This post was created in partnership with CVS Media Exchange
Retail media has become a bigger part of the growth plan for many brands; it has also become harder to manage. There are more channels, more shopper signals, and more pressure to show what is working.
During an ADWEEK House Possible panel co-hosted with CVS Media Exchange, Zoë Ruderman, chief content officer at ADWEEK, spoke with Parbinder Dhariwal, VP and general manager at CVS Media Exchange (CMX), and Kelly Shu, director of omni shopper and customer marketing at Kenvue, about where AI fits into that work.
Retail media has more signals than ever
For Shu, the first place AI fits is personalization.
“Personalization comes to mind,” she said. “Just the way in which we always talk about personalization, but are we actually doing it? And I do think AI gives us the opportunity to actually do it.”
Dhariwal framed the issue as one of volume and fragmentation.
“There are so many signals—massive amounts of fragmentation around those signals,” he said, pointing to the challenge of understanding customers as they move between digital and physical environments.
AI helps turn those signals into action
For CMX, the foundation is its loyalty program, ExtraCare. Dhariwal said the business is built on 90 million ExtraCare records, along with 9,000 CVS locations and 5 million customers coming through CVS stores every day.
That scale gives CMX a strong view into shopper behavior. The next step, Dhariwal said, has been organizing and enhancing that data so teams can move faster across planning, audiences, optimization, and measurement.
That work is coming to market through CorIQ, CMX’s intelligent marketing platform. Dhariwal shared that it brings AI into three parts of the process: media planning, real-time optimization, and measurement. In practice, that can mean removing a shopper from a segment after a purchase, replenishing the audience, or reducing repeated messaging to someone unlikely to convert.
Shu added that those changes matter on the brand side because teams are trying to reach “the right shoppers with the right messaging at the right time.”
The value shows up in outcomes
Dhariwal said CMX has already seen the effect in campaign performance, including 16% greater efficiency around reach, a 14% increase in attributed sales, and a 15% increase in incremental ROAS.
“We are retail media, and we are in the outcomes business,” he said. “We drive outcomes. That is a unique identifier that only retail media can bring to this space.”
Shu added that Kenvue saw a more than 30% lift, along with increases in buyer conversion and basket size.
“The media metrics matter,” she said, “but then growing the business matters as well.”
Human judgment keeps AI grounded
Both speakers agreed AI still needs human oversight, especially when consumer trust is on the line.
“I don’t know that I’m ready to just let AI do all the work,” Shu said. “I think there’s a lot of strategy, like allowing AI to surface where the optimizations are, but having someone still oversee it.”
Dhariwal said CMX is also keeping people involved as the technology moves toward more advanced decisioning.
“There’s always going to be a human involved there,” he said.