- As AI advances, business leaders can use it to help their brand show up more human.
- AI handles marketing's "how," freeing humans to focus on the "why."
- Snapchat's human-first AI helps marketers engage audiences more personally at scale.
As historic levels of investment fuel AI's ongoing evolution, merely adopting the technology is just table stakes for business. The real differentiator is a clear strategic vision of the technology's power to transform work: to amplify the uniquely human skills — judgment, creativity, and relationships — that create lasting value. For Shobha Diwakar, vice president of ads product and engineering at Snap Inc., that's where the technology's greatest potential lies.
"I think the displacement narrative misreads what the technology is good at," Diwakar says, referring to a familiar framing in which AI fills human roles. After several years building AI systems at Google and now Snapchat, she sees the technology as exceptionally good at automating content creation, personalization, segmentation, and data analysis. "What it cannot supply is judgment, taste, and the human relationships that make a brand worth paying attention to."
Shobha says that because AI "will expand what you can do, but really doesn't tell you what is worth doing," the technology actually makes the human role more central. A truly strategic vision of AI use invites corporate leaders to imagine how their business could look different with workers freed to focus on making meaningful connections with today's customers at a scale previously unreachable. It comes down to a core question: How does AI deliver value by enhancing what humans do best?
The human at the heart of value
Snapchat's application of AI offers practical solutions for marketers. The platform's ecosystem is vast, with over 950 million monthly active users — an audience size that represents a significant opportunity for brands. For marketers looking to distill actionable insights at this scale to most effectively engage target audiences, it can also feel daunting. That's an example of the kind of challenge for which AI is well-suited.
Snapchat is empowering advertisers with a suite of new AI innovations across the entire marketing workflow, all designed to help them "find, create, engage, and optimize," Shobha says. The recently launched Snap Smart Assistant, for example, enables marketers to describe campaign objectives in plain language and receive audience insights and targeted campaign recommendations from the AI assistant.
Dynamic Product Ads infer shopping intent from Snapchatters' actions and find products similar to those they've shown an interest in. They also learn from what Shobha calls broader shopping patterns: "what products people browse together, which shoppers behave alike, and what similar audiences engage with." The value, as Shobha says, is that AI will "handle all the mechanics so you can focus on the message and focus on the relationship with Snapchatters."
The relationship between marketers and Snapchatters is key to Snapchat's "Human-first, AI-Enabled" philosophy. The company's aim isn't to displace human connection — it's to enhance it, by helping advertisers engage with the community in a relevant, natural, and effective way. The technology may be new, but it's a tool for understanding customers' shopping preferences and delivering accordingly.
How should marketers strategize for the future of AI?
Increasingly, that means understanding customers' use of AI interfaces as a trusted resource in shopping decisions: A Deloitte survey conducted during the 2025 holiday season found that 56% of U.S. consumers planned to use AI to find bargains and 47% planned to use it to summarize product reviews. If the rapid adoption is surprising, consider that for over a decade now, consumers have been able to ask brands questions on social media — about product availability, service, and more — and receive individualized responses.
"Consumers are increasingly expecting to interact with a brand the way they interact with a friend," Shobha says. "They want to ask a question, they want to get a real answer, they want to compare options, and then move forward all inside a single conversation. Snapchat is unusually well-positioned to see this because the product was built for connection and conversation in the first place." AI Sponsored Snaps extend this trend by enabling brands' AI representatives to reach Snapchatters in Chat and answer questions about products in real time.
It's an example of how Snapchat's investments in AI innovations lead to what Shobha called smarter media: "better targeting, bidding, delivery and creative optimization with less manual work." Thatfrees marketers to focus on creating genuine connections with customers.
This human-first, AI-enhanced approach offers more than just practical solutions for today's campaigns — it's a North Star that can keep marketers focused on what matters most, even as models continue to evolve. Too often, Shobha says, teams anxious to prove they're AI native chase "what is new, and then they design use cases to justify the new model coming up. That's backward." Instead, she recommended that they should start with their goals, outline the workflow, and then choose the model that best delivers.
In other words, a truly strategic vision to transform work with AI starts with clarity on its use: "Letting AI handle the how, so that marketers can focus on the what and why of human connection."
Thissponsored post was created by BI Studios with Snapchat.
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