ACENTO Codes Culture Into AI

How a Cross-Cultural Pioneer is Defining the Next Era of Inclusive Marketing Technology

As the marketing world races to embrace artificial intelligence, one agency is slowing down, just long enough to ask a critical question: Who, exactly, is teaching AI what culture looks like?

At this year’s ANA’s AIMM Forum in Miami, Los Angeles-based ACENTO unveils its Culturally Capable AI Initiative, a first-of-its-kind framework that ensures artificial intelligence can think, learn, and create with cultural intelligence. The move reinforces ACENTO’s long-standing mission to Defeat Indifference while charting a new path for inclusive innovation in advertising.

From Cultural Pioneers to AI Trailblazers

For over four decades, ACENTO has been a trusted partner for brands seeking to connect authentically with diverse audiences. Founded as one of the early multicultural agencies in the U.S., it has always stood at the intersection of creativity, empathy, and business impact.

Now, the agency is taking that heritage into the AI era and challenging the marketing industry to confront one of its most overlooked truths: AI is biased because the data it learns from is biased.

“AI will only ever be as inclusive as the people who teach it,” said Donnie Broxson, CEO of ACENTO. “If we don’t code our cultures into its DNA, someone else’s default will define us.”

That recognition became the catalyst for ACENTO’s new initiative, which identifies two critical stages in the marketing process where AI bias is most damaging: strategy and creative development. By embedding cultural expertise into both, the agency aims to make AI not just more accurate, but more human.

The Rise of Interactive Audience Personas

The centerpiece of the initiative is ACENTO’s Interactive Audience Personas, a breakthrough approach that transforms static consumer profiles into living, conversational avatars. These AI-driven personas are capable of real-time video chat, allowing marketers to literally sit across from a lifelike digital audience member and ask questions about lifestyle, preferences, messaging, tone, or creative concepts.

“Imagine being able to invite your target consumer into your meeting—instantly,” said Sofia Escamilla, VP of Media at ACENTO. “We’ve moved personas from posters on a wall to people in the room. Now marketers can converse with their audience at any moment.”

These avatars draw from demographic, psychographic, and cultural datasets, trained and refined by human experts to reflect authentic voices, language, and lived experiences. For brands, it means instant cultural input on daily strategic decisions.

Teaching AI to See What It Misses

While the personas bring empathy to strategy, the second part of the initiative, Culturally Attuned Creative Generation, brings authenticity to execution.

Led by Vicent Llopis, VP and Executive Creative Director, ACENTO’s creative and tech teams are retraining AI models to represent multicultural audiences accurately. By carefully prompting, guiding, and auditing generative tools, they’ve developed a process that produces visual and written content free from the distortions of internet bias.

From capturing the nuanced regional Spanish accents across Latin America to ensuring diversity in AI-generated imagery, the agency is setting a new benchmark for what culturally responsible AI creativity can look like.

“Technology should expand empathy, not erase it,” Llopis said. “Our initiative ensures that as AI evolves, it carries every culture forward, not just the ones with the loudest data footprint.”

Empathy as a Competitive Advantage

The Culturally Capable AI Initiative isn’t just a statement about inclusion—it’s a business strategy. By enabling faster cultural insight, higher creative precision, and more relevant communication, ACENTO’s approach offers brands a measurable ROI advantage.

But beyond performance metrics, the initiative reinforces something deeper: the idea that empathy and technology are not at odds. ACENTO aims to make them partners.

As the industry grapples with the ethical and creative implications of AI, ACENTO’s vision offers a clear direction—one rooted in heritage, guided by humanity, and powered by innovation.

After all, for a cross-cultural agency built on decades of bridging differences, coding culture into technology might just be the most natural evolution yet.