By Stefanie Beach, Founder & CEO, The Marketeer Group
Every conversation about women and AI starts in the same place. The pipeline gap. The bias in the training data. The under-representation in the rooms where the models get built. All real. All documented. And, by 2026, exhausted.
But the senior women in marketing, brand, and adtech reading this are not the subject of the responsible AI story. We are the actors in it. We sign the vendor contracts. We approve the tools that touch millions of customers. We decide which agencies get the work and which platforms get the spend. In the UK, women now make up more than 40% of agency C-suite roles (IPA Agency Census 2025), and women lead 50% of product roles at IAB Tech Lab, where the technical standards behind every programmatic transaction are written. We are some of the most leveraged people in this industry when it comes to how AI actually shows up in the world. It is time to come up with a concrete framework and tangible next steps to bring about change.
Ahead of our deep-dive conversation at Cannes, I am sharing the clear steps we will be exploring on what adtech women leaders can do to lead AI from the front and ensure we build something that benefits everyone. We are not using that leverage. And the cost of not using it is going to compound fast.
The conversation we keep having is the wrong one
The “women and AI” discourse has been stuck on the wake-up-call beat for three years. Every panel, every op-ed, every keynote runs roughly the same script: there is a problem, here is the data, we need to do better.
The women in the audience already know there is a problem. They have watched their personalisation engines miss half the customer base. They have caught bias in AI outputs their male counterparts missed. The IMD, Microsoft and EqualVoice Mind the Gap research confirms the scale: GenAI systems associate women with terms like “home,” “family,” and “children” four times more frequently than men, while male-coded names are linked to “career” and “executive.” When EqualVoice tested image generators with the prompt “CEO giving a speech,” the output was male 100% of the time.
The question is not awareness. It is authority. And specifically, whether the women who already have authority are willing to use it on this.
Procurement is the lever no one is pulling
Here is what is actually moving faster than the policy conversation: spend.
The single highest-leverage action available to a senior brand leader right now is not advocacy. It is procurement. Bias auditing as a contract requirement. Model cards as a vendor disclosure. Renewal contingent on annual re-testing. Refusal to work with platforms that cannot show their work.
This is not theoretical. A handful of CMOs are already doing it quietly, and the vendors are responding faster than they have responded to any regulatory framework or industry letter. The governance gap is what makes the lever so powerful: Optro’s AI oversight research found that 58% of leaders believe their governance controls are keeping pace with AI adoption, but only 18% have active mitigation covering most or all identified risks. Vendor assurances are filling a gap that procurement clauses could close in a quarter.
Vendors respond to revenue pressure on a different timeline than they respond to op-eds. The brands that lead on this in the next 18 months will define the standard for everyone else. The ones that do not will be the case studies in the bias lawsuits and FTC actions coming down the pipe.
The agentic shift is the deadline
The generative AI conversation we have been having is about to be obsolete. Agentic AI does not write copy a human reviews. It makes decisions a human does not see. Audience selection. Budget reallocation. Creative approval. Targeting calls.
When bias lives in a generative output, someone catches it. When bias lives in an agentic decision, it becomes the strategy.
The pace is the part that should worry every senior leader reading this. Per the 2026 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey, only 17% of organisations have deployed AI agents to date, yet more than 60% expect to within the next two years, the most aggressive adoption curve of any emerging technology Gartner has measured. And Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report found that only 21% of enterprises have mature governance in place to manage the risks of agentic AI.
The governance frameworks that will determine how AI agents make decisions on behalf of brands are being written right now, in 2026, at almost every major company. The women in the room when those frameworks get set will shape them for a decade. The ones who are not in the room will be managing the consequences.
Stop posting about responsible AI. Operationalise it.
The gap between what brands say about responsible AI on LinkedIn and what they have actually built into their workflows is where the exposure lives. Regulatory, reputational, commercial.
A March 2026 Economist Impact study of 639 executives found that while 88% of executives view AI as a source of competitive advantage, only 8% have enforceable responsible AI frameworks in place. In small firms, that figure drops to 2%. The other 92% are mostly relying on vendor assurances. Vendor assurances are not governance.
If responsible AI is in your company values, it should be in three other places: vendor contracts, performance reviews for anyone deploying AI, and incident response plans. If it is not in those three places, it is marketing.
Lead from the front
None of this requires waiting. Not for a policy mandate. Not for a new study. Not for permission.
It requires the women in this industry who already have authority to spend it on the problem the discourse keeps describing without solving. Procurement clauses. Governance seats. Hiring decisions. Public fluency.
The next decade of AI is being built right now, in decisions happening this quarter inside companies whose leaders are reading this piece. The question is not whether we have a role in shaping it. It is whether we are going to use the one we already have.
That is the conversation we are hosting at Cannes Lions on 24 June. The women in that room are already the AI power users in this industry. The work now is leading from the front.
