learned how to be empathetic in the same way that the model could follow suit. 

“These are learned behaviors. They follow some sort of subliminal rules that you were trained in throughout your life. And if you think about AI today, that’s how it learns empathy as well. It’s learning the rules of how to behave like a nice person,” she stressed. 

UnionBank’s intelligent marketing

According to Albert Cuadrante, UnionBank’s Chief Marketing and Experience Officer, no amount of AI can replace the traditional principles of how people digest, analyze, and act on data.

Even before the digital wave triggered by the pandemic, UnionBank was already at the forefront of digital transformation in the country, with AI models in place. Yet conversion rates remained low. The issue? Despite having a wealth of data and AI models in place, the ability of the materials to connect with the type of consumers the bank wanted to attract needed much improvement.

To solve this, Albert and his team went back to basics, this time, running conventional research methods, like proper segmentation and real-world observation, to gain a sharper understanding of the external consumers’ attitudes, behaviors and lifestyles to complement their understanding of their internal customers. They visited homes, spoke with customers and even those who do not have bank accounts, and gathered insights from competitors. They weren’t just gathering data — they were listening.

“I think that’s what separates a great marketing campaign from an ordinary one,” he shared in an exclusive interview with adobo Magazine. “The great marketing campaigns that you connect with are really the ones that are based on insights that you feel this brand knows you very intimately.”

He emphasized that the true power of AI relies on the quality of the data it is given. While many businesses claim to have an abundance of data, much of it is often fragmented or “dirty.” For UnionBank, the breakthrough came from centralizing and refining their data, allowing them to unlock deeper, more actionable insights.

UnionBank’s strategy reflects this philosophy. While many customers engage digitally, the bank understands that real life happens offline. That’s why their presence extends beyond the screen and out to where customers travel, shop, and dine. It’s proof that good old-fashioned consumer interaction and observation remain the foundation of intelligent marketing.

How brands harness AI for personal connection

During the panel discussion moderated by Ken Mandel, Grab’s Regional Managing Director and Head of GrabAds and Enterprise Customers, transformative and data-driven insights emerged from two of the country’s top marketers: Candice Iyog, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Cebu Pacific, and Roche Vandenberghe, Chief Marketing Officer of Globe Telecom.

Roche emphasized that at Globe, data is currency, and hyperpersonalization is the value they unlock from it. Through their “Just for You” campaign, Globe uses detailed customer data from cell sites, partner ecosystems, and customer interactions to tailor highly specific offers. With over 50 million subscribers, Globe uses AI to score and profile users, generating daily “next best offers” that feel uniquely tailored to each individual. This approach turns personalization into a precise, customer-first strategy.

Candice, on the other hand, sees generative AI as a powerful support tool for customer service at Cebu Pacific — not a replacement for human agents. By using AI to intelligently triage, tag, and understand customer inquiries with context and empathy, her team enables faster, more effective resolutions. AI handles the front-end processing, while agents step in with better insights and focus. This strategy reinforces the role of AI as an enabler — streamlining operations while maintaining the warmth and nuance of human interaction.

Across industries, one truth resonates from the GrabAds CMO Circle Masterclass: The future of marketing lies at the intersection of data, technology, and human intuition. Whether it’s Union Bank revisiting traditional segmentation, Grab building scalable empathy with AI, or Globe and Cebu Pacific transforming customer engagement through hyper-personalization and smart automation, every story points to a shift from generic strategies to precision-crafted experiences. As AI redefines what’s possible, it becomes clear that intelligent marketing is not just about mastering data, but knowing how to turn it into meaningful, human-centered impact.

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