Jonathan Courtney, Head of Digital, AKA (London, U.K.)

Jonathan Courtney is Head of Digital for AKA, a specialist marketing agency for theatre, live entertainment, and the wider arts and culture sector. He leads a team of more than 60 specialists across Digital Media, Product Development, and Data and Insights, working with clients including Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, ABBA Voyage, British Film Institute, and Southbank Centre.

Over the past year, Jonathan has led AKA's research into how generative AI is reshaping the way audiences discover cultural experiences, drawing on the agency's UK and US Culture Insights and Show and Tell panels of more than 100,000 people. His current focus is helping cultural leaders protect the direct relationship between institutions and their audiences as more of that relationship is mediated by automated systems.

Bridging the Gap: Audience Discovery, Trust, and First-Party Data in the Age of AI

Cultural discovery is being mediated by AI faster than most institutions can track. Audiences who once arrived through a search result are increasingly meeting cultural organisations through summaries written by systems they do not yet fully trust. Institutional visibility is rising, but the click-throughs and the direct relationships that have always sustained the sector are harder to build and harder to measure.

This session is built on audience research with thousands of respondents across AKA's UK and US panels, with fresh waves of fieldwork running into the weeks before the conference. The data tracks how audiences are using AI for cultural decisions, what they trust, what they avoid, and how those answers are shifting over time. Audiences are curious about AI and reaching for it for convenience, but they still anchor their decisions in people and institutions they already know.

For cultural leaders, the practical question is shifting. It is less about how to win AI search and more about how to maintain a direct relationship with an audience that increasingly encounters you through intermediaries you do not control. As the discovery layer becomes more automated, the bridge between an institution and its audience has to be one the institution itself owns. The session looks at what our audience research tells us about changing customer behaviour and what that means for our industry.

Attendees will leave with a clear read on what is shifting, what is steady, and where to focus institutional effort over the next year.