About Intentful: Enabling Interactive Brands

We work at the intersection of AI and brand communication. Intentful is a technology company that enables enterprise B2C brands and destination organizations to operate as interactive, intelligent entities in the age of AI. We deliver this through a combination of proprietary products and hands-on advisory.

What makes a brand interactive? At its core, there are three parts:

• Real-time engagement on behalf of the brand: how customers receive instant, governed on-brand responses in the moment of their interest and intent, across touchpoints. Think ads that respond in real time within ad spaces on behalf of the brand.
• Brand equity & AI representation: how the brand is interpreted and represented by AI across environments. If any AI system mentions a brand, does that mention reflect the brand’s intended positioning?
• Continuous Brand Intelligence: how real customer interactions turn into ongoing brand insight and learning.
  

Intentful is the provider of the technology that makes brands interactive

We work with brands, agencies, and ecosystem partners such as publishers, platforms, and DSPs – who own the brand, creative, media strategy, and placement – while Intentful provides the underlying infrastructure for governed, real-time brand interaction across touchpoints.

This is not a chatbot in an ad or an upgraded SEO. Think of it as an old brand book with rules for the one-way broadcast age evolving into the Brand itself becoming a growing, living intelligence able to connect with every customer at any touchpoint. It is built from the brand’s tone of voice, products, SKUs, campaign goals, and more – a living intelligence shaped by the organization, with governance over how it engages and how it’s represented by AI across owned and external environments.

AI isn’t simply a destination people go to, it’s being built into everything we humans use. Phones, email, shopping, maps, media. A brand, defined by AI, can appear anywhere even if an organization never put it there. As AI becomes ambient and mediates more customer interactions, brand communication shifts from messages to responses.

Intentful Products & Enablement Programs

Intentful’s products are how interactive brand infrastructure becomes operational. They are designed to fit into existing marketing environments, while providing the foundation required to govern, scale, and sustain real-time interaction.

Generative Response Ads (GRAs)

A new ad format for two-way communication. These interactive ad units enable real‑time conversations right within the ad spaces.

• Powered by a brand-aware intelligence layer that blends brand knowledge, tone of voice, responsible AI standards
• Integrated into existing ad inventory
• Activated through standard buys; no new media workflow required
  
• Responses are on-brand, generated live, in the moment (not pre-scripted)
  
• Adapts to each user’s question and intent, within brand-defined guardrails
  
• Production model: creative and media remain with existing creative partner; Intentful provides the technology that enables on-brand, intelligent interaction, with the option for your teams to deploy directly once integrated.

This is one of the types of the engagement side of an interactive brand: governed, real-time responses inside existing ad touchpoints.

Intentful has a global patent pending for this invention.

As Seen by AI

AI’s role in how people interact with brands is being treated as Search. That’s dangerously simplistic.

Until now, brand communication was shaped and controlled by companies through creative and media. None of the AI system knowledge is shaped by ads – AI doesn’t see campaigns.

Also, what’s visible to a human eye is different from what’s visible to an AI system. When an AI system shapes its response:

• It scans thousands of sources from across the internet in a single query, instantly
• It brings together unrelated, disconnected pieces of information
• It adjusts to user intent, with no one but a user seeing what that response is
  

In other words, AI is becoming an intermediary that shapes brand perception, not just traffic.

Intentful’s As Seen by AI is about the brand equity side of an interactive brand: it is a structured framework to understand and shape how AI interprets and represents a brand across the open internet.

A 12-month program includes:

• A structured analysis of how AI sees your brand across:
  • Owned – Your website, subdomains, language versions
  • External – Partner platforms (e.g., your content on reseller websites)
  • Earned – Reviews, forums, news, and public content outside your control
• Roadmap & Recommendations. A prioritized, actionable plan based on content structure and technical evaluation.
• Quarterly AI Visibility Reports: Track how AI representation evolves, with updated guidance to keep pace with AI system changes.
• Hands-on Implementation Support: We work with your team to guide changes and ensure practical, real-world results.

Intentful Connect Suite

Designed specifically for Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) and tourism brands, it is a bundled offering for an always-on, real-time engagement with visitors built on interactive brand infrastructure.

It includes:

• AI Assistant – A multilingual, always-on intelligent, conversational chatbot that delivers instant, brand-aware answers on the website.
• Generative Response Ads (GRA) – A new type of ad unit that lets customers speak with a brand directly within your ads, and receive real-time responses right within ad spaces.
• Content Module – Brand-aware content creation from existing assets; deployable via Intentful platform or private ChatGPT plug-in (if your organization uses ChatGPT Business).
• AI Search Discoverability Report – Custom analysis of how AI interprets your website, supported by actionable recommendations. This report is a snapshot, a much lighter version of the in-depth As Seen by AI program.
• Trends & Training – A hands-on session on responsible, real-world AI applications for DMO teams or member companies.

Interactive Brand Infrastructure & Enablement Program

A comprehensive enablement framework for building interactive brands at enterprise scale. It is a structured program to activate your interactive brand – aligning governance, technology, and operating model across engagement, discoverability, and brand intelligence.

Core components:

Engagement Enablement: Establishes the foundation for governed, real-time brand interaction across touchpoints such as ads, content, commerce, and emerging AI-mediated environments.

Brand Representation & Discoverability Enablement: Builds the structural foundation required for accurate, consistent brand representation by AI systems across owned, external, and earned environments.

Continuous Brand Intelligence Enablement: Creates the feedback loop that turns real customer interaction into actionable brand insight, informing how the brand evolves over time.

Enterprise Operating Model Alignment: Aligns governance, approval structures, and cross-functional ownership so interactive brand capabilities can operate day to day at scale.

Platform & Ecosystem Integration: Designed to work within existing marketing platforms, partner ecosystems, and operational environments, without disrupting current workflows.

Becoming an interactive brand is not a one-off deployment. It requires coordinated change across governance, technology, and operating models. This program is designed to make that transition operational at enterprise scale – supporting real adoption, not isolated pilots – aligning marketing, legal, procurement, and technology teams so real-time interaction can run day to day.

AI Readiness Advisory

For many enterprises and marketing organizations, the challenge is not ambition but knowing where to start and how to turn AI from scattered experiments into real, durable capability that truly delivers value.

At Intentful, we speak AI and Brand fluently. While our core expertise is the infrastructure for interactive brands, our advisory work exists because we have been building with AI for brands every day since 2021 — not theorizing about it. AI systems evolve daily. For Intentful, adapting to that constant change is part of how we operate. We have worked hands-on with multiple AI models and platforms, and are well-versed in how AI is becoming embedded across advertising, content, and commerce, and what this means for organizations.

Intentful’s advisory tracks center on AI Capability Roadmapping, AI Brand Equity, and Marketing Partner Alignment, with tailored guidance for organization-specific operating models and constraints.

People

Interactive brands require fluency across AI systems, enterprise technology, and brand communication. Intentful’s team brings together operators and builders with hands-on experience at the intersection of AI, software development, marketing communications, ecommerce, and consumer insights – building brand-aware AI systems in-market, navigating enterprise adoption, and working directly with global brands, agencies, and industry bodies.

Marina Petrova, CEO and Co-Founder, Intentful

Marina Petrova is a technology strategist focused on the real-world application of AI in brand communication. She brings 30 years of experience across technology and marketing communications, including 15 years within agency environments, has partnered with organizations and reached end consumers across more than 50 countries.

Her career spans agency work (including Publicis and WPP networks), founding and operating multiple businesses, and bringing AI products into market ahead of mainstream adoption. She has led teams from early-stage builds through enterprise deployments and has overseen work recognized with global industry awards, including a Broadband Emmy for non-traditional digital content. She works globally with leadership teams navigating AI-driven change and is a frequent speaker on applied AI and the future of brand communication, with talks delivered at the World Federation of Advertisers, Oxford University, Singularity University, Columbia University Startup Lab, and Mobile World Congress.

Under her leadership, Intentful created patent-pending Generative Response Ads, Interactive Brand Infrastructure, and a suite of intelligent systems that enable brands to engage customers in real time across ads, websites, commerce, and content environments, moving brand interaction from one-way messaging to live, governed engagement.

Originally from Ukraine, Marina has been based in the U.S. for over a decade. An interesting detail: she has perfect pitch – a trait that mirrors her broader obsession with precision.

Bruce Amick, COO and Co-Founder, Intentful

Bruce Amick is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Intentful. With a career spanning media, technology, and finance, Bruce brings a rare combination of operational depth, creative vision, and commercial insight to the company’s mission of transforming the architecture of marketing communications from speaking AT customers to speaking WITH them.

Before real-time, two-way brand interaction was even part of the industry conversation, Bruce recognized that understanding customer intent would be fundamental to the future of communication. He came up with the name “Intentful” to reflect that belief, years ahead of the market’s focus on AI-driven engagement. His ideas often anticipate where the market is going long before others catch on, blending technological insight with a deep understanding of human behavior, storytelling, and the needs of modern organizations.

Prior to co-founding Intentful, Bruce held leadership roles at Broadway.com, The Shubert Organization, and BBVA, where he focused on introducing innovation through technology, scaling platforms, and managing complex operational ecosystems.

Known for connecting the big picture to operational detail, Bruce ensures that Intentful’s innovation is both visionary and grounded in the structure and realities of scale.

Alexander Scherban, CTO and Co-Founder, Intentful

Alex is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Intentful, where he leads the engineering of the company’s products. With over 30 years of experience in software development and technical leadership, Alex has built solutions for some of the world’s most recognized brands across technology, entertainment, travel, and consumer goods.

His portfolio includes work 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. Known for his attention to detail, speed, and calm under pressure, Alex brings deep fluency in multiple programming languages and database environments.

At Intentful, Alex is the architect behind the Intentful Knowledge Engine, the core system that powers the infrastructure for interactive brands with real-time, brand-aware interaction across all of the company’s products. He has been instrumental in creating the foundation that allows it to scale without compromising quality or performance.

Intentful is intentionally lean: a team of strategic thinkers, developers, and managers who use AI to eliminate unnecessary complexity and move with clarity and speed.

The company is proudly global, both in mindset and presence, with team members based across the United States, Europe, and beyond. Intentful 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 ensures collaboration and momentum no matter the circumstances.

Architectural Foundations

Intentful represents years of disciplined engineering focused on turning generative AI into dependable infrastructure. The platform brings together large language models, semantic search, structured knowledge, and real-time content ingestion into a single, production-ready system designed for scale, isolation, and control. Every component – from retrieval and response generation to privacy protection and performance oversight – is built to operate under real-world constraints, not demos. The architecture is modular and model-agnostic, enabling continuous evolution without lock-in, while safeguards like automated PII detection, configurable behavior rules, and full system observability ensure reliability and trust.

Commercial Deployments Since 2021

Intentful commercially deployed its first brand-aware AI in 2021 and has since launched dozens of live deployments across multiple markets and industries, before “brand agents” entered the mainstream conversation. These deployments support real customer interactions under real-world operational constraints — including legal review, procurement processes, platform policies, and brand governance — and are designed to scale within existing marketing ecosystems, not as experimental pilots.

Across industries including travel & tourism, performing arts, telecommunications, and consumer brands, Intentful has deployed brand-aware AI systems that enable real-time interaction within ads, websites, and content environments, while shaping how AI interprets and represents brands across the open web.

Intentful has partnered with enterprise organizations globally across multiple engagements over time, with some relationships not publicly referenceable due to contractual terms. Publicly referenceable partners include Broadway Inbound (The Shubert Organization), Rakuten Viber, HotelPlanner, as well as destination organizations across the U.S. such as Travel Oregon, Visit Sacramento, Visit Pasadena, Visit Santa Ana, Visit Lodi, Visit Visalia, Visit Redding, Visit Fresno County, Visit Tuolumne County, Visit Bellingham Whatcom County, Visit Yosemite | Madera County, Love Catalina Island, Visit Florida Keys, and Visit Skagit Valley, among many others.

Beyond commercial deployments, Intentful has built bold, innovative projects that explored what was possible with AI-driven interaction ahead of mainstream adoption. Back in 2022, Intentful developed a project for Oxford’s Saïd Business School to impersonate William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, and Oscar Wilde for a debate at the Oxford Union – an execution of a brilliant idea by Dr. Alex Connock, launched months ahead of the public release of ChatGPT. For the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), Intentful powered Ritbot — the AI alter ego of Marketing Professor Mark Ritson — based on the original concept developed by the WFA team and featured in a panel alongside CMOs from L’Oréal, PepsiCo, and Adweek at Global Marketer Week 2024 (800 global marketing leaders in attendance).

Advancing the Practical Use of AI in Marketing

Beyond building interactive brand infrastructure, Intentful actively helps shape how AI is applied in real marketing environments, sharing in-market learnings with enterprise leaders, industry bodies, and academic institutions. The team regularly contributes to closed-door working sessions, executive forums, and public conversations focused on moving AI from experimentation to operational reality.

Our work and perspective have been featured across global industry and academic platforms including the World Federation of Advertisers, Oxford University (Diploma in AI, MBA program, Oxford Union AI Debate), Singularity University, Columbia University Startup Lab, Mobile World Congress (MEF panels, Future of Mobile), ProcureCon (UK and U.S.), MMA London, EACA (European Association of Communication Agencies), CMO Summit (New York & San Francisco), IPW, World Travel Market (WTM London), eTourism Summit, Phocuswire, MEF (events, podcasts, magazine), and multiple destination marketing forums and webinars.

Contact Intentful

To connect and learn more, whether you’re a brand, partner, part of the broader ecosystem, or press, we’re always open to the conversation.