On 16 June 2026, FMI ran our first event in Switzerland, kindly hosted by Alessio Vinci, Chief Comms Officer and Conny Kalcher, Chief Customer Officer at Zurich Insurance Group. In this article, Nick Lord, Founding Partner, Resonate Global Advisors, captures the key takeaways.

"Senior marketing and communications leaders within Switzerland’s financial services sector met to discuss how AI is reshaping their jobs, their companies, and their customers’ experiences.

The event kicked off with a mind-expanding presentation from Dominique Rose Van-Winther, Founder of Final Upgrade AI. As an AI evangelist, she exhorted the audience to embrace the possibilities she believes AI can and will bring.

In particular, she highlighted how new ideas are already being brought to life for a fraction of the time and money they cost before, partly because they no longer need to go through a bottleneck of programmers and coders.

However, she noted that most companies, no matter what sector they are in, remain in a white box phase. Employees are using AI to execute simple tasks such as editing emails which save them about two to three hours per week.

They key now, she said, is to move to grey and then black box thinking. This involves re-imagining and transforming workflows.

And instead of humans overseeing AI agents, she believes the end result could be a “flipping of the script.” AI will deploy its superior project management skills to check in on human teams at key milestones.

Van-Winther also discussed how AI can help marketing and comms professionals to manage stakeholders through the use of synthetic data to map outcomes.  By embracing AI’s possibilities, she concluded that they too can become AI evangelists within their companies and among senior leadership.

In the discussion I moderated that followed, few participants doubted AI’s potential and a number highlighted practical use cases. Yet, many flagged practical constraints.

These include the need for financial services marketing and communications messages to be error free due to strict regulatory oversight. One participant outlined how supervisory standards are lagging real-world usage, joking that, “the regulator looks at a time when everything worked and lands at 1984”.

Participants agreed that AI needs to be effective not just efficient. “With AI we could produce 50 white papers a year, rather than five,” one remarked. “But does our audience really have the time to read 50 white papers? It should be about quality not quantity.”

In the end it was largely agreed that while AI is a very useful tool, whose possibilities are only just being grasped, having a human in the loop is not only vital but desirable. Being able to judge what is important and what is not, what is aesthetic and what is not, and what is relevant and what is not, are all human qualities and requirements for marketing and comms professionals that AI does not possess. Or not yet….

On behalf of my partners at Resonate, I would like to thank the team at Zurich Insurance for hosting everyone at this inaugural roundtable discussion and all the participants for sharing their insights."

Find out more about Resonate Global here.