From Montblanc to Martech: Miles Chevalier on Tech, Humanity, and the Future of AI

When you speak with Miles Chevalier, you quickly realize his perspective on marketing and technology is shaped as much by human experience as it is by systems. Formerly Product Manager at Montblanc, where he led customer service systems and global workflows, Miles has spent the last several years navigating the intersection of digital platforms, change management, and marketing operations.

What’s changed recently in your beliefs about marketing and MarTech?

I came in from the DAM program with a more technical mindset. I was really passionate about the function of tools. But once you’re in the business environment, people aren’t concerned about that. They want to know: where’s my asset, is it there on time, why isn’t it?

The tech is the easy part. The difficult part is the human side—change management, guiding people through workflow changes, formats shifting. Breaking my ankle recently also shifted me—It makes you see things in a more human light. Marketing is about connecting to people, not just systems.

How does AI fit into that human + tech balance?

We don’t really know what we mean when we say ‘AI.’ Sometimes it’s just integrations being marketed as AI. But the potential is huge.

One of the best descriptions I’ve heard is: automation used to take away low-skill repetitive work, but AI is starting to automate high-skill repetitive work. That’s where the opportunity is.

But you’ve still got to be rigorous—what problem are you solving? Train the systems, compare outputs, do proper selection. AI excites me, but it’s still just another system. You need to know why you’re using it.

Do you have a “wartime story” from a project that went sideways?

No project’s gone completely sideways, but every project has challenges. The real challenge is always the human side.

During one migration someone worried they wouldn’t get the data they needed and even suggested pausing the entire process. Of course, that wasn’t feasible for the wider company. But that’s the reality—people resist because they want tomorrow to be predictable.

New systems mean things look different, and that creates panic. You need empathy to support people through that.

How should marketers balance efficiency from AI with human judgment?

If you automate too much, you risk losing the human filter. For example, I’ve used NightCafe to generate images—some of them looked better than anything I’d seen in the job. With proper training on brand assets, you could replace a lot of agency work, at lower cost and higher speed.

But you don’t boil the ocean. Start with small use cases—like aspirational imagery or text—and integrate in a controlled way.

And you still need workflows, approvals, audit trails. AI can help filter, but human approval is still key, especially with brand value at stake.

If you could give your 2018 self advice, what would it be?

I’d tell myself not to see it as purely technical. It’s also psychological. Early on, I didn’t appreciate that.

Also: really understand processes. Often people don’t actually know how they work day-to-day—they describe workflows in two or three stages when it’s really 10 or 15. Sometimes people are following steps that only exist because of a failure in a system no one uses anymore.

In transformations, don’t just adapt processes to a new system. Step back and ask: what’s the ideal way we could be working?