Digital transformation is hard enough for financial institutions 150 years ago.
However, doing it in the age of generative AI – creativity, compliance and speed are all on the line – is a completely different level of pressure.
Speaking to Tuesday in a one-on-one interview at Sydney’s Adobe Summit, Prudential Financial’s Brandget Esposito provided an internal scoop for the company’s own AI journey.
“Marketers are under great pressure to not only create more, but also to achieve that with faster deadlines,” Esposito said. “We had to understand how to do more with less and still maintain it with that high quality.”
Technology wasn’t the only answer for Prudential. It was a reinvention of the process – iteratively decomposed and reconstructed workflows, with brand governance and ethical guardrails at the core.
“We created a small AI Ethics Council that we decided on, and this is what we think is OK. This is something we don’t,” Esposito said.
“This is where we move faster. This is where we need more legal time. The law is part of the council, making it easier to make decisions quickly. There are so many gray areas in AI.”
In order to beat internal stakeholders, especially in high compliance environments, the team began with “low-end, low-risk” AI use cases.
We avoided these customer data, but achieved visible results. Automate boring creative production tasks, speed up buy-in cycles, and free human bandwidth for bigger strategic ideas.
“For us, AI is taking up low funnel work that we don’t want to do. We run campaigns in all different sizes and formats,” Esposito said. “It helps you draft your first draft 70% faster, both in writing and image generation. That’s a big deal for creatives.
However, speed wasn’t the only award. Creative quality – and brand trust – remained unnegotiable. It meant constant repetition.
“It’s not a ‘set and forget’ approach,” Esposito said. “AI changes very quickly. We literally need to keep improving our processes every day. If something goes well, what will it be?
One of Prudential’s boldest AI initiatives is Flash Forward. This is a multisensory experience that aged users’ photos, imagine future retirement stories generated by AI and fueled by personal prompts.
The platform, launched more than a year ago, faced an immediate backlash.
“Prudential wanted to break the boundaries of AI bias with conscious inclusion.”
Instead of pulling the tool, Prudential doubled it by fixing it. A mitigation layer has been introduced. A human reviewer intervened. The models were retrained each month.
To achieve this, the Flash Forward team took three approaches: We used the AI vision model to generate a more subtle and comprehensive text prompt. The custom iPad app allowed the brand ambassador to act as a human loop moderator, allowing it to review or play the output in real time. The built-in disclaimer also transparently acknowledged AI limitations and potential bias.
“We’ve started moderated 85% of our output. Now we’re down to 15%,” she said. “We’re still learning that. But we’ve invested time and money to get it right — because that’s how you build trust.”
The next evolution? Generated video. “We’re experimenting with people moving themselves and making them talk in the future,” she said. “It may surprise people, but it may be the most powerful storytelling we’ve ever done.”
To prepare the organization, Prudential invests in creativity across the board, including training technical and financial staff in the fundamentals of storytelling.
“Storytelling is a very important tool that everyone has to head up,” Esposito said.
“AI can hallucinate stories, but it often lacks empathy. People need to know what makes a good story and how to improve it.”
One campaign has almost completely derailed. The company’s “Beta Baby” initiative – offering newborn investment accounts from day one – faced a major delay when the website components reached technical limits.
“We were pushing even more than the components were built,” Esposito said.
“It took three months to rebuild, so instead, we broke down the process, found a new system and found a way to use what we had. We launched it on time. The campaign showed how important it is to be flexible and supportive.”
The collaboration now spans creative, maltech and strategy. And it’s not just operational, it’s cultural.
“It takes a lot of warm embrace to break a silo,” joked Esposito. “It’s about learning each other’s language and losing ego. We’re all swimming in the same pool.
Even if there were six major events under her belt, which she called “Self-service July,” Esposito is already looking ahead. Tools like Adobe Express and Firefly are reconstructing the way brands can move faster, but the generated videos are on the horizon.
“I don’t think the biggest risk is that AI is too far,” she said. “It means that the brand is moving too slowly. If you’re not in a conversation, there’s no answer. If you don’t have an answer, you’re not relevant.”
