A self-described AI “enthusiast,” Moira Gilchrist, Philip Morris International’s chief global communications officer, said that audience personas the company has created to test its messages have been a valuable application of artificial intelligence.
“Those personas are absolutely fascinating,” she said. “The feedback that we get really helps us to improve how we’re communicating.”
In a video interview with CMO Insider, Gilchrist said that PMI, whose portfolio includes smoke-free brands like Zyn and Iqos, is focusing on optimizing its owned channels, including its corporate website, for large language models.
Gilchrist, who spoke to us after the first quarter of the financial year, also said that PMI is leveraging its internal metrics to demonstrate its ongoing business evolution of replacing cigarettes with smoke-free products.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m using AI tools for pretty much everything. I’m an absolute enthusiast, maybe an early adopter, and I can’t think of a single part of my life where it has no use.
From a work perspective, we’ve done some pretty exciting stuff to help us understand how our audience thinks and how we can ensure that our messages actually resonate with them.
We’ve built what I call personas: artificial audience replicas where we can play around with our messaging to make sure that it’s actually right for the audience. Those personas are absolutely fascinating. The feedback that we get really helps us to improve how we’re communicating.
The company website is more relevant in the AI era
Our corporate website has become an important vehicle for us to set the record straight because large language models are accessing the information that is on there. I think it’s going to help us actually rebalance the information ecosystem to make sure that the facts are told correctly. So we’ve put a much greater emphasis on our own channels as being a strategic communication channel.
It sounds crazy, but before why would you ever go to the PMI website? Nobody would go there, unless you were a journalist or perhaps an investor or something like that. The general public would never go there. But there’s a lot of really important information there about our company’s transformation, the progress we’ve made, and the products that we’ve developed and are selling in hundreds of markets around the world.
I wouldn’t say it’s a case of more resources. I think it’s a more thoughtful approach to our own channels, working to make sure that the LLMs can pick up the information there in the best way possible.
That’s an art that everybody’s learning today. The days of search engine optimization are over — now it’s all about generative engine optimization.
We’re making sure that the LLMs can pick up the rich information that’s there and serve it up when people are inquiring about us.
Internal data helps tell the transformation story
We realized a couple of years ago that we had to make a better effort to help the world understand the magnitude of the transformation we’ve already undergone. So we started using some of the metrics we had been using internally much more externally.
We were running a campaign every quarter around our earnings releases that highlights key metrics like the percentage of our net revenues that come from smoke-free alternatives.
When we first launched smoke-free alternatives — the first one in Japan in 2015 — 0% of our net revenues were coming from smoke-free alternatives.
Fast forward to Q1 2026. In the data that we released, 43% of our net revenues come from smoke-free alternatives. So that helps people to understand the magnitude of progress that we’ve made already.
We still have a long way to go, but I’m super proud of the progress we’ve made so far.
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