The Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin–Madison hosted its second Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Marketing, a three-day conference focusing on modern AI applications in marketing. The event was co-chaired by Neeraj Arora, the Arthur C. Nielsen, Jr. Chair in Marketing Research and Education and academic executive director of the Marketing Leadership Institute; Ishita Chakraborty, Thomas and Charlene Landsberg Smith Faculty Fellow and an assistant professor of marketing; and Remi Daviet, assistant professor of marketing.
The national symposium drew scholars from research institutions including Yale, Stanford, and Wharton, as well as AI industry leaders. The event included presentations on Deep Learning and Unstructured Data Analysis, Generative AI in Marketing, Human-AI collaboration, Algorithmic Bias and Fairness, AI & Marketing Theory, Probabilistic Machine Learning and Computational Methods for Marketing.
Session themes for the symposium presenters included AI and the Professional World, AI and Advertising, Working with Language, AI and Consumers, Analyzing Purchases, AI and Online Platforms, as well as a panel on AI in Research and Teaching.
“No other function in the business world uses AI more than marketing,” said Matt Seitz of WSB’s AI Hub for Business as he gave the opening remarks. “This is a real opportunity for marketing leaders and researchers to take the lead in defining AI best practices for use across the enterprise.”
K. Sudhir, the James L. Frank ’32 Professor of Marketing, Private Enterprise and Management at the Yale School of Management, gave the academic keynote. Sudhir is the school’s founder-director of the Yale China India Insights Program and leads the academic-industry interface for quantitative marketing at the Yale Center for Customer Insights.
Saqib Mustafa (MBA ’07) delivered the industry keynote. Mustafa is Head of Partner Marketing for Anthropic, where he leads the company’s Partner Marketing team to partner with GenAI leaders such as Amazon Web Services and Google, as well as adoption of Anthropic’s AI model, Claude.
“We were thrilled to welcome leading marketing AI scholars from across the country to share their work,” Arora said. “At the Wisconsin School of Business, our vibrant AI research community benefits greatly from events like this, which expand networks, attract top talent, and spark collaborations between academia and industry.”