George Yaryura, Senior Vice President and Head of CIBG Marketing, Marketing and Communications Group, MashreqFor the past 20-plus years, we have been obsessed with one idea: digital transformation. We digitised everything. And I write this as someone who has spent the better part of the last two decades driving that change across industries and operating models.
We moved from paper to platforms. From manual workflows to automated systems. We removed friction, created smoother experiences, built clouds, SaaS models, subscription economies – entire business architectures on the promise that digital would make us faster, smarter, more efficient.
And it did. But here is the uncomfortable truth: Digital transformation has now succeeded so completely that it no longer differentiates. Digital is no longer strategy. It is infrastructure.
Which is why I think we are misunderstanding artificial intelligence (AI). Some see AI as simply the next wave of digital transformation – ‘digital transformation 2.0’ – the next layer of productivity. It is not.
“AI will scale production, but it cannot generate brand love because love is earned through trust, relevance, authenticity and empathy.”
Many have already framed AI in terms of augmentation rather than replacement – a view now widely discussed. What I find more interesting is the deeper structural shift underneath it – because the question has flipped. Digital transformation was about digitising processes: taking what was manual and asking, ‘Where do we plug digital into these processes?’
AI forces a completely different lens. In a world where workflows become AI-driven by default, the question is no longer where we plug AI in. It is: where do we plug the human back in? That is the inversion. This is not automation. This is cognition being digitised, execution becoming machine-led, and differentiation becoming human-led. And that changes everything.
From digitisation to overload
Marketing is perhaps the clearest example of what digital transformation delivered. We moved from traditional marketing into digital marketing and saw an explosion of data, funnels, attribution models, performance metrics, and optimisation loops.
The function evolved rapidly – and so did the output and the skill sets. Brand became specialised. Performance became specialised. Product marketing became specialised. Content became specialised. CRM became specialised. Digital didn’t just transform marketing. It expanded and fragmented it. We built organisations of specialists, each managing their own slice of the marketing engine, connected by dashboards and analytics, all in service of doing more.
Digital transformation gave us acceleration: faster processes, smoother execution, better customer experiences. Now imagine adding AI into that equation. AI brings abundance, infinite content and infinite speed. It brings hyper-personalisation at scale. So, the question is no longer how much we can produce. The question is: will it resonate?
The efficiency race is real, but it is not the prize
AI will absolutely deliver productivity. It will reduce cost. It will scale execution. And yes, marketing has entered an arms race. Everyone will be racing. But that is hygiene.
Because when everyone has access to the same tools, efficiency stops being differentiation.
And if marketing becomes purely transactional or promotional, it risks becoming a zero-sum game – a race to the fastest click and the cheapest option.
Back to the human fundamentals: brands that mean more
In a world where execution becomes abundant, the advantage shifts. AI will scale production, but it cannot generate brand love – because love is earned through trust, relevance, authenticity, empathy and meaning for the customer.
These are fundamentally human. And they take us back to the fundamentals of marketing – fundamentals that have never changed. Marketing is still about creating differentiated customer value: value that resonates emotionally, feels culturally relevant and makes a brand matter in the mind and heart of the customer.
In markets like the Middle East, where ambition is high, competition is intense, and cultural nuance matters deeply, this becomes even more critical. Customer centricity here is shaped by cultural fluency and by how intelligently brands combine human relevance with AI-powered personalisation.
The brands that will win in the AI era will not be the ones that generate more. They will be the ones that mean more.
The Roadrunner economy: how fast the ground is moving
I recently came across an article by futurist Noah Raford on the ‘Roadrunner economy’, and the metaphor is striking. The piece explored how AI is disrupting the SaaS economy – how platforms and business models that took years to build can suddenly be recreated or unbundled almost instantly.
Like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner, many organisations are still sprinting forward, not realising the terrain has already shifted beneath them. I couldn’t help but draw the parallel with marketing and MarTech.
We have built increasingly complex stacks, platforms and ecosystems – but AI raises an uncomfortable question: how much of that advantage holds when so much can be generated, customised or replaced at speed? We are chasing efficiency, optimisation and the next platform. But by the time you catch what you are chasing, it is already gone.
The post-digital era is human
Digital transformation was about replacing manual work with digital systems. AI is a rethink of how we operate – and where humans create value in an AI-driven world.
If we play our cards right, this is where augmentation becomes real: not the automation of marketing, but the elevation of what only humans can bring: critical thinking, empathy, imagination, curiosity, cultural intelligence, common sense.
Digital built the infrastructure. Now the advantage is human. Because the defining question for marketing is no longer what AI can do but what we choose to become and create, with it.
By George Yaryura, Senior Vice President and Head of CIBG Marketing, Marketing and Communications Group, Mashreq
