INVNT has appointed James Nicholas Kinney as its first Global Chief AI Officer to scale AI across strategy, creative, production, and operations. Kinney will drive client-facing AI innovation and internal transformation, building on INVNT’s expanding portfolio of AI-powered brand experiences for global clients, including Microsoft, Oracle, ABB, Lamborghini, and COP28.
INVNT has named James Nicholas Kinney as its first Global Chief AI Officer, a move framed as both a milestone for the agency and an inflection point for how experience-led brands will adopt, deploy, and scale artificial intelligence across their organisations. The new role, announced globally, formalises a shift already underway inside the INVNT network: a deliberate acceleration of AI integration across strategy, creative, production, operations, and data, with the objective of reshaping how stories are told and how brands engage in a world increasingly defined by machine intelligence.
The appointment signals something more consequential than a simple leadership addition. For INVNT, the creation of a Global Chief AI Officer role establishes an architectural hub within the company responsible for the systems, data lakes, and intelligent tooling that will underpin the next generation of experiential marketing. Rather than relegating AI to a standalone innovation lab or piecemeal R&D outfit, INVNT is threading AI into the operational spine of the agency with the same weight historically placed on creative, production, and client service functions. In doing so, the agency is attempting to build what many in the industry have argued is needed but few have meaningfully executed: an AI-centred operating system that enhances both internal workflows and outward-facing client programmes at scale.
Kinney arrives with a profile that neatly intersects human capital, technology fluency, and enterprise transformation—three domains that have become increasingly linked as companies navigate the organisational impact of AI. His credentials include AI certifications from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Wharton, the latter a programme led by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. Professionally, he is known for his tenure as a Global Chief People Officer, most recently at .Monks, part of S4Capital, with earlier experience at Ogilvy, Giant Spoon, and Mother, where he helped shape people-first cultures during periods of rapid growth and complex digital shifts. The through line is a career built around talent systems, organisational design, and the interplay between human and machine capabilities—an alignment INVNT describes as increasingly critical for the evolution of the modern agency.
“Business transformation happens when you connect the dots across industries, technologies, and the experience ecosystem,” said Scott Cullather, Chairman and Chief Growth Officer at INVNT. He noted that the company has “always been at the forefront of innovation-led brandstory,” and that introducing a Global Chief AI Officer is the next phase of that trajectory. Cullather emphasised that Kinney brings a rare hybrid skill set: deep HR leadership coupled with advanced AI training and frontline agency experience. In Cullather’s framing, the assignment is not about machines replacing creatives, strategists, or producers, but about enabling a coexistence that unlocks operational maximalism, predictive analytics, and more intelligent solutions for clients around the world.
For INVNT, the appointment is not occurring in a vacuum. Over the past 17 years, the agency has carved out a niche for itself as a partner to major global brands seeking large-scale experiences that fuse creativity with emerging technologies. That positioning has naturally pulled INVNT into AI-enabled workstreams, and the agency now cites a portfolio of initiatives that demonstrate how machine learning can augment storytelling, content production, and audience engagement. For Microsoft, INVNT helped introduce CoPilot to the world and built Microsoft’s 50th Anniversary event around AI-driven features. For Oracle, the firm developed creative and programmatic layers for Oracle AI World 2025, a massive gathering with over 60,000 attendees and a keynote by Larry Ellison.
Elsewhere, the agency embedded AI into campaigns and ecosystem tools for SHRM, which tapped INVNT as its creative and media buying agency of record; engineered a proprietary AI Music Factory for Xero that could generate full albums from voice prompts; debuted a highly awarded AI-powered Tree of Life installation at COP28 in Dubai; and developed “ABB-e,” an interactive real-time AI mascot for ABB that scaled across global events. In the luxury space, INVNT designed the AI-powered strategy and marketing campaign for Lamborghini’s final naturally aspirated Aventador, pairing it with a 1:1 supercar NFT created with Steve Aoki and Krista Kim that later sold at auction for $1.6 million through RM Sotheby’s. The agency has also pursued its own proprietary technologies, including patent-pending AI-first XR learning and engagement systems across Apple Vision Pro and other extended reality hardware.
These projects illustrate how AI has already been operating behind INVNT’s curtain. What changes with Kinney’s addition is the formalisation and centralisation of that capability into a leadership seat with direct accountability for scale, consistency, and market-facing innovation. His remit spans client work, internal acceleration, and new business development, with a mandate to help brands deploy machine learning systems that drive economic and experiential outcomes. He will report directly to Cullather, underscoring the strategic weight placed on the role.
The appointment also carries a geographical dimension. While INVNT is headquartered in the United States, its fastest-growing innovation-led region has been Asia-Pacific, where emerging technologies have been adopted earlier and with fewer legacy constraints. Laura Roberts, Managing Director for APAC at INVNT, said the expansion of AI capabilities is a natural progression given the region’s appetite for immersive and XR experiences. She noted that clients in APAC will gain access to deeper intelligence, better tooling, and more connected workflows that link regional execution with global planning. “This move gives our clients in the region access to deeper intelligence, better tools, and more connected ways of working, helping them turn ambition into real-world impact,” Roberts said, framing AI not as an abstraction but as an operational lever for economic and creative scale.
For Kinney, the cultural alignment appears to be as important as the technical opportunity. Calling INVNT an “innovation-led brandstory agency full of high performers,” he described his role as inserting AI into that ethos in a way that supports both client value and internal performance. He positioned AI not merely as a toolset but as a shared language designed to harmonise execution across borders and disciplines. “We dream big and build boldly,” Kinney said. “My role is to bring AI into that ethos, to create greater impact for our clients and drive operational acceleration for our employees around the world. We will enable global cultural alignment with clear language, shared understanding, and unified execution.”
The move also reflects broader industry dynamics. While many firms have created Chief AI Officer titles or equivalents, few have paired the role with deep creative production capabilities or a legacy in physical experience design—two areas where AI adoption is expected to reshape workflows dramatically in the coming years. The experiential sector, in particular, sits at the intersection of content, hardware, data, and logistics, making it fertile ground for generative systems, predictive modelling, and sensor-driven responsiveness. Brands have already begun experimenting with AI-powered music, environments, assistants, data visualisations, and real-time generative installations. Over time, those experiments are expected to evolve from spectacle into infrastructure.
By appointing a Global Chief AI Officer with both people-systems expertise and technical literacy, INVNT is wagering that the real unlock for AI-led creativity will come not from automation alone but from organisational coherence—the integration of tools, teams, training, and mindset under one leadership framework. In that sense, the Kinney appointment functions as both an internal operating thesis and an external market signal: AI is no longer an adjunct to brand experience, but an engine that will increasingly power how those experiences are imagined, built, and scaled.
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