Ikea's global CMO says large language models have expanded the brand to every word written about the company — including its annual report. "It's not only about communication anymore, it's also about other elements that go and get fed into the algorithm," Vincenzo Riili, global CMO of Ikea Retail, told Digiday in an interview arranged by Dentsu around its annual CMO survey.

Riili's point is structural, not rhetorical. LLMs don't separate the ad campaign from the investor documents. Ask one a question about a retailer and it pulls from the company's site, product pages, press coverage and financial filings with little regard for who wrote what.

Why does that change the CMO's job?

For marketers, that widens the brand to every word about the company. Much of it comes from sources who have never seen a brand book. The annual report, in Riili's framing, is brand copy now — at least as far as the LLMs are concerned.

That puts a new burden on functions that marketers historically didn't control. Investor relations, product page copy and third-party press coverage all now feed the same retrieval pipeline that shapes how a chatbot answers a question about Ikea. The brand's line has to hold in places the brand team never wrote.

What did Riili actually say?

Riili made the comments to Digiday in an interview set up by Dentsu around the agency network's annual CMO survey. His core quote:

"It's not only about communication anymore, it's also about other elements that go and get fed into the algorithm."

The framing is blunt: the inputs that shape machine-generated answers about a brand are broader than the inputs marketers have traditionally managed. Communication is one element among many that "go and get fed into the algorithm."

What's the so-what for brand teams?

The practical implication is that brand governance can't stop at the campaign brief. If an LLM synthesizes its answer about a retailer from filings, product pages and press coverage, then each of those surfaces is now part of the brand's public face — whether or not anyone in marketing signed off on them.

For a company of Ikea's scale, that means the CMO's remit logically stretches toward documents and channels that sit outside the marketing department. The alternative is letting unmanaged copy define the brand inside the systems more consumers are turning to for answers.

Riili's message positions LLMs as the newest place a brand has to hold its line — and the brands that treat every corporate word as brand copy will be the ones that hold it.