Actionable AI - Altair Inspires

What Actionable AI means for businesses across all sectors?

Our Altair Inspires events are designed to bring together senior marketing leaders and industry innovators for immersive and interactive sessions that delve into the most important issues of the day. In this session we cut through the AI hype to reveal how brands can use AI to transform media planning, programmatic buying and to be visible on generative search to improve business outcomes.

With thanks to our contributors:

Amanda Schifino // Snr Product Marketing Manager // Yext

Oliver Chapman // Chief Revenue Officer // Plug Media

James Duffy // Head of Client Services & Strategy // Plug Media

The new discovery revolution

Amanda Schifino from Yext was first on the agenda to discuss brand visibility in the age of AI.

AI search has arrived, and it has arrived fast. ChatGPT hit 100m users in just two months, and by 2026 25–50% of all search will be AI-driven. We’ve been talking about this across our Horizons webinars and Inspires events, but now it’s real: discovery is being rewired.

Traditional search (Google-as-we-know-it) made users do the work. They were presented with a list of relevant (and sometimes, not so relevant) options which helped them make an informed decision. AI search answers the question for them, shaping what audiences think as well as what they choose. For any organisation, this is seismic.

Don’t let your brand disappear! You must be visible to AI, not just your ultimate audiences. And we are going to tell you how to do it.

How to be visible to AI

LLMs analyse questions by breaking them apart, then they check websites and listings for objective facts, and platforms like reviews, discussions and cultural commentary for subjective insight. That means your organisation’s story, data, content, credibility, reviews and brand narrative must be structured so AI can understand and elevate you.

We heard from Yext how you need a strategy across the whole spectrum of where you might appear. This will differ depending on how much control you have on the various channels.

Full control: Your website

Partial control: Your social media and content ecosystem

Minimal control: News, commentary, reviews, forums, your cultural footprint

And it’s not a one-off.

It’s a measure >> refine >> measure >> refine process. Track sentiment. Track local performance. Track conversations. And don’t forget, AI remembers what people respond to. It learns taste. It anticipates preferences.

While the use of AI search is exploding, audience trust is still catching up with only 19% saying they trust AI search in a recent survey. This gap is an opportunity for brands with strong identity and mission to lead the way. Imagine what this could mean for your business.

AI-Powered Audience Insight

Programmatic buying has always promised efficiency. Now AI puts rocket boosters on audience understanding and how the different programmatic channels work together. Understanding the impact of programmatic out of home buying on display media or connected TV is now possible due to AI.

Instead of broad targeting or guesswork, AI can now surface the deep motivations behind engagement, that is attention, mood, behaviour and moments of openness. This is the kind of intelligence businesses have never had access to at scale.

Plug Media demo-ed their AVA AI planning tool to showcase this in real time. You give it your objectives and it:

• Builds personas
• Maps them to Amazon audience segments
• Generates a channel investment plan
• Layers in geography
• Outputs a working campaign strategy

And then, crucially, a strategist sharpens the plan. Humans at the beginning and end, AI doing the heavy lifting in between.

Campaign data feeds right back into the machine, elevating the next cycle.

This isn’t theory, it’s operational.

Turning business data into business power

The question is no longer “Do we have enough data?”, it’s “How do we unlock its power?”

For years, arts and culture organisations struggled with data scarcity. Now we’re dealing with the opposite problem, a tidal wave of data from audiences, platforms, search, sentiment, tourism, culture, behaviour and more. The challenge isn’t volume anymore. It’s meaning. AI alone is not enough, you need humans at the beginning (to frame the brief, add cultural nuance, define the mission) and humans at the end (to sharpen insight and validate decisions).

But in the middle? You can now have AI agents, not just assistants, building, learning, and accelerating cultural intelligence.

Our sister agency 10point6 showcased agents that handle:

• Brand health
• Search query and keyword analysis
• Responsive search and cultural discovery
• Meta analysis

AI synthesises vast data streams to generate insights, conclusions and recommendations, and it does it all before you get to your desk in the morning.

This means: reduced reporting burden, faster decisions, stronger creative strategy and knowledge that stays in the organisation.

And dashboards? They’re being reinvented. No more charts that simply tell you what happened, eg “CPC is up”. Altair’s agents can now tell you why and what to do about it. This is revolutionary for all businesses.

Mixed Media Modelling used to be something only global brands could afford, it was expensive, slow and limited. Now, Altair is democratising it for everyone.

Imagine being able to:

• Run dynamic cost-per-lead models to forecast the impact of spend changes
• Build scaling scenarios (from conservative +10% to aggressive +50%)
• Predict regional demand shifts
• Understand the audience value curve

This is business planning on steroids.

The power of synthetic audiences

A focus group on demand.

Finally came the showstopper: synthetic audiences. There’s a lot of excitement about synthetic audiences at the moment but how do they actually work and can they help you?

Altair has built robust synthetic personas from years of survey data and research.

Not guesses or feelings but data-derived, AI-shaped models that can be interrogated in real time.

During the demo, audiences watched a synthetic persona come to life, answering strategic questions instantly.

It showed exactly how brands can test messaging, channels, motivations and objections before spending a single pound in market.

This is more than insight, it’s confidence, speed and scalable intelligence for teams that need to move fast without risking their accuracy.

Those who were there already know how transformative this is.

Those who weren’t? They’ll want to see it for themselves because this is the competitive edge to end 2025 and head into 2026.