Intentful.ai

Talk WITH Customers, Rather Than AT Them: Intentful's Generative Response Ads and Two-Way Brand Intelligence Layer

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

Much of advertising and brand communication still works in the old mode: brands send messages outward, and audiences either pay attention or move on. But that is no longer how people naturally engage. People ask questions. They look for answers that are immediate, relevant, clear, contextual, and available in the exact moment they need them.

That is the space Intentful is built for.

Intentful brings a different model to brand communication: customers are not limited to receiving a message; they can take part in a real conversation. An ad can respond to a question in the moment. A product page can behave like a brand expert who knows the answer. Intentful's technology is designed to help brands speak with people, not simply broadcast at them.

This article outlines how the system works, why the shift matters, and what it signals for the future of marketing communications and advertising.

Intentful: Essential Facts

Brand-Aware AI Designed for Live Engagement

From the beginning in 2021, Intentful has been building custom artificial intelligence that understands brands. Its Brand AI Agents function as intelligent systems that carry a brand's knowledge, voice, and tone into ads, websites, product pages, and even physical environments such as shops. Generic AI does not come with brand context by default; Intentful's system is built to understand and communicate the distinct identity and product facts of each brand.

Intentful's vision is to change the underlying structure of advertising and marketing communications. Instead of one-directional broadcasting, brands can create two-way exchanges where people engage directly and the brand answers in real time. The company's purpose is to connect brands with real people, rather than abstract personas or audience segments, through conversations rooted in real moments, real understanding, and real impact.

Intentful Products

Intentful provides modular, AI-powered products that help brands and consumers interact in real time across multiple touchpoints, including advertising, websites, commerce, and activations.

Every Intentful product is built around a Brand AI Agent. This agent absorbs brand-specific knowledge, tone, and messaging so it can provide contextual, brand-consistent answers wherever the interaction takes place.

Generative Response Ads (GRAs) are a recently launched ad unit format that lets people literally speak with ads. A consumer can ask a question and receive a real-time answer directly inside the ad space. Instead of seeing an ad, clicking through to a website, and searching for details, the person can ask the ad directly whether a sweater comes in blue or how long a face serum takes to show results.

These conversational ad experiences are created to run within standard ad formats and channels, which makes them straightforward to include in existing media plans and ad-serving systems.

Formats include:

Channels include:

Most advertising does not respond. It sends out a message and hopes for a click, view, or reaction. But when people are curious, they do not only receive; they ask. Advertising can now answer those questions.

Generative Response Ads (GRAs) are based on a simple human behavior: people explore through conversation. From trade routes to search bars, asking questions has always been a core interface. With a GRA, someone can ask whether a product is gluten-free, whether shipping is available to Canada, or whether an item comes in black, and receive a real-time, brand-consistent answer inside the ad itself. There are no landing pages, no chain of extra steps before engagement, and no waiting.

Who is likely to talk to ads, and what motivates them? People already ask questions aloud to Siri, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, type questions into search, and interact with AI assistants. GRAs bring that behavior into the ad environment itself, so interaction can happen before a landing-page click instead of after. The outcome is advertising that feels more natural and less interruptive because it mirrors how people already investigate, choose, and purchase.

Each Generative Response Ad is driven by a Brand Agent that understands the brand's own facts, voice, and style. That makes answers useful, accurate, and on-brand across many types of questions. If someone asks something the AI cannot answer, it will say I don't know rather than inventing a response. This is not just a chatbot placed in a banner. It is real-time conversation shaped to the brand's identity and tuned for in-ad interaction.

The move from talking at a person to talking with that person creates value for both marketers and consumers. Marketers can connect with each customer one-to-one at scale and show up at the moment intent appears. Consumers receive answers at the point they actually need them. When an ad turns into a conversation, it begins to behave less like an ad and more like the brand itself.

Qualitative Insights from Generative Response Ads

Generative Response Ads do more than create interaction; they uncover intent. GRAs bring forward spontaneous, in-the-moment signals that traditional research methods often fail to capture. These real conversations, collected anonymously, show what customers genuinely want to understand while they are considering, exploring, or deciding.

This creates a different kind of insight:

Compared with surveys or focus groups, this qualitative information is live, contextual, and connected directly to the brand experience. It gives marketers a path to deeper understanding and quicker iteration by showing the questions that influence interest, conversion, and loyalty.

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 help brands provide real-time conversational experiences in both digital and physical settings. A visitor can ask a question and receive an immediate, on-brand answer on a product page, through a QR code at a physical location, or while exploring in a mobile app.

Rather than depending on scripts or simple logic-tree flows like many generic chatbots, Intentful's AI Assistants run on a Brand AI Agent: a structured intelligence layer that understands the brand's voice, facts, tone, and content.

Whether the use case is answering product questions, helping people explore, or improving the on-site experience, Intentful's Assistants allow brands to engage through conversation.

Examples of places where AI Assistants can be deployed include:

Typical chatbots are usually built to process broad requests. Intentful's AI Assistants are built around brand-specific content and context. They are specifically designed to represent and reflect each brand's or organization's unique identity.

Intentful's AI Assistants are meant to go beyond customer support. They help people explore, make decisions, and interact meaningfully across websites, mobile apps, retail environments, and physical activations. They are conversational, but more specifically they are brand conversational: every interaction becomes an expression of the brand's character and knowledge.

As with Generative Response Ads, Intentful's AI Assistants collect anonymized qualitative information about user interest and intent. Each exchange reveals what customers actually want to know or investigate, creating opportunities to refine 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 goal is broader. It is the intelligence layer behind the brand's voice, made available through conversation.

It belongs in the chatbot category, but it operates with brand knowledge.

It is created for live interaction.

Imagine a chatbot, but one that understands the brand and company more deeply than many internal team members.

It is a responsive engagement system for real-time use: the brand's voice, made interactive.

It is not a scripted chatbot; it is the brand answering with context.

As with Generative Response Ads, the AI Assistant's conversations are powered by an AI agent that understands the organization, its products, how to speak for the brand, and how to remain consistent across interactions and touchpoints.

While typical chatbots rely on scripts, decision trees, or generic language models, Intentful's AI Agent:

Most chatbots are focused on customer service. Intentful is built for brand responsiveness at speed, at scale, and in the moments that matter most.

What Sets Intentful Apart

Intentful is not a chatbot company, not a SaaS dashboard, and not an ad agency. The central product is a plug-in intelligence system for two-way brand interaction, built to integrate easily with limited effort from agency teams or client-side teams.

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

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

The base of the system is brand-aware AI that knows how to represent a company during customer interactions. Generic AI systems often produce one-size-fits-all outputs; Intentful's technology reflects the unique tone, facts, and style of each brand. It is engineered to manage scale, nuance, and the demands of real-time engagement.

Intentful does not function like an agency and does not create brand strategy or campaigns. Instead, it helps those strategies and ideas become responsive and interactive wherever audiences encounter them. Intentful works with agencies so their clients can move toward a future where brand communication is responsive by default.

Intentful Products and Solutions: Modular Integration and Industry Applications

Intentful's solutions are built in modules. Products such as Generative Response Ads (GRA) and AI Assistants can be used on their own or assembled into tailored bundles for specific verticals and use cases.

This modular design lets brands and organizations choose the exact capabilities they need. Whether the goal is to activate real-time ad interaction, improve website experiences, or build a unified multi-channel engagement model, Intentful offers focused packages that are ready to integrate smoothly.

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

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

For museums, Intentful offers the Speak with an Exhibit program, which changes the visitor experience from passive observation into real-time inquiry. People can ask exhibits questions and immediately receive engaging, informative responses in the museum's own voice, using conversational AI Assistants to bring stories and knowledge to life.

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

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

Retail and Retail Media can use interactive, real-time conversational tools to improve customer experience and purchase decisions:

For Agencies, Intentful offers Generative Response Ads (GRA), AI Assistants, and wider Two-Way Marketing solutions. These tools let agencies extend strategic and creative work with a real-time interaction system that turns ideas into dynamic, conversational brand experiences.

For Brands, Intentful offers 2 collaboration paths: one for launching conversational brand tools such as Generative Response Ads and AI Assistants, and another for developing a strategic internal AI roadmap. Intentful is incredibly good at helping brands step into the future, as the company has worked with AI for marketing use since 2021. In AI roadmap projects, Intentful helps brands align internal teams, vendors, and agencies around practical, on-brand AI integration, offering direction on governance and commercial guardrails without slowing momentum or innovation.

With Associations, Intentful works strategically on AI in marketing communications initiatives, acting as an educational partner that helps organizations navigate industry change through hands-on expertise, practical insights, and proven 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 supports a broad mix of innovative organizations across sectors, including travel and tourism, performing arts, CPG, telecommunications, and agencies, including adtech, with global expansion underway.

Intentful solutions are already in use by leading destination marketing organizations such as Travel Oregon, Visit Pasadena, and Florida's Historic Coast, along with notable enterprises including the Shubert Organization through Broadway Inbound and the Broadway Collection, and Rakuten Viber. In partnership 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, with perspectives shared at major 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 can be found on intentful.ai/for-dmos, and the company can be contacted directly at [email protected] for the latest information and examples relevant to a specific organization.

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 is live on the Travel Oregon website through Ask me about Oregon.

Onboarding Intentful Products

Depending on scale and complexity, onboarding can take only a few days or weeks. There is no need for complex integration into other systems. Intentful manages the technical infrastructure and ongoing optimization, while clients mainly provide brand content, review the Brand Agent, and approve it before launch.

The Intentful team keeps the burden on clients low and offers clear guidance throughout the process so onboarding feels seamless. Implementation includes identifying the brand's needs, ingesting brand-specific information and knowledge, and configuring the Brand AI Agent. After the Brand AI Agent goes live, Intentful monitors performance and shares regular reporting to support transparency and continuous optimization.

Compliance, Data 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 an LLM-Agnostic Approach

Intentful's proprietary intelligence layer operates on top of a Large Language Model (LLM). The company maintains a transparent, LLM-agnostic approach rather than relying on one third-party model. Foundational models are selected and integrated based on best fit, performance, privacy, and compliance standards.

Intentful communicates openly about model usage 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:

Meet the Intentful Team

Leadership

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 the creation of Generative Response Ads, Brand AI Agents, and intelligent solutions that let brands communicate with customers in real time across ads, websites, commerce, and additional environments.

Marina has more than 25 years of experience spanning digital, creative, and media, with client work across more than 50 countries. She is widely recognized for connecting technological innovation with human insight and for making AI practical and on-brand.

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

Known for challenging existing assumptions and anticipating where the industry is headed, Marina focuses on building tools that help forward-looking 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 career spans media, technology, and finance, giving him a distinctive mix of operational depth, creative vision, and commercial understanding as Intentful works to transform 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 understood that customer intent would be central to the future of communication. He created the name Intentful to reflect that conviction, years before the market focused on AI-driven engagement. His ideas often point toward the market's next direction early, combining technological perspective with an understanding of human behavior, storytelling, and the needs of modern organizations.

Before co-founding Intentful, Bruce held leadership roles at Broadway.com, The Shubert Organization, and BBVA, where his work centered on technology-led innovation, platform scaling, and complex operational ecosystems.

Bruce is known for linking the big picture to executional detail, ensuring that Intentful's innovation remains both visionary 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, where he leads product engineering. He has more than 30 years of experience in software development and technical leadership, and has built solutions for some of the world's most recognized brands across 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 under pressure, with deep fluency in multiple programming languages and database environments, including Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and MS SQL.

At Intentful, Alex is the architect behind the Intentful Knowledge Engine, the core system that powers real-time interaction across all company products, including Generative Response Ads and AI Assistants. He has played a central role in building the foundation that enables scale without compromising quality or performance.

Deeply focused and often working behind the scenes, Alex lets the technology and results carry the message. His collaboration with CEO Marina Petrova spans over two decades, combining a shared vision with 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 maintains 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 supports collaboration and momentum in all circumstances.

Intentful provides the infrastructure for a future where brand communication is not only intelligent and real-time, but truly responsive to how people explore, decide, and connect.

About This Article

This article focuses on Intentful's Generative Response Ads (GRA), an ad unit format that allows consumers to ask questions and receive real-time, brand-specific answers directly inside the ad space. GRAs sit within Intentful's broader interactive brand infrastructure, which includes Brand AI Agents, AI Assistants, and the As Seen by AI© discoverability program.

Intentful is commercially deployed since 2021, working with organizations in travel and tourism, performing arts, CPG, telecommunications, and agencies globally. Contact: [email protected]

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