A marketing operating model has to be fixed before technology or AI can help it. Anca Pintilie of JP Morgan Chase showed why at aiblLIVE London 2026. Her example came from her previous role at Amazon.
A martech stack meant to bring six global marketing teams into line failed in its first market. So her team spent six months finding out how the work really happened, then redesigned it. Here is how it worked.
All figures as stated on stage by Anca Pintilie.
Because nobody had asked marketing how it worked. A stack built for the US was sent to Mexico to force the teams into alignment. Marketing never scoped the use cases. Its most effective channel at peak was getting in a car and talking to people in markets, which no tool supported.
Whatever we thought is running our business was actually not reflected in any of the documentation that we had.
Anca Pintilie, Executive Director, Brand Operations (Chase & JP Morgan Personal Investing), EMEA, JP Morgan Chase
Ghost processes are the undocumented dependencies, informal approvals and legacy workarounds that quietly keep a business running. One example is always visiting a colleague’s desk for a sanity check before a big approval. Pintilie’s team found about 60 of them, and found that calls only produced rehearsed answers. In-person visits, 12 flights in all, revealed the real work.
Map the real work first, then decide what to keep. For each process, Pintilie’s team chose to kill it, codify it or redesign it. Teams then helped shape the redesign, were retrained on pen and paper, and only then did technology go in. Thirteen operating models became three.
Yes, Pintilie says the team rolled out about half the sophistication it had planned. In some regions, a better briefing system made the work so much cleaner that teams did not need the most advanced marketing mix model. All vendors were measured against one framework, and about half were scrapped.
You kill it, you codify it, or you redesign it.
Anca Pintilie, Executive Director, Brand Operations (Chase & JP Morgan Personal Investing), EMEA, JP Morgan Chase
Anca Pintilie is Executive Director, Brand Operations (Chase & JP Morgan Personal Investing), EMEA at JP Morgan Chase. She has worked in marketing for about 20 years, including at Amazon, Revolut and Oracle. She spoke on the Growth track at aiblLIVE London on 20 October 2026.
If your tools are not delivering because nobody knows how the work really runs, this is the method to borrow. The full PDF goes deeper than this page, in Pintilie’s own words.
For CMOs, COOs and marketing operations leads planning a new tech or AI rollout. Six pages, about an eight-minute read.
