VaynerX CMO Discusses How To Turn Cultural Signals Into Content With AI
Avery Akkineni explains how AI helps marketers turn cultural signals into content faster while keeping human creativity and judgment at the center.
Avery Akkineni
CMO of VaynerX
Cultural Signals: VaynerX uses AI to identify emerging cultural trends, validate brand relevance, and accelerate localized content production.
Human Judgment: AI expands creative output, but humans still decide which ideas deserve investment and protect quality.
Pilot Limits: Narrow AI pilots fail to transform marketing because lasting results require infrastructure, talent, and cross-functional adoption.
Search Shift: AI connects SEO and social, making culturally relevant content increasingly important for discovery, recommendations, and brand visibility.
Leadership Practice: Marketing leaders gain advantage by building agents, redesigning workflows, and practicing AI directly rather than observing from afar.
Avery Akkineni is CMO of VaynerX, a multi-hundred-million-dollar business representing some of the biggest brands in the world. She's also ex-Google, and she sits on Salesforce's AI Council, Meta's Creative Council, and TikTok's For You Collective.
We sat down with Avery to learn how she's using AI to turn cultural signals into content. Here's what she told us.
Where culture and technology collide
Hi! I'm Avery Akkineni, CMO of VaynerX. My career started at Google. I joined VaynerMedia in 2018 and spent the next two years building our Asia Pacific business from zero. We grew to 150 people across Singapore, Bangkok, Tokyo, and Sydney, and picked up Independent Agency of the Year Gold along the way. After that, I founded Vayner3, our innovation consultancy. Then I ran VaynerMedia LATAM and stepped into the CMO role.
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Every chapter has been the same bet. Find where culture and technology are about to collide, and get there before the rest of the industry shows up. APAC was that bet. Web3 was that bet. AI is the biggest one yet, and it's the moment I've been preparing for.
I sit on Salesforce's AI Council, Meta's Creative Council, and TikTok's For You Collective, so I see how the biggest platforms are building this. But the conviction came from using it myself — Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity — daily, as infrastructure.
A sharp operator with the right stack can now do what used to take a large team — at a fraction of the cost and time.
Fifteen offices, three regions, one brand
VaynerX has over 2,000 people across fifteen offices, organized into our different agencies including VaynerMedia, ChukMedia, Tamara Group, VaynerSpeakers, and others. My remit is the VaynerX brand itself, which spans all of them.
My team runs marketing and communications globally with PR, events, our own content, and internal ops. We cover the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.
The complexity is that we're a multi-hundred-million-dollar business representing some of the biggest brands in the world, and we're a brand ourselves. We market to the same CMOs we serve. That changes everything about how we show up.
In practice, that looks like over fifty events a year, regular multimillion-view LinkedIn hits, and more content output than any independent agency in our space.
How an expectation of AI fluency expands social output
The biggest concrete change we made is making AI fluency an expectation. We're an early adopter of Google's enterprise Workspace suite with Gemini, and we expect everyone from Gary down to our most junior team members to know how to use these tools.
Practically, that has unlocked our ability to produce even more incredible social content and launch new handles designed to reach new audiences. We bring our "document vs create" philosophy to life at our events, where we take footage from a single event and turn it into hundreds of posts, then let the data tell us which ones land.
That used to be impossible at our scale. Now it's the baseline.
A workflow for turning cultural signals into content
At VaynerX, we move at the speed of culture to capture underpriced attention. Integrating Gemini into our marketing workflows helps us accelerate decision-making, unlock efficiencies, and deliver more relevant work for our clients.
Here's the workflow:
- Step 1: Our teams identify real-time cultural signals, shifting platform trends, and consumer insights across every social channel to pinpoint the raw data that matters.
- Step 2: We use proprietary AI assistants, our "Gems," trained on client data and market guardrails. We feed them the signal, and they validate how to translate that cultural moment into authentic brand execution.
- Step 3: Gemini instantly spits out multi-market brief outlines, core creative hooks, and platform-specific copy — tailored for every market globally.
- Step 4: These foundational assets are immediately dumped into presentations. Our global teams grab them across time zones, refine the hooks, and push contextual content into production in a fraction of the traditional time.
The line between AI work and human work
AI informs our decisions; we use it to surface patterns we'd miss, to test more variations than a team could ever produce manually, and to compress the time between a question and an answer.
It also enhances our work, touching almost every craft. Copy, imagery, video — all of it has gotten faster and more iterative. And operationally, AI now reliably automates much of the project management and coordination work that used to slow teams down.
We see the most interesting gains in custom agents. Our team member, Tan Ha, leads that work. He builds agents trained on specific brands and roles, so the leverage compounds the longer we use them. It's gone from a productivity tool to something closer to infrastructure.
But humans still make all our important marketing decisions. That's a deliberate line, and I don't see it moving anytime soon!
And we don't automate ideation itself. Ideas still come from creatives — the people who see things, feel culture, and pick up on texture before the rest of the room. AI can mock up a concept in minutes. It can produce a first draft of almost anything. But the instinct for what's worth making in the first place is human.
Why leaders need to consider how AI affects jobs
I'd say the results have been 90% good. People are sharper, faster, and more capable across more disciplines than they were a year ago. Even baseline tasks like translation and dubbing no longer present barriers, changing how we operate across our three regions.
As for the other 10%, the downsides are twofold.
…the downsides are twofold. First, AI slop. Lazy work ships because the tool made it easy, not because the idea was good. Second — and this is the harder issue — jobs.
First, AI slop. Lazy work ships because the tool made it easy, not because the idea was good. We hold the line on that internally, but the broader industry will have to reckon with it.
Second, and this is the harder issue, jobs. We're watching the technology sector contract in real time, and AI is absorbing many of those roles rather than reorganizing them. That's not something I celebrate. The opportunity before us is real, but so is the cost. Any leader who doesn't consider both sides isn't paying attention.
Why marketing leaders need to redesign AI pilots
Over the last three or four years, we've run dozens of pilots designed to prove that AI can take something from zero to one hundred in a quarter. And they've all failed.
To be clear, AI can take you from zero to one hundred. We've done it with some of the best technology partners in the world. But a three-month pilot scoped against a narrow use case isn't the right way to unlock what generative AI can do for a marketing organization.
People walk away frustrated because they expected a transformation and got a proof of concept. Real transformation requires infrastructure, cross-functional partnership, and a team that knows how to use the tools.
The tools are incredible. But using them well takes time and talent, and there's no shortcut for either.
Why SEO and social are no longer separate disciplines
SEO and social no longer operate as separate disciplines. AI has completely collapsed those boundaries.
Generative AI and conversational search are increasingly pulling from social platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and creator ecosystems as source material for discovery and recommendation. The content brands publish today isn't just fueling engagement in the moment; it's becoming the training data and reference set for how consumers find and evaluate brands tomorrow.
That's forced a shift in how we think about visibility. And it's forcing a major pivot in how we create and distribute content. The conversation has shifted from SEO to AEO.
We're creating content designed not only to earn attention in culture but also for AI systems to be surfaced, synthesized, and recommended.
The result is a more scalable way to inject ourselves and our clients into the conversations that matter most — where culture, discovery, and decision-making increasingly intersect.
Why CMOs need to get their hands dirty
My advice is to get as hands-on as you can. Everyone has a Claude subscription. Everyone has made a flyer for their kid's birthday using a visual generator. That's table stakes now, not a skill.
The real work is to build something. Create an agent. Break a workflow and rebuild it. The leaders who will pull ahead are the ones who stop treating AI like a chat window and start treating it like a craft.
And one specific recommendation: Couch to AI 5K. It's a free program I have no affiliation with, but it pushed me to click into things I would have otherwise skipped.
That's what hands-on looks like: not reading about AI, but doing the reps.
My advice is to get as hands-on as you can…build something. Create an agent. Break a workflow and rebuild it. The leaders who will pull ahead are the ones who stop treating AI like a chat window and start treating it like a craft.
Follow Along
You can follow Avery Akkineni's work on LinkedIn.
More expert interviews to come on The CMO Club!
