#KatieTalks with Rochelle Tognetti: Type Your Own Name Into an LLM Tonight. Then We'll Talk

Most people talking about AI in marketing have never had to fund it, defend it to a board, or answer for it. Rochelle Tognetti has done all three.

She was CMO and Partner at Deloitte. In 2024 she walked into her performance review and told her boss she was leaving to go and study. Deloitte wrote a sabbatical clause into the partnership to keep her. She branded the year "my year of saying yes", started lecturing at the University of Sydney, and came back to go all in on AI. She co-founded the Australian Centre for AI in Marketing and is now Adobe's first ever AI Evangelist for Japan and Asia Pacific.

In this episode of #KatieTalks, Katie Bennett-Stenton and Rochelle skip the hype and get to what actually separates the leaders from the laggards: your data foundations, your workflow design, your visibility inside a generative engine, and your own instinct.

In this conversation

• Why the market moved from freeze to bets. The question is no longer should we. It is how fast, and how safely.
• Where agentic AI is genuinely real. Autonomous content personalisation, real-time journey orchestration, and agents working in orchestration with each other.
• The AI-native consumer. Your customers have the same technology without your risk profile. In some ways they have pulled ahead. The AI agent is now a persona in your plan.
• Where leaders are kidding themselves. Assuming the process can run without humans, and putting shiny technology on top of fragmented data.
• GEO, practically. Citations, references, FAQs and long-form content. How to check how you show up, whether to build or partner, and what happens to the SEO budget. Plus the shadow website idea Kato brings back from Sydney.
• The skill nobody is hiring for. When AI makes your thinking worse, why instinct is a leadership asset, and the difference between using AI as a shortcut and using it as a thought partner.

Rochelle Tognetti leads AI Strategy and Evangelism for Asia Pacific and Japan at Adobe. She is the former CMO and Partner at Deloitte Australia, co-founder of the Australian Centre for AI in Marketing, and an academic at the University of Sydney.