Edmond Handwerker is Global Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer at APR, a global content creation optimization consultancy that helps brands improve how they plan, produce and manage marketing content. With more than 20 years of experience leading transformation initiatives for Fortune 500 brands across pharmaceuticals, travel, technology, CPG and finance, Handwerker’s background spans holdcos, agencies and management consultancies.
NDA recently spoke with Handwerker for his perspective on how AI is changing marketing operations, the agency model and content production in 2026…
Tell me about your role. What sort of thing takes up most of your time?
As Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer at APR, I’m pretty much living in a world of hurt — the good hurt, the good kind of pain! Between driving our global growth strategy, building out our AI consulting capabilities, and helping clients modernize their production ecosystems, we are perpetually drinking from the fire hose.
A huge chunk of my day is spent acting as that “phone a friend amidst all the chaos” for enterprise marketing leaders who are trying to navigate AI disruption. Internally, my focus is on “connecting the hive”—making sure our global teams have our collective data and AI tools at their fingertips, turning billions of dollars in production insights into real-time, actionable strategy for our brands.
What sort of support are your clients most commonly asking for right now?
Clients aren’t asking us “What is AI?” anymore — they are knee deep in work trying to figure out how to operationalize it without creating brand dilution or legal exposure. Everyone is working to connect AI across their own internal enterprise and their partner agency ecosystems. At the moment we’re far away from a frictionless experience.
Everyone needs stakeholder alignment. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen marketing and procurement meet for the first time with completely diverging agendas, which contributes to that friction. At APR, we help bridge that gap so everyone is aligned from day one. Second, they want help bringing in “creative technologists” and developing actual tool tactility. They don’t want passive, multi-day mandatory training lectures where their teams are out of commission for days; they want practical, hands-on upskilling to manage everything from tier-one hero craft down to automated content at scale.
With everything that’s changing within creative production workflows and ecosystems between clients, agency brands today are seeking partners who can help connect the dots while mitigating risk across the board. In this new digital age, new tools and capabilities are cropping up every day and it’s more important than ever to be on the pulse of balancing efficiency and efficacy without compromising brand value or risk exposure.
What trends are most relevant to senior marketers in 2026?
The honeymoon phase of random AI experimentation is completely over. In 2026, the biggest trend is moving from fragmented tool usage to building a connected throughput of their overall brand activations, inclusive of connecting back into the enterprise and being able to deliver into the marketplace.
You’re looking at truly creating the enmeshment connecting all tiers of content across the board.
The reality is, AI usage has been democratized from the ground up and so brands don’t have a consistent playbook to guide how their enterprise needs to transform with AI across all workflows. The early, bespoke approach has exposed brands to some of the weaker points in the operating model.
Marketers are realizing that if your AI capabilities aren’t integrated throughout the enterprise, you end up with isolated silos and brand inconsistency.
Another massive trend is rethinking talent upskilling. Instead of pulling people out of live production for generic webinars, forward-thinking organizations are embedding hands-on tool tactility into daily workflows. That’s how you future-proof both your business and your people.
How is your organisation (and your clients) utilising AI at the moment? Are any sectors outpacing others in terms of the effective use of AI?
At APR, AI is the technology backbone that connects our knowledge hive. It lets us supercharge our production insights and deliver accelerated workflows across our global network.
When you look across client categories, the pace of adoption really comes down to risk tolerance and infrastructure. Tech and CPG brands are charging through, full speed ahead. They’re using AI for hyper-personalized content at scale, dynamic asset optimization, and rapid visual prototyping. Travel and retail are right on their heels, using it heavily for localization and asset versioning to get to market faster.
Then you look at highly regulated sectors like pharma and financial services, and they’re taking a much more measured, deliberate path. They aren’t ignoring AI by any means, but they’re laser-focused on enterprise governance, data privacy, and closed-loop risk mitigation before rolling tools out across global productions.
Based on your 20 years’ experience in the industry, what advice would you offer a young person considering a career in marketing?
Get tactile with the technology, but never lose respect for the creative soul of the work.
Don’t be afraid to step into the mystery-box situations, those messy, undefined projects with a quasi-brief where there’s no immediate answer. The marketing landscape changes every single day, and the most valuable people aren’t the ones who memorized a static playbook. They’re creative technologists. My advice is to lean into the chaos, learn the tools inside out, and turn yourself into that phone-a-friend everyone wants on speed dial. Rock on!
