At the VivaTech conference in Paris, Julia White, chief marketing officer at Amazon Web Services, offered a blunt assessment of what it takes to become proficient with artificial intelligence: you have to be willing to fail.
White, who oversees AWS's global marketing operations, told Euronews Next that her own journey with AI began with existential doubt. "I myself had a moment of like, oh my gosh, am I useful anymore?" she recalled. But after experimenting with AI agents, she found relief rather than fear: the technology could strip away the tedious parts of her job, freeing her team for higher-value work.
That personal experience has shaped her advice to leaders across Europe: get your hands dirty with AI, or risk falling behind.
From incremental gains to full reinvention
White said early experiments with AI, layered onto existing workflows, delivered productivity improvements of 10 to 30 percent. But the real breakthroughs came only after her team abandoned the old playbook entirely.
"To get really big effects — like 5x effectiveness — we actually had to step back and rewrite how our processes work," she explained. The results were striking: creating a new webpage, a task that once required around three hours and multiple team members, now takes 30 minutes, with AI agents handling much of the heavy lifting. AWS publishes more than 5,000 new webpages each year.
This kind of workflow reinvention is exactly what European businesses need to consider as they invest in AI, especially amid broader calls for collective investment in technology infrastructure, as IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva recently urged EU leaders.
What AI cannot do
Despite the efficiency gains, White is clear about AI's limits. "AI isn't very good at beautiful storytelling that really connects with the human experience," she said. "It's a wonderful thought partner — but it's not a tastemaker."
That distinction has shaped how her team uses Amazon's internal assistant, Amazon Q. Rather than outsourcing creative judgment to the technology, marketers use it as a sounding board. The approach recently produced what she described as a breakthrough brand narrative for AWS, which she said even moved colleagues to tears.
"That core storytelling, that unique human insight, is a person," White said. "Knowing that and working with it in that same way is what has got us the best outcomes."
This tension between human creativity and machine efficiency is a theme that resonates across the continent. As Capgemini's AI chief recently noted, the trust gap between humans and machines remains wide.
Celebrating failure
White argues that to truly get good at AI, failure is the only clear option. She has launched a "Be Brave" award within her team that honours efforts that did not work out — and makes a point of sharing her own missteps publicly.
"Failure is necessary on the path to mastery," she said. "We're never going to get great at AI if we don't try and fail."
Finding time to experiment is a challenge for many companies. White has gotten around that by introducing dedicated training days with no meetings, reserved purely for learning new tools.
The personalised AI experience
The most exciting aspect of the AI age for White is the resurrection of ideas she had once written off as impractical. Chief among them: truly personalised marketing at scale, tailored to each individual customer.
"I've always dreamed of how I can have a truly personalised experience for every single customer," she said. "This was not practical before, but now it's suddenly practical."
Her advice to other leaders is simple: start using it. "If you just read about it or hear about it but you don't actually use it, you're going to miss it," she said. "And if you don't, you're going to not be leading your teams well."
