The rise and development of artificial intelligence in marketing and advertising have become hot topics within the industry, sparking polarized opinions among leaders. Whether viewed as a beneficial evolution or a potential threat, AI has undoubtedly influenced both the conception and execution phases in marketing. With this context, MARKETECH APAC published a byline titled "What’s NEXT in Marketing: From AI agents to beyond LLM–these are AI marketing trends for 2025, " offering an initial glimpse of AI marketing trends expected this year. Due to its significant impact in readership and relevance, the piece was honored as Thought Leadership of the Year. To explore these insights further and anticipate 2026 trends, we interviewed Manolis Perrakis, Innovation Director at We Are Social Singapore and author of the piece. He discussed the progression of AI marketing trends and how marketers can adapt. **AI Agents: Friend or Foe in Creativity?** Manolis highlights that with major cloud infrastructure advancements supporting voice-to-voice AI agents, their use will expand across customer service, development, language translation, gaming, and entertainment. He favors AI agents and workflows for automating mundane, repetitive, and complex tasks, which streamlines the creative process. He emphasizes that human creativity remains irreplaceable despite automation. Creative teams are discovering new ways to augment content creation beyond past limitations. Tools like Nano Banana Pro, Veo 3. 1, Sora 2, and Flux 2 empower creatives to flourish, but human input is essential for strategic direction, orchestration, and final refinement. Looking ahead, Manolis expects a rise in purpose-built automations designed not to replace human talent but to amplify creativity. Platforms like Gemini Gems and OpenAI GPTs, alongside advanced methods such as n8n nodes and vibecoded apps, will become widespread. These will act as research agents, brainstorming assistants, and support visualization workflows, handling heavy tasks to allow focus on craft. This will enable tackling more complex creative challenges with AI’s aid. **Evolution of GenAI Content: Images to 3D** Manolis confirms AI-generated content will continue proliferating in 2025 across all media.

Beyond text and images, video and audio generation technologies will improve in quality and consistency. The friction between creative ideas and visual or video output is fading, transforming communication and idea expression in pitches, ideation, and content creation phases. Currently, image, 3D, and video AI models are integrated within creative workflows to produce traditional and experiential content rapidly. High-fidelity assets and immersive environments can now be prototyped at unprecedented speeds. The ultimate breakthrough will come with World Models, like Google’s Genie 3, which merge image, video, and 3D into real-time content generation. These technologies promise to revolutionize content creation and consumption, allowing experiences such as revisiting past holidays through interactive 3D worlds generated from a single photo or pausing movies to explore scenes virtually. Brands will create personalized, interactive VR experiences. **Ethics and Transparency in AI Marketing** Regarding ethical AI-driven creativity, Manolis notes many creatives lack awareness of their datasets' origins, often due to limited technical expertise. Over the past three years, creatives have faced the dual challenge of rapidly learning new tools while ensuring compliance. He adds that many AI providers offer limited transparency on datasets and proprietary information, prompting lawsuits from entertainment industries targeting foundational models. Because of this legal ambiguity, creatives alone cannot determine ethical and legal AI use. Organizations must establish responsible AI frameworks to guide employees on best practices. At We Are Social, internal legal teams provide clear guidelines on permissible GenAI models and those protecting against copyright claims. When protection is lacking, indemnification from clients is required. Until AI companies disclose training data transparently, creatives should adhere to approved GenAI tools and collaborate closely with legal advisors to avoid infringement. **AI Autonomous Campaign Ideation** Asked how close agencies are to fully automating campaign ideation, Manolis believes it’s not about proximity but about current adoption levels, which remain low but will rise soon. He sees end-to-end automation fitting in repetitive creative tasks or as inspiration for overcoming blocks; however, for high-level strategic concepts, AI remains a tool to amplify human strategy rather than replace it. **Recognition of Thought Leadership** This recognition was based on Google Analytics data identifying the most-read 2025 stories, editorial validation of leadership contributions, campaign outcomes, and overall impact in the industry.