About the Centre
The Australian Centre for AI in Marketing is an independent body that researches, teaches and convenes. It grew out of AIR Consulting client work, and it was deliberately established apart from it.
Our mission
To support Australian marketers through the shift to artificial intelligence with independent research, practical education and a standard of responsible practice the industry sets for itself.
How it started
The Centre began as a recurring conversation rather than a plan. Inside AIR Consulting, the same question kept arriving from clients in different industries, at different sizes, with different budgets, and it was rarely the question the vendor demonstration had prepared them for. It was not "which tool should we buy". It was "how do we know whether any of this is working, and who in my team is supposed to decide that".
Those conversations had a shape. A marketing leader had been handed a mandate and a deadline. Their team was already stretched. The material available to them was written by companies selling something, or by commentators abstracted far enough from the work that the advice could not be acted on. There was no neutral place to take the question, and no shared standard against which two organisations could compare what they were doing.
It became clear that answering this one client at a time was the wrong shape for the problem. What the field needed was not more consulting hours. It needed a body that could hold the knowledge in public: teach it, publish it, and be accountable for it, without a commercial interest in the answer.
The Australian Centre for AI in Marketing was established to be that body. It is deliberately independent of the consultancy it came from and of every vendor in the category. It runs education, publishes research and frameworks openly, and convenes practitioners in rooms where they can be honest with each other about what has and has not worked.
The support the industry needs through this change is not enthusiasm. There is plenty of that. It is a clear account of what these systems do, an honest account of what they cost, a standard of practice worth defending, and colleagues who will tell you the truth about a decision before you make it.
The path here
Four steps, each of which narrowed what the Centre would be and what it would refuse to become.
The same problem arrives repeatedly in AIR Consulting client work: marketing leaders with a mandate, a deadline, and no neutral source to reason with.
A judgement that the answer belongs in public rather than in billable hours, and that it needs a body independent of the consultancy to hold it.
The Centre is constituted as an independent body with its own board, a published position on vendor money, and a founding commitment to open knowledge.
Four teaching tracks, an open research and frameworks library, a national events calendar, and a membership electing its own practitioner directors.
What we hold to
Values are only worth publishing if they rule something out. Each of these closes off a decision that would otherwise be available to us.
The Centre takes no vendor money for editorial content, speaking slots or recommendations. Partners can underwrite public access programs; they cannot buy a platform or a favourable word. This closes revenue lines that would otherwise be open to us, and that is the point: an assessment that is for sale is not an assessment.
The people setting the agenda are the people doing the work. Practitioner seats on the board are elected by members. Programs are shaped by an annual consultation of the membership rather than by what is easiest to fill or most fashionable to teach.
We would rather say we do not know than say something confident and thin. Where the field has genuine evidence, we teach it. Where it has only anecdote, we say so plainly and describe how a team could find out for itself.
Everything the Centre produces is judged against whether a practitioner can apply it in their own organisation within a week. Frameworks are written to be adapted. Policies are written to be signed. Research that cannot survive contact with a real marketing team has not finished.
Research, frameworks and teaching material are published without a form in front of them. Members fund the depth, the cohorts and the room. The knowledge itself belongs to the field, including the parts of the field that cannot afford to join.
Setting expectations for responsible practice means holding ourselves to them first, in our own publishing, our own use of these tools and our own disclosure. A body that teaches governance and does not practise it has taught nothing.
Board and governance
The Centre publishes how it is governed rather than a gallery of headshots. These are the seats, what each is responsible for, and who holds the right to fill them.
Appointed at establishment from the AIR Consulting practice that the Centre grew out of. They carry responsibility for the Centre’s purpose and its separation from any commercial interest, including that of the consultancy itself.
Elected by the membership for two-year terms, drawn from in-house marketing teams and agencies. At least one seat is reserved for a practitioner working outside New South Wales and Victoria, and at least one for a team of fewer than ten people.
Held by a researcher or educator working on marketing, data or applied artificial intelligence at an Australian institution. The seat exists to keep the Centre’s teaching connected to research and its research connected to practice.
A seat with a specific brief: to challenge the Centre’s own positions on disclosure, consent, personalisation limits and synthetic likeness, and to raise concerns about our published guidance before it reaches the field.
If you work in an Australian marketing team or agency and you want a hand in what the Centre works on next, membership carries a vote and the right to stand. The reserved seats for practitioners outside New South Wales and Victoria, and for teams of fewer than ten people, exist because a board drawn only from large eastern-seaboard organisations would quietly teach to itself.
Get involved
The Centre is only as useful as the practitioners in it. Start with a course, bring a speaker to your event, or join and help set what we work on next.
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