The wave of AI tools moving through marketing departments often brings a familiar fear: that early adopters are betting on something unproven. DXC Technology CMO Anthony Pappas sees that hesitation as part of a cycle. In a Digiday conversation, he compared today’s generative AI doubts to the early web, when people said, “I’m never going to put my credit card on the internet.”
Pappas, who marks a year as CMO, argues the bigger barrier is not the technology but how marketers have been trained to work. His message is especially relevant for marketing leaders balancing automation with brand judgment.
Begin with the outcome
Pappas says organizations love processes. They build workflows, systems and meetings, then spend enormous time managing them. His advice is to reverse that: “Start with the outcome.” Ask what the team is trying to achieve, then figure out how intelligence can help deliver it.
This shift is not a productivity tweak. It changes what people can do and forces leaders to engage with AI directly. “You cannot lead an intelligence transformation from a PowerPoint deck,” Pappas says.
Customer zero before client rollout
DXC Technology has made itself “customer zero,” using AI inside its own marketing and communications operations before taking solutions to clients. The company applies guidelines and guardrails while Pappas experiments with building his own agents and generative AI workflows.
That internal-first approach is now turning into real product outcomes. DXC and Anthropic recently announced a multi-year partnership to bring Claude into systems DXC operates for major banks, airlines, insurers, manufacturers and government agencies. Claude is one of the models behind agentic workflows in DXC Oasis, DXC’s platform for coordinating and automating managed services.
DXC estimates it can develop Oasis software about 10 times faster, with Claude generating more than 95% of code before it reaches human review. The difference, Pappas says, is moving from experimenting with intelligence to putting it to work.
AI as amplification, not replacement
Pappas rejects the idea that AI simply replaces human roles. He points to creative work once requiring large teams, specialist skills and long timelines; today, teams of three skilled people can produce work that might have needed dozens. Human expertise becomes more important, not less, because someone still has to judge good creative from bad.
That idea sits inside DXC’s Human+ philosophy: combine intelligent systems with human expertise. For marketing teams, the practical implication is to treat AI as a force multiplier for skilled staff rather than a headcount reduction machine.
What marketers can do now
- Use AI in your own operations first, with clear guardrails, before rolling it out to clients.
- Start from the outcome you want rather than the workflow you already have.
- Get hands-on with the tools; leadership cannot stay at the strategy-deck level.
- Choose models by the use case, and keep human review in the loop for quality and judgment.
Pappas’s baseball habit frames the outlook: you do not need to know exactly where the ball will land, but you need to be ready to make the play. For marketing leaders, that means making curiosity, listening and responsible experimentation a routine rather than waiting for certainty.
Source: Digiday
