AI, instinct, and the courage to lead: Three lessons from GEICO’s CMO

Your customers’ online habits are changing faster than your dashboards can explain it. So how do you decide which AI promises deserve your attention when everyone claims to have the answer?

In the inaugural episode of her “Reserve the Right” podcast, Knotch co-founder and CEO Anda Gansca sat down with Arianna Orpello Lewko, CMO of GEICO, for a candid conversation about what it’s like to lead a marketing department through AI’s upheaval. Both are excited about what the technology makes possible – but both have questions about what’s being sold along the way.

Here are three ideas to listen for.

1. Customer behavior can change before your measurement catches up

Every marketer is simultaneously a consumer – and as a result it’s often their own habits that clue them into something that needs to change in how they work. Orpello Lewko noticed that her own online browsing and purchasing habits were changing. She heard the same thing from friends. But inside GEICO’s business, the conversation kept returning to whether website traffic supported that shift. It wasn’t clear.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not happening, just because you can’t measure it,” she says.

That tension will sound familiar to marketers trying to understand AI’s influence on discovery: Often, traffic patterns just don’t tell the whole story. Customers can arrive on brands’ websites with research already done and opinions already formed, without leaving a neat trail explaining how they got there.

As Gansca puts it: “Consumers are just conditioned by conversation.”

Listen for more: The challenge lies in deciding how to respond while the evidence is still incomplete. In the full “Reserve the Right” episode, Orpello Lewko offers a blunt assessment of attribution and its limitations – and shares the metaphor she uses at GEICO to explain why waiting carries its own risk.

2. Build a marketing foundation that can outlast the next tool

When every new platform promises to transform marketing, it’s easy to let that platform’s technology take the wheel. Orpello Lewko says it’s important for marketers to not just hand over the keys without simultaneously doing the underlying work of understanding an audience, creating something that connects, distributing it, measuring, and learning.

“The way you might do each of those steps and the channels that you might be in or the things you might be creating might be different,” she says. “But the core steps have stood the test of time.” Effectively, it’s a matter of checking some essential boxes.

Gansca’s follow-up gets straight to the underlying question: “Okay, so what are the boxes?”

Their exchange offers a useful way to think about building a team that can adapt as tools change. It also raises a harder question: With countless things available to try, how do you choose?

Listen for more: You’ll learn what question Orpello Lewko asks when someone proposes a TikTok strategy, as well as the vendor promise that immediately makes her skeptical.

3. Leading through uncertainty requires bravery—and communication

“I don’t think you can be a marketer today and not be brave,” Orpello Lewko says.

That bravery includes making bets, acknowledging uncertainty, and giving leadership a clear view of your thinking before an alarming headline about AI lands in their inbox.

“You should know that this email will be coming,” Gansca says. “You should proactively go to the CEO.”

Orpello Lewko explains how those conversations can change the questions a CEO asks. Her advice is especially relevant to anyone balancing pressure to move quickly with the responsibility to make thoughtful decisions. Which, these days, is pretty much all marketing leaders.

Listen to the full episode of Reserve the Right for the stories behind these takeaways, including GEICO’s experiments with its gecko, an eye-opening visit with Anthropic’s marketers, and a conversation about what both leaders hope their children will learn in an AI-shaped world.

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Published on October 14, 2026