Horizon Media’s Katie Comerford: Organizational Change Is the Main Barrier to AI Adoption
CANNES, France — Agencies and brands have access to sophisticated AI tools, but getting employees to incorporate them into daily workflows presents a harder challenge than any technology deployment — one that requires hands-on demonstration rather than simply granting access.
“There’s a hunger for discoverability. There’s a lot of curiosity. We’ve given our teams access to multiple different AI tools, but that step change to really making it a day-to-day component of what you’re doing — that’s the tricky part,” Katie Comerford, president, Horizon Commerce and Client Transformation at Horizon Media, told Beet.TV editorial director Lisa Granatstein at Cannes Lions. “You’ve got like 80% of the group that really needs a little bit more handholding.”
This organizational reality shapes how Horizon approaches AI adoption internally and with clients, emphasizing demonstration and hands-on experimentation over tool access alone.
Retail and national media budgets converge
Horizon helps clients consolidate historically separate retail and national media strategies into unified budget frameworks that drive growth across both channels rather than managing competing initiatives.
“What we’ve been trying to do is tell a consolidation story of not having two separate budgets and two separate initiatives, but really marrying it together,” Comerford said. “We can’t control where customers shop. So making sure that both sides of the house are elevating and driving client growth.”
This consolidation becomes critical as consumers move fluidly between retail and national media touchpoints without regard for internal budget structures.
Agentic commerce demands discoverability investment
Emerging agentic commerce platforms require brands to optimize content specifically for AI discovery engines that surface product recommendations, reviews, and purchase suggestions through conversational interfaces.
“For us, it’s really starting with discoverability. Making sure that we’re showing up in the discovery engines where they’re looking for reviews or where should I travel, what should I buy, what’s the best fan from a [product design/tech company] SharkNinja perspective,” Comerford said. “We’re optimizing the content that’s getting picked up by the agents and helping them come to the forefront.”
Speed and scale require creative guardrails
AI-powered content creation at scale demands strong creative briefs and quality controls to prevent brand messaging from losing resonance and authenticity across expanded content volumes.
“You still want to be meaningful. You can’t have AI slop everywhere. We do need the message to be resonating and we need to make sure it resonates with the right audience,” Comerford said. “We’re still looking at the data first, finding the right people, but we’re now doing it at a much broader scale and more effectively and more efficiently.”
Human judgment powers AI strategy
Despite AI’s expanding capabilities, human understanding of consumer psychology, cultural context, and macro-micro ecosystem shifts remain irreplaceable for strategic decision-making that technology cannot reliably predict.
“There’s still this element of strategy. There’s understanding what’s going on in our ecosystem from both macro and micro things shifting that humans are going to understand how a consumer thinks and how they feel and what’s impacting them,” Comerford said. “That’s not something that I think is predictable a lot of times in human behavior. Having that core — we’re all still customers, we’re all still consumers — that human element is still going to be very, very important.”
You’re watching “From Discovery to Purchase: AI’s New Role in Retail,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Best Buy Ads. For more videos from this series, visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
CANNES, France — Agencies and brands have access to sophisticated AI tools, but getting employees to incorporate them into daily workflows presents a harder challenge than any technology deployment — one that requires hands-on demonstration rather than simply granting access.
“There’s a hunger for discoverability. There’s a lot of curiosity. We’ve given our teams access to multiple different AI tools, but that step change to really making it a day-to-day component of what you’re doing — that’s the tricky part,” Katie Comerford, president, Horizon Commerce and Client Transformation at Horizon Media, told Beet.TV editorial director Lisa Granatstein at Cannes Lions. “You’ve got like 80% of the group that really needs a little bit more handholding.”
This organizational reality shapes how Horizon approaches AI adoption internally and with clients, emphasizing demonstration and hands-on experimentation over tool access alone.
Retail and national media budgets converge
Horizon helps clients consolidate historically separate retail and national media strategies into unified budget frameworks that drive growth across both channels rather than managing competing initiatives.
“What we’ve been trying to do is tell a consolidation story of not having two separate budgets and two separate initiatives, but really marrying it together,” Comerford said. “We can’t control where customers shop. So making sure that both sides of the house are elevating and driving client growth.”
This consolidation becomes critical as consumers move fluidly between retail and national media touchpoints without regard for internal budget structures.
Agentic commerce demands discoverability investment
Emerging agentic commerce platforms require brands to optimize content specifically for AI discovery engines that surface product recommendations, reviews, and purchase suggestions through conversational interfaces.
“For us, it’s really starting with discoverability. Making sure that we’re showing up in the discovery engines where they’re looking for reviews or where should I travel, what should I buy, what’s the best fan from a [product design/tech company] SharkNinja perspective,” Comerford said. “We’re optimizing the content that’s getting picked up by the agents and helping them come to the forefront.”
Speed and scale require creative guardrails
AI-powered content creation at scale demands strong creative briefs and quality controls to prevent brand messaging from losing resonance and authenticity across expanded content volumes.
“You still want to be meaningful. You can’t have AI slop everywhere. We do need the message to be resonating and we need to make sure it resonates with the right audience,” Comerford said. “We’re still looking at the data first, finding the right people, but we’re now doing it at a much broader scale and more effectively and more efficiently.”
Human judgment powers AI strategy
Despite AI’s expanding capabilities, human understanding of consumer psychology, cultural context, and macro-micro ecosystem shifts remain irreplaceable for strategic decision-making that technology cannot reliably predict.
“There’s still this element of strategy. There’s understanding what’s going on in our ecosystem from both macro and micro things shifting that humans are going to understand how a consumer thinks and how they feel and what’s impacting them,” Comerford said. “That’s not something that I think is predictable a lot of times in human behavior. Having that core — we’re all still customers, we’re all still consumers — that human element is still going to be very, very important.”
You’re watching “From Discovery to Purchase: AI’s New Role in Retail,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Best Buy Ads. For more videos from this series, visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
