In this latest episode of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data, smarter – Master Data Storyteller, Sam Knowles, spoke to serial CMO, Pete Markey, in a special episode recorded live in London on 18 June 2026 at the ‘AI for PR’ conference. This episode is the opener for the eleventh season of Data Malarkey.
Pete Markey is one of Britain’s most experienced marketing and communications leaders, with senior roles at British Gas, the AA, More Th>n, RSA, the Post Office, Aviva, TSB Bank, Boots, and now the University of Nottingham. His career has spanned some of the country’s most familiar, trusted, and sometimes fragile public brands. This wide-ranging experience makes him an ideal guest for a live debate about AI, not as a novelty, but as a force already reshaping marketing, communications, reputation, and organisational decision-making.
Humans in the loop, in the lead
The conversation began, usefully, not with technology, but with human behaviour. For Markey, one principle has remained constant across sectors and decades: relevance. Brands matter only when they continue to play a meaningful role in people’s lives. At Boots, he disliked hearing people call the company “good old Boots” because that suggested affection without urgency. The challenge was to move from fond memory to present-day relevance and generate the response “Oh my god, wow Boots!” for every new piece of communication.
Trust, he argues, has changed too. In earlier decades, a brand promise could live largely in advertising. Today, it has to be experienced everywhere. Social media has made inconsistency much easier to expose and with much more immediate and serious consequences. Markey’s example from More Th>n is telling: a brand built around the idea of doing “more” could not afford customer service that felt like “less than”. The lesson is clear. Purpose, positioning, and experience must align, or audiences will notice.
The middle way
On AI, Markey is neither a starry-eyed evangelist nor a cynical sceptic. His position is much more balanced and nuanced than that, and hence it’s more useful. He sees AI as increasingly valuable for research, brief writing, creative versioning, digital experience, offer personalisation, and speeding up marketing operations. At Boots, it helped teams respond faster, create more versions, and interrogate information more efficiently. In consulting, he has found it invaluable when working without the support structure of a large corporate team.
But he is equally clear about the limits. AI can generate images, text, summaries, and ideas, but it still requires human judgement. Markey draws a careful line around authenticity, particularly in beauty, health, and wellness. An AI-generated beach may be acceptable. AI-generated bodies, hands, or faces are another matter entirely.
Keeping track of the genie out of the bottle
His concern is not to make AI disappear. It will not and cannot. The genie is far too far out of the bottle. The challenge is to decide what it should replace, what it should assist, and what should remain fundamentally human. He argues that marketers may become more like air traffic controllers, overseeing tools, outputs, standards, and decisions. That shift requires training, clarity, and new ways of working, not simply plugging in another platform.
The same applies to agencies. AI will change brand-agency relationships, but not through tools alone. The bigger question is how the whole ecosystem works: what should be done internally, what still requires external craft, and where human creativity adds disproportionate value.
A focus on PR and comms
For PR professionals, Markey’s advice is to be thoughtful. Reputation is fragile, and brands will be judged not only on what they say, but on how, where, and why they use AI.
His most unfashionable view may also be his most sensible: AI and human creativity can coexist. The task now is to shape that future deliberately, rather than have it happen by accident.
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The first draft of this blog was written by ChatGPT, using a transcript of the episode and an ever-refined prompt. It was then edited by real humans.