AI Heroes Live From Cannes: Dawn Cummins - Episode 11

AI Heroes: Dawn Cummins on Organisational Clarity, AI-Driven Productivity & the Power of Transparent Insights
🎙️ Live from Cannes – AI Heroes Live

In this episode of AI Heroes Live, recorded at Insights Lighthouse during the Cannes Lions Festival, we sit down with Dawn Cummins, former Unilever and Mars Wrigley insights leader and now a strategic consultant, to unpack how AI is reshaping organisational design, media analytics, and stakeholder alignment.

Dawn shares how she’s embraced AI both in client-side leadership roles and as a consultant—harnessing tools like intelligent scheduling, image recognition, and NLP to boost productivity, clarify stakeholder needs, and drive high-impact insight strategies across global teams.

We also dive into:

• How AI-powered productivity tools like Motion are reshaping the way consultants and teams operate

• The challenge of algorithmic competition within organisations—and why transparency is key

• A real-world case study of implementing "addressable audiences" at Mars Wrigley

• Why empathy and cross-functional collaboration are non-negotiable for landing complex analytics projects

• How to humanise the "black box" of AI and build trust in model-driven decision-making

• The danger of organisational silos—and how AI may be accelerating rather than solving this issue

If you’re building, scaling, or transforming insights and analytics teams, or navigating the complexity of deploying AI across functions, this episode delivers raw honesty, practical strategies, and deep foresight from one of the industry’s most candid voices.

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