On 17 September, Team Flourish joined Scotland’s marketing community at The Social Hub Glasgow for the CIM Scotland Conference 2026. This year’s theme, “smarter, braver, more human,” ran through every session. Here’s what stood out to us, speaker by speaker.
Marketing is, and will always be, about people
Chris Daly, Chief Executive, CIM
Chris opened by arguing that competitive advantage remains profoundly human, however much information technology puts at our fingertips. Bravery, he said, means experimenting despite the uncertainty; the brands we remember are the ones that took risks. His clearest line: technology creates messages, but brands create trust, and the future belongs to whoever uses both.
AI empowering people like us
Nicola Thomson, Head of Marketing and Communications, Glasgow Life
Glasgow Life doesn’t sell a product, so Nicola’s focus was AI as an efficiency tool rather than a headline act. A chatbot launched in 2023, trained only on the contents of Glasgow Life’s website, now handles around 1,500 conversations a month and resolves more than 92% without a person stepping in. Targeted SEO and AEO work lifted underperforming content from page four of Google to page one, driving an 18% rise in page views and a 36% rise in box office checkout value. With 1.5 million customers in the CRM, the real work wasn’t collecting more data, it was making sense of what Glasgow Life already had.
The perfect AI:Bravery ratio
Mark Choueke, Partner and Chief Creative Officer, OrbitalX
Drawing on more than 80 CMO conversations for his podcast Do More With Less, Mark’s argument was that AI multiplied by bravery equals distinction, not AI plus bravery. Fast, cheap work multiplied by zero bravery still equals zero, indistinguishable from everyone else’s. “AI can give you speed,” he said. “It can’t give you permission to be brave.” That judgement still has to be a person’s. His call to action? “AI’s got the ‘doing’ covered. The deciding – that’s on you.”
Why B2B marketing still needs you in the age of AI
Luan Wise, Marketing Consultant and Social Media Specialist
Luan opened with a G2 stat: 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than Google, and 69% have switched vendors based on what it told them. One client scaled AI content from 4 articles a month to 40; organic traffic rose 300%, but qualified leads fell 15%. Cutting back to 12 carefully briefed articles grew qualified leads by 45% in three months. Her framing: make sure you have a human in the loop, where a person reviews every output, versus a human on the loop, where AI runs within set limits. A handy P.S? Check out Wiki’s “Signs of AI Writing” page and make sure you add to your prompts to avoid the AI slop!
Audaciously you: making unconventional career moves
Mercy Abel, Founder, Who You Know
Graduating into 2020’s lockdown with no clear path, Mercy built a career through five audacious steps: asking for help, treating LinkedIn and trial and error as her testing ground, chasing the right audience rather than the biggest one, and daring to dream big. Five years on, Who You Know spans mentorship, recruitment support and training. Mercy’s challenge to the room: what audacious move will you make?
Breaking down the silos: why marketing can’t drive growth alone
Karen Trickett, Founder, Fractionauts
Growth is a system, not a department, built from discovery, conversion and retention designed together around a clear ideal customer. Karen’s framing for AI: the wrong question is how do we use it, which leads to faster tasks and a plateau within months; the right question is where it creates genuine commercial advantage across the whole system. Marketing, she said, has never been more key to commercial growth, and it can’t succeed alone.
Still human: building trust and relevance in a new era of marketing
Emily Young, Chief Marketing Officer, Johnston Carmichael
In 2020, as government support schemes changed overnight, competing firms raced to be first into clients’ inboxes. Johnston Carmichael waited, taking time to understand what each announcement actually meant. Emily called it one of her proudest moments, proof that marketing can be the head and heart of a business, not just its mouth. She pointed to the firm’s 2024 strategy launch, broadcast live into 11 venues across the UK, after which staff posted about it on LinkedIn, unprompted, which naturally created a buzz with clients too. For Emily, that’s the real proof point: people are the heart of an organisation, and they’re your biggest brand ambassadors, far more convincing than any campaign. On AI, her line was direct: it can do the first draft and the admin, freeing up time for the judgement, about whether something still sounds like Johnston Carmichael. That stays human.
Digital marketing that actually cuts through
Benjamin Black, Head of Digital Marketing, C&C Group
The best performing social post Tennent’s has ever run anchored Ben’s session: a hilarious reel of a typical Glaswegian auld yin, enjoying a pint that reached 4.5 million views, roughly the entire adult population of Scotland. His argument was that the win came from getting out of the way of a simple, funny idea rather than adding process to it. Trusting the team, backed by clear guardrails rather than more approval stages, took impressions up 60%, engagement up 85% and video views up 100%. His closing test for any piece of marketing: is it useful, is it entertaining, and will it still matter when it’s published. Remember, he said, strong brands don’t need to tell you their personality. They demonstrate it.
The panel: staying brave, staying human, and steering clear of AI slop
Hosted by Mercy Abel, with Mark Choueke, Emily Young, Luan Wise, Karen Trickett and Benjamin Black
On avoiding “AI slop,” the advice was to train people to recognise what good AI use looks like, rather than banning the tools outright. Marketing has always carried an environmental cost, from direct mail to email, and AI is simply the latest iteration; it’s here to stay. Benjamin warned it can stifle creativity if you let it, treat it the way marketing once treated Photoshop, a tool to use creatively, not a shortcut. Karen added that the brains driving the machines matter more than the machines themselves; different minds get different results from the same tool, whether that’s Claude or anything else, so the real skill is using it to fill your own gaps. On whether AI is closing the door for junior marketers, Karen and Emily both saw the opposite: junior roles are moving away from mundane tasks and into strategy work much earlier, with AI changing relationships rather than replacing them.
Overarching takeaways
Across the day, one thread ran through every session: AI is genuinely useful for speed, scale and pattern recognition, but the judgement about what to say, when to say it and whether it still sounds like you remains a human job. Bravery came up just as often, whether that was Johnston Carmichael waiting instead of racing to be first, Tennent’s letting a team be funny instead of adding another approval stage, or Mercy Abel choosing to build a business instead of a CV. The day’s best moments belonged to people who made a call and put their name to it.
A big thank you to the CIM Scotland team for putting together such a fantastic day.
Let’s chat if any of this chimes with something you’re working through.
