By Betsy Vereckey 

“Marketing is now technology, and it was not that way when I started 25 years ago,” recalls Heather Cole T’03, a senior vice president at American Express. Cole estimates there’s at least 10,000 different “MarTech” solutions in the market. “And it just continues to grow,” she says.

As a psychology undergrad with a fascination with human behavior, Cole arrived at Tuck wanting a well-rounded, fundamental experience that would teach her the business side of marketing. She began working at Amex through Tuck’s summer internship program and has been at the company for 20 years.

Personalization has become a critical focus area for marketers—whether that means personalizing the messaging, the offers and benefits available, the copy and images, or even being able to anticipate what the next best message is to a given a customer based on where they are in their relationship journey with a given brand.

Cole says that generative AI can take personalization to the next level by leveraging machine learning to create new content, from text to images and even audio/video, based on specific input and parameters. Like many companies, Amex is beginning to look at the future role of generative AI in powering marketing content development.

“Generative AI is really going to change the landscape of how we create content,” Cole says. “The more agile we can be in creating more personalized content, the better we can serve our customers, even iterating on the content in real time as customers engage with us.”

Cole also spends her time examining how technology can improve the processes that power Amex’s marketing strategies, an area that she says has “just exploded” in terms of streamlining what used to be “highly manual processes.” For example, the process of creating an email was once so manual and cumbersome that it could take months to get a single email out. But Cole says that now it’s possible to turn emails around in days versus weeks, thanks to a highly detailed automation process and tech stack.

Cole continues to be inspired by the pace of change in the industry, though she acknowledges it can be challenging to stay on top of trends. That’s why having “a business school network is so powerful,” because you can bounce ideas off your peers and learn how MarTech solutions are being leveraged in other industries.

“There are constant new frontiers as new technology is introduced,” Cole says. “We all are trying to figure it out and optimize the technology available to unlock revenue growth for the business. It’s constant re-envisioning and re-imagining of transformation roadmaps. It’s an exciting time to be in MarTech.”

This story originally appeared in print in the summer 2023 issue of Tuck Today magazine.