Matt Oakley on AI, Data Strategy, and Innovation at Hotwire Global

1. What challenges have you faced in integrating AI tools into your existing marketing infrastructure?

Great question – and I think the honest answer is many!

When we’re looking at integrating new AI tools into our tech stack, we’re ultimately considering three factors when evaluating potential value and chances for success: data quality and integrity, scalability and adoption potential, and privacy and compliance.

What we have found is that if one of these factors is missing, the rate of success of integrating a new AI tool into the business declines significantly.

And this isn’t just a technical consideration, organizational readiness is just as important. Ensuring the workforce has had the training and has the skills required to adopt new AI tools is critical, and more important than simply introducing new tools.

This is something that we are hyper-focused on, and we’ve set clear goals to upskill our workforce to be AI ready and enabled globally by the middle of 2026.

2. What factors influence your decision to adopt AI-powered tools for search discovery optimization?

Firstly, we know how people research has already changed and that this change is only going to continue at a rapid pace.

This is being driven of course by user adoption and changes in user preferences for search (it’s said that up to 40% of more complex queries are now being done in AI answer engines) – but also in the way AI answer engines work.

We are moving from a world of traditional search engines which are based on lexical search methodologies (exact matches of keywords and phrases) to the AI answer engines which use semantic search to present answers back to users (return results based on the meaning and context behind a query).

This change means that the types of content that are being used to pull information from is changing, as are the sources that are being cited when presenting information back to users. And this would be a big shift for our clients in how their target audiences would discover information about them, their competitors and their industry.

Therefore, we developed our own proprietary agentic AI solution, Hotwire Spark, that is designed to reflect user and target audience behavior in AI answer engines and help us identify the key sources of information and content that is being recommended. The insights and recommendations we provide to our clients from the Hotwire Spark data enables them to optimize content for improved discoverability in AI search but also ensure clear and consistent messaging across channels to get in front of target audiences who are searching for information on solutions and topics related to their brand.

3. What investments are planned to further integrate AI into your marketing operations over the next 1-3 years?

We have recently just announced the launch of our AI Lab, which is a team focused on ensuring Hotwire is AI-enabled and continuously innovating.

This means developing new AI-enabled tools and solutions for our team such as Hotwire Spark but also looking at how we can integrate new third-party tools into our infrastructure to help us continue to deliver high-quality work for our clients. It’s not just one new tool, but many—for instance, along with Hotwire Spark we also launched Hotwire Ignite, an AI-enabled solution that analyses multiple streams of first and third-party data for ongoing account prioritization and optimized go-to market strategies-as well as ensuring our teams have a tech and AI forward mindset to take advantage of these tools.

Our main objective will be to deliver sharper insights faster for clients across the whole lifecycle of campaigns from strategy and planning, creative concepting, through to delivering measurement and reporting solutions to help demonstrate the value of marketing and communications work.

4. How does your organization ensure data privacy and compliance when utilizing AI-driven marketing tools?

Everything that we do regarding tools, whether it be AI-driven or other tools that we are looking to bring into our tech stack, we do so in partnership with our IT and legal team to ensure we are compliant and privacy-first in our decision making.

All our AI practices and tool usage is in adherence to our AI governance policy that has been developed by our parent organization, Enero Group, and which we have adopted across our agency.

5. What role do you foresee AI playing in the future of your organization's marketing and communications strategy?

It is already integral, and that influence is only set to continue to grow over the next few years.

One of our key goals as a business is to be a tech-forward consultancy, and central to the success in achieving this goal is that we invest in the best technologies – whether that be the development of proprietary solutions or third-party tools - and in upskilling our workforce to confidently utilize new tools and solutions for our clients and to enhance our own business.

We have encouraged all our workforce to embrace AI and look for ways to responsibly integrate this into daily workflows and processes. As a leadership team, we know that if we don’t integrate and utilize AI we will be at a competitive disadvantage, and therefore it is central to our current and future planning.

6. How does your leadership team stay informed about emerging AI technologies relevant to marketing?

With how quickly things are developing and evolving, it can be so easy to become overwhelmed!

Internally, would say it’s a mix of reading news, forums, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, listening to podcasts, having daily digests curated by AI … it’s certainly a challenge! But we have a global group of AI champions who are active in consuming this information and testing new technologies, and alongside our Analytics and AI leadership team (Anol Bhattacharya, Laura Macdonald and I) are sharing updates across internal Slack channels to help us stay as up-to date as possible. We also run our own research, for example we have an upcoming Frontier Tech report which examines the disconnect between how business leaders perceive impact of AI and how employees and the wider public feel about it.

And then we also ensure we’re engaging with other experts. For example, we work with think tank House of Beautiful Business to engage with their community, as well as running a series of reports and salon events (including at Davos) to explore what other leaders are addressing. We don’t just participate but are taking active leadership roles – for example, I’m on the board of AMEC where how AI is impacting how companies can more effectively measure comms programs is unsurprisingly a hot topic.