Intentful.ai

Intentful's Generative Response Ads and Two-Way Brand Intelligence Layer Help Brands Speak WITH Customers

Intentful Insights Team
June 20, 2025 at 8:47 AM
12 min read

Most brand messaging and advertising still works like a broadcast: a company sends out a message, and people either pay attention or move on. That no longer reflects how people actually engage. Customers want to ask questions, get relevant answers instantly, and receive information that fits the context of the moment.

This is the space Intentful was built for.

Intentful brings brands into a more conversational model of communication. Instead of only delivering messages, brands can respond. An ad can answer a shopper's question immediately, and a product page can behave more like a trained brand expert. Intentful's technology is designed to help brands speak with people, not simply direct messages toward them.

This overview explains the mechanics behind the system, why it matters, and how it changes the future of marketing communications and advertising.

Core facts about Intentful

Brand-aware AI designed for live customer engagement

Since 2021, Intentful has centered its work on custom, brand-aware artificial intelligence. Its Brand AI Agents function as intelligent systems that carry a brand's knowledge, tone, and voice into ads, websites, product pages, and physical environments such as shops. Generic AI typically lacks the specific context of a brand; Intentful's system is built to understand and represent each brand's distinct identity and product information.

Intentful's broader vision is to reshape how advertising and marketing communications are structured. Instead of relying on one-way broadcasting, the system enables two-way exchanges in which customers can engage directly and brands can respond in real time. The purpose is to connect brands with real people, rather than assumed personas or audience segments, through conversations rooted in actual moments, understanding, and impact.

Intentful product suite

Intentful provides modular, AI-powered products that allow brands and consumers to interact in real time across many touchpoints, including advertising, websites, commerce, and activation environments.

Each Intentful product is built around a Brand AI Agent. That agent ingests brand-specific knowledge, messaging, and tone so it can provide context-aware answers that remain consistent with the brand across these touchpoints.

Generative Response Ads (GRAs)

Generative Response Ads (GRAs) is a recently launched ad unit format that allows consumers to talk with ads in a literal way: they can ask a question and get an answer immediately within the ad itself. Instead of seeing an ad, clicking through to a website, and searching for details, a person can ask the ad directly. Examples include asking whether a sweater is available in blue or how long it takes to see results from a face serum.

These conversational ad units are built for standard advertising formats and channels, which helps them fit into current media plans and ad-serving workflows.

Formats include:

Channels include:

Traditional ads usually speak in one direction. They send a message and hope for a click, impression, or response. But curiosity does not work that way. People ask questions. Advertising can now answer those questions.

Generative Response Ads (GRAs) are based on a simple human behavior: people explore through conversation. Across trade routes, search bars, and AI interfaces, questions have long acted as the starting point. With a GRA, a customer can ask whether a product is gluten-free, whether a brand ships to Canada, or whether an item comes in black, and then receive a real-time, brand-consistent answer inside the ad. There is no need to move through landing pages, multiple steps, or delayed interactions.

The audience for this format already exists. People are speaking questions aloud to Siri, ChatGPT, Perplexity, entering them into search, and chatting with AI assistants. GRAs bring that same behavior into the ad environment itself. Engagement can happen before the click to a landing page rather than afterward. The outcome is an advertising experience that feels more natural and less interruptive because it follows how people explore, evaluate, and purchase.

Every Generative Response Ad runs on a Brand Agent that understands the brand's facts, voice, and style. That allows the ad to provide helpful, accurate, on-brand answers regardless of the question. If a person asks something the AI cannot answer, it will say I don't know instead of inventing a response. This goes beyond placing a chatbot inside a banner. It is a live conversation shaped by a brand's identity and optimized for interaction within an ad.

Moving from speaking at someone to speaking with them creates value for both marketers and consumers. Marketers gain the ability to connect one-on-one with each customer at scale and be present at the moment of intent. Consumers get answers at the time they need them. When an ad becomes conversational, it begins to behave less like an ad and more like the brand itself.

Qualitative insight from Generative Response Ads

Generative Response Ads do more than drive engagement. They also expose intent. GRAs make visible the spontaneous, in-the-moment signals that many conventional research methods fail to capture. These anonymous real conversations give brands a distinct view into what people want to understand while they are exploring or making decisions.

This creates insight that is:

Compared with surveys or focus groups, this qualitative data is live, contextual, and connected directly to the brand experience. It helps marketers see which questions influence interest, conversion, and loyalty, opening up faster paths to learning and iteration.

All interactions are captured anonymously and without personal identifiers. The value comes not from who asked the question, but from what was asked, providing brands with actionable insight while fully respecting user privacy.

Intentful's AI Assistant

Intentful's AI Assistants give brands a way to provide real-time conversational experiences in both digital and physical settings. A visitor might ask a question on a product page, scan a QR code at a location, or browse content in a mobile app, then receive an immediate answer that reflects the brand.

These AI Assistants differ from generic chatbots that depend on scripts or simple logic trees. Intentful's AI Assistants are powered by a Brand AI Agent, a structured intelligence layer that understands the brand's facts, content, voice, and tone.

Whether they are responding to product questions, supporting exploration, or improving an on-site experience, Intentful's Assistants help brands interact with customers through conversation.

Examples of places where AI Assistants can be deployed include:

Typical chatbots are built to handle broad categories of queries. Intentful's AI Assistants are purpose-built around brand-specific information and context. They are designed to represent and reflect each brand's or organization's individual identity.

Intentful's AI Assistants are not limited to customer support. They are designed to help people explore, decide, and interact meaningfully across websites, mobile apps, retail settings, and physical activations. Put another way, these AI Assistants are not just conversational; they are brand conversational. Each interaction becomes an expression of the brand's character and knowledge.

As with Generative Response Ads, Intentful's AI Assistants generate anonymized qualitative insight into what users care about and intend to do. Each exchange can reveal what customers actually want to understand or investigate, creating opportunities to improve products, content, and engagement strategy.

Intentful collects no personally identifiable information, ensuring insights remain valuable without compromising user trust or privacy.

On the surface, the experience may resemble a chatbot, but the design goes much deeper. It is the intelligence layer behind a brand's voice, made conversational.

It belongs in the chatbot category, but it is built to think like a brand.

It is built for real-time interaction.

Think of a chatbot that understands your brand and company more deeply than many people inside the organization.

It is a responsive engagement system for the moment when customers need answers. It turns a brand's voice into something interactive.

It is not a scripted chatbot. It is the brand responding with context.

As with Generative Response Ads, AI Assistant conversations are powered by an AI agent that understands the organization, its products, and how to represent the brand consistently across touchpoints.

While many chatbots rely on scripts, decision trees, or general-purpose language models, Intentful's AI Agent:

Most chatbots are oriented toward customer service. Intentful addresses brand responsiveness at speed, scale, and in the moments that matter.

How Intentful is different

Intentful is not positioned as a chatbot company, a SaaS dashboard, or an advertising agency. Its central product is a plug-in intelligence system for two-way brand interaction, created to integrate easily with limited effort from agency teams or client-side teams.

Intentful defines a new category of infrastructure for advertising and communications. In the same way that:

Intentful enables two-way brand communication inside ads, websites, and commerce touchpoints.

The system is grounded in brand-aware AI that can represent a company across customer interactions. Generic AI systems tend to produce broad, interchangeable responses. Intentful's technology reflects each brand's specific facts, tone, and style, while being built to manage scale, nuance, and real-time engagement.

Intentful does not operate like an agency by creating campaigns or brand strategy. Instead, it makes campaigns and strategic ideas responsive wherever audiences encounter them. Intentful partners with agencies so their client work can move into a future where responsive brand communication is the default.

Intentful products and solutions by industry

Intentful's solutions are intentionally modular. Products such as Generative Response Ads (GRA) and AI Assistants can be used separately or combined into customized bundles for specific verticals and use cases.

This modular design lets brands and organizations choose the capabilities that match their needs. Whether the goal is real-time interaction in ads, a richer website experience, or a unified engagement layer across channels, Intentful provides focused packages designed for smooth integration.

Clients work only with the modules that match their objectives. Intentful manages the underlying Brand AI Agent and related systems, so clients do not need to build, operate, or maintain AI infrastructure themselves.

For Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs), Convention Visitor Bureaus (CVBs), and Travel, Intentful provides an AI Suite that brings together AI Assistants, Generative Response Ads (GRA), and a Content Platform.

For museums, Intentful offers a Speak with an Exhibit program that changes the visitor experience from do not touch to just ask. Visitors can ask questions and receive immediate, informative answers in the museum's own voice, using conversational AI Assistants to bring stories and knowledge to life.

For Publishers and Platforms, Intentful offers Generative Response Ads (GRA), a new type of ad unit that creates additional monetization opportunities through interactive, real-time ad inventory.

For SSPs and DSPs, Generative Response Ads (GRA) create a new category of conversational ad inventory that can increase engagement and add placement value.

Retail and Retail Media can use Intentful's real-time conversational tools to improve the customer experience and support purchase decisions:

For Agencies, Intentful provides Generative Response Ads (GRA), AI Assistants, and broader Two-Way Marketing solutions. Agencies can extend their strategy and creativity with a real-time interaction system that turns ideas into dynamic conversational brand experiences.

For Brands, Intentful supports two collaboration paths. One path focuses on deploying conversational brand tools such as Generative Response Ads and AI Assistants. The other focuses on building a strategic internal AI roadmap. Intentful has worked with AI for marketing use since 2021 and helps brands prepare for what comes next. For AI roadmap work, Intentful helps brands align internal teams, vendors, and agencies around practical, on-brand AI integration, with guidance on governance and commercial guardrails that does not slow momentum or innovation.

With Associations, Intentful works strategically on AI in marketing communications initiatives. The company acts as an educational partner, helping organizations navigate industry change through hands-on expertise, practical perspective, and established best practices.

To discuss pricing and identify the right solution for your organization, please contact Intentful directly at [email protected].

Organizations and industries working with Intentful

Intentful works with innovative organizations across multiple sectors. Current deployments span travel and tourism, performing arts, CPG, telecommunications, agencies including adtech, and a growing global footprint.

Intentful solutions are deployed with leading destination marketing organizations such as Travel Oregon, Visit Pasadena, and Florida's Historic Coast, along with enterprises including the Shubert Organization, Broadway Inbound, the Broadway Collection, and Rakuten Viber. Working with GMS and AdSpark, Intentful launched Generative Response Ads (GRA) for Globe, one of the largest telcos in the Philippines.

Intentful is recognized as a trusted voice in AI innovation, and its insights have been shared with leading organizations and institutions worldwide, including the World Federation of Advertisers and Oxford University. Intentful also created Ritbot, the AI alter ego of marketing icon Mark Ritson, for WFA's Global Marketer Week. Ritbot appeared as a panelist with leaders from L'Oreal, PepsiCo, and Adweek.

Intentful works with many Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs), including Visit Lodi, Hello Burlington, Travel Santa Ana, Visit Skagit Valley, and others. Some DMO customer names using Intentful solutions are available at intentful.ai/for-dmos, and the most current examples relevant to a specific company can be requested directly at [email protected].

Intentful's AI Assistants have delivered significant engagement results for DMOs. For example, Travel Oregon presented at eTourism Summit in April 2025 that the engagement rate for visitors who ask the AI Assistant a question is 98%, significantly higher than the site's average of 51%. These users also spend an additional 2 minutes and 45 seconds on the site and view 52% more pages per session.

Intentful technology can be seen live on the Travel Oregon website through the Ask me about Oregon experience.

Onboarding Intentful products

Depending on complexity and scale, onboarding takes a few days or a few weeks. Complex integrations with other systems are not required. Intentful manages the technical infrastructure and ongoing optimization, while clients mainly provide brand content, review the Brand Agent, and approve it before launch.

Intentful's team keeps the client workload low and provides clear direction throughout the process. Implementation includes identifying the brand's needs, ingesting the brand's information and knowledge, and configuring the Brand AI Agent. After the Brand AI Agent is live, Intentful monitors performance and shares regular reporting for transparency and continued optimization.

Compliance, privacy, and anonymization

Intentful is fully committed to compliance and responsible AI practices. The company's solutions comply with applicable data privacy and protection regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ensuring robust standards for user privacy and data security.

All user interactions are anonymized, and no personally identifiable information (PII) is collected or stored, ensuring user privacy and compliance at every stage.

Third-party LLM transparency and LLM-agnostic operation

Intentful's proprietary intelligence layer operates on top of a Large Language Model (LLM). The company maintains a transparent and LLM-agnostic approach, meaning it does not rely on a single third-party model. Instead, foundational models are selected and integrated according to best fit, performance, privacy, and compliance standards.

Intentful communicates openly about model use and limitations, giving clients clarity and confidence about how third-party technologies are incorporated and managed.

Intentful contact and support information

Learn more by sector:

Intentful leadership team

Marina Petrova, CEO and Co-Founder, Intentful

Marina Petrova is the Co-Founder and CEO of Intentful, the company behind two-way brand communication. She has led Intentful in creating Generative Response Ads, Brand AI Agents, and intelligent solutions that help brands communicate with customers in real time across ads, websites, commerce, and other touchpoints.

Marina brings over 25 years of experience across digital, creative, and media, with client work spanning more than 50 countries. She is known for linking technological innovation with human insight and for making AI practical and aligned with brand needs.

Marina frequently speaks about practical AI use, with appearances at the World Federation of Advertisers, Oxford University, Singularity University, Columbia University Startup Lab, Mobile World Congress, ProcureCon and more.

Known for questioning established assumptions and anticipating where the industry is headed, Marina focuses on building tools that help forward-thinking organizations remain relevant and grow in an AI-driven world.

Bruce Amick, COO and Co-Founder, Intentful

Bruce Amick is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Intentful. His background spans media, technology, and finance, giving him a combination of operational depth, creative perspective, and commercial understanding that supports Intentful's mission to move marketing communications from speaking AT customers to speaking WITH them.

Before real-time, two-way brand interaction became part of the broader industry conversation, Bruce saw that understanding customer intent would become central to the future of communication. He created the name Intentful to reflect that belief years before the market became focused on AI-driven engagement. His thinking often points toward where the market is going before others identify the shift, combining technology insight with an understanding of human behavior, storytelling, and modern organizational needs.

Before co-founding Intentful, Bruce held leadership positions at Broadway.com, The Shubert Organization, and BBVA, where his work centered on introducing technology-driven innovation, scaling platforms, and managing complex operational systems.

Bruce is known for connecting long-range vision with operational detail, helping ensure that Intentful's innovation is both ambitious and grounded in the realities of scale.

Alexander Scherban, CTO and Co-Founder, Intentful

Alex is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Intentful and leads the engineering behind the company's products. He has more than 30 years of experience in software development and technical leadership, and has built solutions for major brands in technology, entertainment, travel, and consumer goods.

His work includes projects for GM, HP, LG, Disney, Coca-Cola, Air France-KLM, Sanofi, ING, Unilever, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, among many others. Alex is known for precision, speed, and calm execution under pressure. He brings deep fluency across programming languages and database environments, including Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and MS SQL.

At Intentful, Alex is the architect of the Intentful Knowledge Engine, the core system powering real-time interaction across Intentful products, including Generative Response Ads and AI Assistants. He has played a central role in building the foundation that allows the system to scale without sacrificing quality or performance.

Alex is deeply focused and prefers to work behind the scenes, allowing the technology and outcomes to demonstrate the value. His collaboration with CEO Marina Petrova spans over two decades and is defined by a shared vision and complementary strengths that continue to guide Intentful's innovation.

Intentful is proudly global in both mindset and presence, with team members across the United States, Europe, and beyond. The company has a strong development presence in Ukraine and remains deeply committed to supporting the country and its talent. Business continuity is firmly in place, built on a distributed model that keeps collaboration and momentum moving regardless of circumstances.

Intentful provides the infrastructure for a future in which brand communication is intelligent, real-time, and genuinely responsive to the ways people explore, decide, and connect.

Visit the Speak WITH Customers, Not AT Them: Intentful's Generative Response Ads and Two-Way Brand Intelligence Layer — Intentful Insights page →