Andrea Iorio is a renowned leadership speaker, specialising in guiding executives and teams through the complexities of digital transformation and strategic innovation.

As a columnist for MIT Technology Review Brazil, host of NVIDIA’s podcast, and former head of Tinder Latin America and CDO at L’Oréal Brazil, he merges real‑world tech insights with leadership acumen. His bestselling books — 6 Competências para Surfar na Transformação Digital, Meta‑Leadership, and Metanoia Lab — have shaped the global conversation on future-ready leadership.

In this exclusive interview with Champions Speakers Agency, Andrea explores how leaders can harness AI, customer-centric strategies, and antifragility to drive resilient growth in the era of Web3 and beyond.

You introduced the concept of “invisible marketing” during your time at Tinder. Can you explain what it entails and how it’s reshaping modern brand-consumer relationships?

So, I used to work at Tinder. I was the head of Tinder, the dating app, for five years in Latin America. 

I launched the app and I made Brazil the second biggest market in the world. And invisible marketing is a marketing framework that I actually developed and applied at Tinder at that age — namely, it was around 2014, that’s when we launched in Latin America. 

And it was a model with this provocative term invisible marketing. It sounds counterintuitive because marketing wants your brand and your product to actually appear and be visible. 

But the truth is that I felt the traditional marketing strategies were too pushy and too disconnected with what users and customers wanted today — namely, something very organic, something very personalised, something that didn’t feel like a transactional push. And so, I developed this framework that is based on three big pillars, and it actually became one of my best-selling keynotes. 

First of all, invisible marketing is a new marketing framework that is based first on selling experiences and not products and services, right? And so, I pivot people away from this very transactional view of marketing — that is, that, you know, we should sell and push a product and create the need for that — through: let’s craft an experience and make a sale out of it. 

But eventually, through an experience, you just retain and make your customers more loyal to your brand. They, you know, you produce awareness, they can experience your product and service. And so, the experience is like an opening door. It’s not pushy, it’s immersive and so makes the customer feel much better about your product and service. 

The second pillar of invisible marketing is hyper-personalisation, right? So, we live in a world of data and so we need to use that data in order to personalise the experience for our customer. Otherwise, again, it will feel too visible, too pushy. 

And so, an invisible marketing is a marketing that is so personalised that basically people don’t even feel this is marketing, but this is just a way to solve their own problems. And so again, the more we implement digital journeys in our relationship with our customer, the more data we collect. 

And so, it’s like a snowball effect — the more data, the more we can personalise. And the third point is by, again, pivoting away from transactional relationships towards conversational experiences, right? And so, conversation is very important because again, traditional marketing would always be one way, right? 

Would be the company communicating their message to the customer and trying to convince him or her that it was worth the purchase. Now it’s almost the opposite — brands should listen to their customers. And so, that’s why we need conversations. Conversations are two-way. 

And so, this is much more based on, you know, communities rather than just on basically individual transactions. And so, I think these three points are very important. Again, focusing on experiences, hyper-personalisation, and basically on conversations. 

And so, this marketing — this invisible marketing—is much smoother, almost invisible again, doesn’t feel like marketing. And eventually, the result is that it maximises retention and loyalty of your customers, which is eventually the most important metric whenever you look at your business in the long term.

The idea of antifragility challenges traditional notions of resilience. How do you define antifragility in leadership today, particularly in the age of AI and automation?

So, antifragility is this term made popular by the economist Nassim Taleb, thanks to his book about leaders and organisations being antifragile whenever they strengthen themselves through chaos and very hard situations. 

But I actually made some adjustments to this term in my book and I actually came up with the term antifragility to define an ability of leaders to actually learn through their mistakes and to improve their business and organisations through that. So, it’s very much correlated to the, again, ability to deal with mistakes. 

My thesis is that in the world of technology and AI, actually we should outsource to AI, again, in technology, everything that it does better —namely, efficiency and productivity and, you know, repetition of very familiar tasks. And that’s where AI will minimise dramatically the amount of mistakes we make in organisations. Why? Because again, it is more efficient and productive than us. 

We humans make mistakes, even whenever we do tasks that we’re very familiar with — AI doesn’t, or at least, you know, makes a very minimal amount of mistakes. 

Now, whenever we basically outsource to AI all of that, we humans — leaders and employees and workers — should actually take advantage of that and experiment more. 

Experiment more in the unfamiliar domain of business, where innovation stems from. And so, the more we experiment, as much as scientists, the more we make mistakes. And so, what becomes the differentiator is our ability to learn through those mistakes. And this is what I define as antifragility in my book. 

It is the ability again to extract the most value through mistakes. And so, you know, it’s one step beyond resilience, right? Very much often we hear about, you know, the necessity of companies being resilient. But I challenge this vision. 

Resilience comes from the Latin word resiliere — and as a good Italian, I know it well — which means to get back to a normal state after a mistake, after a failure. We don’t want to get back on track. We want to actually improve and become even better. 

And so, as much as, you know, resilience is one step after fragility, antifragility is two steps after because it’s even more than being resilient. It is about being able to extract the most value through mistakes and to evolve and improve as leaders and organisations.

Digital transformation is often discussed broadly, but how do its effects vary between B2C and B2B sectors — and where do you see the greatest long-term impact?

So, digital transformation, of course, is a term used for many technologies and the impact that they have on businesses of all sorts. But we have, again, to differentiate some of their impacts. 

And so, the first thing that we have to notice is that usually the adoption of new technologies and digital transformation — including AI technologies — usually starts in B2C sectors. And why B2C sectors? Because they’re the ones that are closest to the end consumer. 

And usually, change in the demand for new technologies, for new experiences, for new products and services, always starts from the end consumer. 

And so, for example, sectors like retail, banking or financial services, again, are sectors that usually start off in the adoption of new technologies earlier on than B2B sectors, such as, I don’t know, mining, pharma, and so on. 

But look at how interesting — the big impact of digital transformation exactly lies in B2B sectors. And why? Because that’s where the biggest opportunity lies. 

Again, being consumer-facing, you are more reactive to change and therefore you have a bigger sense of urgency of reinventing your business through technology and digital transformation. 

But then, when most of your competitors are doing the same, well, your differentiator becomes, I don’t know, the experience that you provide, and so on. It’s not only the digital transformation. 

Now, B2B sectors — that’s where digital transformation, the early adopters of digital transformation, gain the most competitive advantage. And so, there’s a great Deloitte report from their team in Australia that is called Short Fuse, Big Bang. And so, what does it mean? 

Well, actually it was Long Fuse, Big Bang — namely, B2B sectors take longer to accelerate their digital transformation. But the bang they get eventually, the explosion of it, the impact of it in their industry and sector, is usually bigger than in B2C sectors.

This exclusive interview with Andrea Iorio was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Motivational Speakers Agency.

• Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash.