Ep 33. Your AI Is Only as Good as Your Data — and Pepsi Just Spent Five Years Proving It, with Stephanie Layser, AWS

Pepsi is shopping for an AI transformation partner and the whole industry is watching — consultancies or agencies, who wins? Alexa for Shopping now gives you one or two recommendations instead of a page of results, and brands are quietly panicking about how to become the one that gets surfaced. Google bought Spirit Airlines' entire data archive for $10 million. And SpaceX AI paid $60 billion for Cursor, the agentic coding tool, in an acquisition that slipped under the radar until it didn't. This week, Shiv and Myles welcome Stephanie Layser — Global Sub-Industry Leader for Publishers and Advertising at AWS — for a conversation that connects the infrastructure story to the advertising story in ways most people aren't putting together yet. Stephanie has spent her career at the intersection of data, identity, and ad tech — at News Corp, AppNexus, and now AWS — and she brings a grounded, customer-facing perspective on what AI transformation actually looks like when the work is real and the stakes are high. Stephanie breaks down what Pepsi's five-year data and cloud investment actually means in plain English — and why the companies that did that work early are the ones who can actually activate on AI right now. She explains why programmatic supply has historically been dumb pipes, and how the shift to agentic ad operations — including the work AWS is doing with Warner Brothers Discovery — is building the intelligence layer that changes what those pipes can actually do. She also shares what her own workday looks like now versus before AI: who she left on read, what needs her attention, and how writing a strategy document that would have taken weeks now takes a fraction of the time. They also get into why a customer ran the same technology build evaluation two years apart and came back with a timeline ten percent of the original, why Alexa for Shopping going from infinite shelf to two recommendations is a bigger GEO story than most people realize, and why the AI advertising infrastructure being built right now feels bigger — not just similar — to the birth of programmatic. Ready to level up your AI skills? Join the U of Digital AI Accelerator. Enrollment now open for September | Sponsored by Blis, a DSP by T-Mobile Ad Solutions https://uof.digital/ai/accelerator/ New episodes every two weeks. Get your AI Edge here.