In 2025, generative AI was no longer a nice-to-have for brands; it became an essential tool in their business and marketing infrastructure.
Some folded the tech into their adtech and media stacks, while others used it as a creative engine, leaning on it to breathe new life into old campaigns. One company even rode the AI marketing momentum all the way to a blockbuster IPO. Several signed deals with major players, including OpenAI.
Along the way, these companies were forced to confront uncomfortable questions about the human cost of going all-in on automation. Many responded with familiar reassurances: that the tools would transform the work humans do, not eliminate it.
From Coca-Cola to Klarna, ADWEEK reflects on seven brands that turned AI innovation into tangible results in 2025.
Unilever’s AI twins cut costs
In March, Unilever’s (soon to depart) chief growth and marketing officer Esi Eggleston Bracey revealed that the company was integrating AI in its product shoots, saving time and money in the process. The CPG giant has been experimenting with NVIDIA’s Omniverse tech on brands including Dove, Vaseline, and TRESemmé.
The tool lets Unilever produce “digital twins,” or digital replicas of its products. Each digital twin contains all of the product’s variants, labels, packaging, and language formats within a single file.
It also allows the company to quickly insert AI-generated product images into messaging on TV and e-commerce, removing duplication to make the image production process twice as fast and half as expensive.
After a few months of experimentation, Unilever said at the end of Q1 that the tech had reduced content creation costs for TRESemmé Thailand by 87%, while generating content twice as fast and increasing purchase intent by 5%.
Across the board, Unilever is using more than 500 AI applications across its business, part of its Growth Action Plan 2030, designed to drive growth across its “superior brands” like Dove, Vaseline, Axe, and Hellmann’s. – Rebecca Stewart
Mattel laid the groundwork for an AI future
Mattel spent 2025 laying the groundwork for an AI-assisted future across its biggest franchises. The company behind Hot Wheels and Barbie signed a wide-ranging deal with OpenAI, giving it access to the company’s newest models and tools, including ChatGPT Enterprise.
The move is part of the toy giant’s broader push to use generative AI as a force multiplier across design and storytelling. Mattel executives have framed the OpenAI partnership as a way to unlock new types of play and rethink how the company develops toys, media, and consumer products.
“Each of our products and experiences is designed to inspire fans, entertain audiences, and enrich lives through play. AI has the power to expand on that mission and broaden the reach of our brands in new and exciting ways,” Josh Silverman, chief franchise officer at Mattel, said in a statement.
While the first product emerging from the OpenAI collaboration is expected later this year, Mattel hasn’t shared details beyond what it disclosed in a June blog post.
The company’s bet signals how legacy toy makers are leaning on AI to stay culturally relevant and move faster in a market where IP-driven franchises now compete with tech-powered entertainment. – Trishla Ostwal
Duolingo’s AI-first strategy prompted debate
In April, Duolingo unveiled an “AI-first” strategy shift that put machine learning at the center of how the language-learning app builds products, content, and ads.
One of its flagship debuts was Lily, an AI agent that helps users practice conversational skills through video calls. AI has also accelerated content production for the brand. In early 2025, Duolingo revealed the tech had delivered 7,500 pieces of content in 2024, up from just 425 in 2021.
Duolingo’s AI pivot didn’t land quietly. After CEO Luis von Ahn said in a May memo that new hires would only be approved if managers could prove AI couldn’t do the job, it prompted speculation about layoffs and a backlash on LinkedIn.
Some users threatened to cancel paid subscriptions, arguing that AI-generated lessons risked eroding trust in the platform. “If I wanted AI-generated language learning content, I’d go ask ChatGPT,” one commenter wrote on von Ahn’s LinkedIn announcement.
By September, Duolingo confirmed its AI investments hadn’t led to any full-time employees being laid off. Instead, AI is boosting human productivity, von Ahn said at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival.
Beyond content, Duolingo also brought its ad tech stack in-house with Duolingo Ads, giving brands tighter access to its characters and roughly 50 million daily users, ADWEEK previously reported.
Duolingo was unavailable for comment at the time of publication. – Trishla Ostwal
Klarna rode the AI wave to its IPO
In 2025, AI moved beyond a “party trick” for Klarna, its CMO David Sandstrom told ADWEEK. The tech now runs through marketing, operations, and customer support—helping the buy-now-pay-later firm generate roughly $1 million in revenue per employee.
The fintech firm made its IPO debut in September at nearly a $20 billion valuation and has built a U.S. customer base of 111 million across roughly 790,000 merchants. Over the 12 months ending June 30, Klarna handled $112 billion in transactions. AI has helped cut costs: marketing spend fell 12% while agency reliance dropped, and AI-driven content production boosted asset output by 600%.
Its AI assistant now performs tasks equivalent to 800 full-time agents, freeing employees for higher-value work and letting the company reinvest a $10 million “efficiency dividend” into growth and brand initiatives, a company spokesperson told ADWEEK.
Looking to 2026, Klarna plans to scale AI further to automate repetitive tasks while keeping humans central to complex interactions, and expand marketing across 26 markets and more than 35 languages, the spokesperson added. – Trishla Ostwal
CaliBBQ cooked up a creative case for AI
On Father’s Day, California barbecue chain CaliBBQ made a creative case for AI when it switched its usual phone operators for an AI agent named Shawn.
The brand trained an LLM to sound like owner Shawn Walchef. Powered by AI startup Palona, the agent handled roughly 150 calls and helped drive an 18% sales increase over 2024, hitting about $26,000 across 268 orders. Walk-in takeout orders jumped 92% year-over-year.
Earlier metrics from Thanksgiving this year showed similar gains: net sales rose 7% to $10,444, voided orders dropped 45%, and phone orders handled by the AI increased 17%, according to data shared by the chain.
Looking to 2026, CaliBBQ plans to expand AI support for catering and explore Palona Vision, a multimodal system that combines vision, voice, text, and data into a single “brain,” the brand told ADWEEK.
The technology can answer calls, flag long lines, or automate catering orders, all from one AI system. The goal is to maintain operational consistency across both front- and back-of-house while keeping staff focused on serving guests. – Trishla Ostwal
General Motors popped the hood on the tech
115-year-old General Motors popped the hood on its AI marketing transformation in 2025.
That shift was led by chief transformation officer, Molly Peck, and powered by Metropolis, GM’s in-house AI platform trained on its own brands, products, and tone.
The tool was built in partnership with S4’s Monks, which helped develop a brand-compliant database that GM’s team could query to quickly generate and source images and video to meet a growing and voracious demand for online content.
Through a self-service portal, GM’s marketing teams can prompt Metropolis to “produce high resolution, contextually precise images in both still and in video…in the matter of moments,” Deborah Heslip, global chief client officer at Monks, told ADWEEK in October.
GM stressed its embrace of AI does not come at the expense of human creativity. As part of its 2024 revamp, it hired 72andSunny and Anomaly as creative AORs on Cadillac and Chevrolet, respectively. These agencies provide brand strategy and platforms that are then scaled using AI. – Rebecca Stewart
Intuit became AI-first from the inside out
In the fall, Intuit’s marketing boss Thomas Ranese told ADWEEK that 83% of its 18,200 employees now use AI at work, marking a 60% jump in adoption over the past nine months.
The TurboTax owner’s marketing team is doubling down on generative AI, powered by a new proprietary tool called Marketing Studio, which can create an entire campaign–from brief to creative to CRM strategy–in under an hour.
Work developed by Marketing Studio has already boosted conversions by about 10%. Elsewhere, gen AI has cut content planning time by 90% for Intuit’s search teams by identifying keyword gaps. It’s also helping Intuit’s social performance team drive a 38% lift in click-through rates.
“We’re at a tipping point culturally now for the tech,” former Google and Uber exec Ranese told ADWEEK in October. “Now we’re moving fast to figure out how we embed it.”
In July 2024, before Ranese joined as CMO, Intuit laid off around 10% of its workforce, or 1,800 employees, to open up budgets for gen AI projects. However, it pledged to hire another 1,800 people in engineering, product, and customer-facing roles such as sales and marketing. – Rebecca Stewart
Coca-Cola gave its AI trucks another whirl
In December, Coca-Cola again rang in the holidays with an AI-powered take on one of advertising’s most enduring seasonal traditions. Created by WPP Open X, led by VML, and supported by EssenceMediacom, Ogilvy, and Burson, “Refresh Your Holidays” blended machine learning and human craft to reimagine the soda giant’s three-decade-old “The Holidays Are Coming” formula.
The ad features a hyper-real aesthetic built from over 70,000 video clips, giving the film a cinematic sheen that merges human craft with machine capability.
Coca-Cola’s holiday work has not been without controversy. 2024’s AI-powered campaign drew debate inside the industry and beyond. Despite this, the business leaned even further into the tech in 2025.
Pratik Thakar, The Coca-Cola Company’s global vp and head of generative AI, said research firm Kantar ranked Coca-Cola’s AI ad as the top-performing Christmas campaign globally last year across all categories—a result that encouraged the company to continue experimenting with generative tools.
Coca-Cola is also toying with AI through more than a dozen incubators with major tech companies, gaining early access to models to test how the technology can drive creativity and efficiency, Thakar said. Beyond marketing, this includes applying AI to research and development, supply chain, and knowledge management—but without creating a separate AI department. – Rebecca Stewart
Disney signed a $1 billion deal with OpenAI
Disney announced in December that it will acquire a $1 billion stake in OpenAI and license its characters for Sora, the company’s short-form video platform launched in September.
As part of the three-year deal, some videos made with Sora will appear on Disney+, the companies said. Sora and ChatGPT Images are set to start producing fan-inspired videos featuring Disney’s licensed characters in early 2026. Disney said it will also team up with OpenAI to create “new products, tools, and experiences” and “deploy” ChatGPT into its workforce.
The first big AI deal out of Hollywood stops short of using actors’ voices or likenesses—central points of ire in the recent actors and writers strikes—but signals that studios may be shifting from blocking AI startups to partnering with them.
Disney CEO Bob Iger framed the move as a cautious embrace of the technology. “The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI, we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling,” he said in a statement. –Trishla Ostwal
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