As part of the MMA MEA Future of Marketing CMO Board, we sat down with leading regional CMOs to understand how they’re preparing for Q4 2025 and beyond.

Ece Uslu, CMO of Amazon.com.tr and a founding member of the MMA MEA Future of Marketing CMO Board, brings a future-focused lens to how brands can scale personalization, performance, and team capability through AI. At the intersection of efficiency and customer obsession, Amazon’s marketing playbook reveals how data-driven decision-making, generative tools, and real-time relevance are shaping the next frontier.

Aligned with the MMA MEA CMO Board’s mission to lead marketing transformation through experimentation, collaboration, and technology, Ece offers actionable insight into what it takes to build teams and strategies ready for what’s next.

1- How is your brand integrating AI into marketing to drive both efficiency and hyper-personalization?

Amazon strategically integrates AI into marketing to drive scalable growth by:

Maximizing customer relevance through real-time personalization at every touchpoint, leveraging billions of behavioral signals to deliver the right content to the right user, resulting in most of amazon.com.tr's homepage clicks being driven by personalized modules in H1’25.

Unlocking operational leverage via automating repetitive workflows, creating agents for manual tasks, and accelerating content production with generative tools, enabling faster time-to-market, greater efficiency, and stronger ROI with minimal manual overhead.

2- In a budget-conscious world, how are you sustaining growth and maximizing ROI?

In a budget-conscious environment, sustaining growth and maximizing ROI requires ruthless prioritization and a clear understanding of what truly moves the needle. We focus on channels that deliver measurable customer acquisition and lifetime value, and we continuously optimize based on performance data. We’ve shifted spending toward high-ROI levers like creator-led marketing, precision targeting, and automation.

3. How are you reshaping your team’s structure and skills for a digital-first, data-driven future?

We are actively reshaping our team structure and capabilities to scale for a digital-first, data-driven future. This transformation allows us to scale impact without scaling headcount, ensuring our team is equipped to move faster, operate leaner, and drive smarter growth.

Building AI-savvy teams: Investing in upskilling and hiring talent with strong data literacy and AI fluency to drive experimentation and smart decision-making.

Shifting from manual to automated workflows: Prioritizing automation of repetitive tasks and leveraging internal tools and AI agents to free up bandwidth for strategic work.

Embedding agent-driven solutions: Exploring how autonomous agents can support reporting, performance optimization, and content generation at scale.

4- What market shifts or consumer behaviors are you preparing for as we enter the final quarter of 2025?

As we approach the final quarter of 2025, we are closely preparing for several key market shifts and behavioral trends:

Rising cost-consciousness & smart-shopping behavior: Amid inflationary pressures, we’re seeing growth in deal-seeking behavior and category switching. Our marketing strategy emphasizes surfacing the right price-value propositions early in the journey to retain and convert these shifting audiences.

AI-powered discovery replacing traditional search: With tools like ChatGPT increasingly becoming the first stop for product discovery, especially among Gen Z and Millennials, we anticipate a continued decline in classic search traffic. About 59% of Gen Z (born 1997–2012) and 56% of Millennials (1981–1996) use AI in at least half of their searches*, prompting us to rethink how and where we position our content and campaigns.

Demand for instant, hyper-relevant experiences: Shoppers expect real-time personalization, faster value delivery, and context-aware recommendations. We are optimizing our journey flows and creative pipelines to meet these expectations.

By anticipating these shifts, we’re evolving our channel mix, experimenting with conversational commerce formats, and investing in AI-native content that meets customers where discovery is happening.

Source: https://business.yougov.com/content/51748-should-ai-generated-search-summaries-replace-traditional-search