Ikea's CMO: LLMs Now Treat Annual Reports as Brand Copy

Large language models do not distinguish between an ad campaign and an annual report. That single technical behavior is now a brand problem, according to Ikea's global CMO.

Vincenzo Riili, global CMO of Ikea Retail, said the scope of brand management has expanded beyond controlled communications into everything an LLM might ingest when a consumer asks about the company.

"It's not only about communication anymore, it's also about other elements that go and get fed into the algorithm," Riili told Digiday in an interview arranged by Dentsu.

The interview was set up around Dentsu's annual CMO survey.

What does this change for brand teams?

Ask an LLM a question about a retailer and it pulls from a wide set of documents. The source material includes:

• The company's website and product pages
• Press coverage from third parties
• Financial filings and investor documents
• Any other indexed text about the business

The models show little regard for who wrote what. An earnings release and a brand campaign carry equal weight in the response.

For marketers, this widens the brand to every word written about the company. Much of that text comes from sources who have never seen a brand book. A journalist, an analyst, a regulator — all of them now contribute to how a model describes the retailer.

Why does it matter now?

The shift is structural, not cosmetic. Traditionally, brand teams controlled a defined set of channels: ads, packaging, owned media. The annual report lived with investor relations. Press coverage lived with communications.

LLMs collapse those boundaries. Even the annual report functions as brand copy as far as the models are concerned, because the algorithm does not separate it from the campaign.

That means documents written for entirely different audiences — investors, regulators, journalists — now shape consumer-facing answers. Riili's framing suggests brand strategy can no longer stop at the edge of the marketing department's output.

How should practitioners read this?

Riili's comment points to a broader implication for marketing leaders. If models draw equally from filings, press mentions and product pages, then brand consistency becomes a cross-functional task rather than a communications task.

The CMO survey context matters here. Dentsu's annual survey gathers views from top marketing officers, and Riili's position reflects a concern rising among that group: the inputs to AI-generated answers are wider than the inputs to any campaign a brand has ever run.

Ikea has not announced specific tooling, guidelines or budget shifts tied to this view, according to the available statements. The CMO's remarks describe the problem space rather than a rolled-out program, so practitioners should treat this as a strategic signal, not a confirmed operational change.

What is confirmed: Riili sees LLMs as the newest terrain where a brand has to hold its line, and he said so on the record to Digiday.

As more consumers get brand information from model-generated answers rather than web pages, expect more CMOs to push for control over documents that marketing teams never previously owned.