The machine-readable brand: Inside Ally Financial’s strategy to win AI search recommendations

“I’m not even sure the title chief marketing officer captures [my role] adequately anymore.”

Ally Financial CMO Andrea Brimmer says that matter-of-factly. At the Detroit-based digital financial services company, the executive who once would have been measured on advertising campaigns now oversees communications, user experience, creative services, customer acquisition, and an internal product innovation studio.

She spends as much time thinking about how large language models understand the firm as she does about television commercials, and she frames marketing’s contribution in terms any CFO would recognize: pricing power, long-term investment decisions, and revenue.

The evolution of Brimmer’s role reflects a larger shift taking place inside corporate America. Artificial intelligence is changing how consumers discover companies, collapsing what marketers long understood as the purchase funnel into a single query.

As large language models increasingly synthesize a company’s reputation into a recommendation, influence within the enterprise has increasingly shifted toward the executive responsible for understanding customers.

When Brimmer became Ally’s CMO in 2015, the department consisted of fewer than 40 people. The bank had no social media team, no CRM organization, no meaningful digital marketing capability, no sponsorship strategy, and, by her recollection, a single person working in digital marketing.

Brimmer spent the next decade assembling capabilities that reflect a different vision of marketing’s role, bringing communications under her remit, building a consumer research and product incubation team, expanding into user experience, and reorganizing the function around customer intelligence.

The urgency behind that transformation has accelerated with generative AI, which is changing how services and products are surfaced to consumers.

A consumer may now type, “I have 10,000 extra dollars. What should I do with it?” The question contains clear commercial intent without naming a financial institution or even a banking product. Companies now compete to become the recommendation that AI systems generate after evaluating thousands of signals about reputation, product quality, authority, and customer experience.

Brimmer cites data from AI search analytics platform Scrunch. It found that Ally was the most-mentioned bank in response to unbranded banking queries across major AI assistants every month from January 2025 through July 2026. Maintaining that position, Brimmer says, requires understanding how AI systems assemble corporate reputation.

“If somebody has a horrible customer experience, that’s going to hurt us in the LLMs,” she says. “If we repossess somebody’s car the wrong way, that’s going to hurt us in the LLMs. If we don’t show up as a good citizen in the world, that’s on us. If we don’t treat our employees with care and love, that will show up.”

Her point carries an implication that reaches well outside marketing. Customer service, communications, product or service quality, and employee experience all contribute to a company’s external reputation. The recommendation an AI delivers reflects the enterprise’s accumulated behavior rather than the output of any single campaign or department.

That reality has forced Ally to reorganize internally. Brimmer has assembled scrum teams focused on what she calls an “AI-first mindset,” feeding information into large language models, correcting misinformation, and studying intent signals that reveal what consumers are actually trying to accomplish.

Every customer interaction, product launch, employee review, earned media mention, and operational decision becomes another signal AI systems use to understand a company. Brand becomes machine-readable, and organizations with stronger reputations gain an advantage each time AI decides which companies to recommend. “Brand has never been more important than it is right now,” Brimmer says.

That perspective also explains why Brimmer frames marketing in financial rather than creative terms. “Please don’t think of marketing as an expense,” she says. “Think of marketing as a driver of revenue.”

Asked how she would defend her budget to Ally’s CFO, Brimmer points to pricing power. Customers who trust Ally’s brand, she argues, are less likely to make decisions based solely on price, giving the company greater flexibility in pricing its products.

Marketing’s influence doesn’t end there. Through Ally’s TM Studio, an internal innovation group that reports to marketing, customer research also shapes product development. Teams go directly to consumers to understand the problems they need solved, then design products around those insights.

Customer research found that people were saving simultaneously for vacations, weddings, college tuition, and future vehicle purchases, yet most banks still required separate accounts for each goal. TM Studio turned that insight into savings buckets, allowing customers to create multiple personalized savings goals within a single account.

For Brimmer, products like savings buckets illustrate how the marketing function has expanded beyond campaigns into customer intelligence and product strategy. It’s also why she believes the title “chief marketing officer” has yet to catch up with the scope of the job.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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