LONDON, 21 September 2026 – AI marketing pioneer Andy Parton has launched Destreza, an independent London consultancy, after leaving BAT. Destreza provides AI-Native Marketing Consulting to leaders in consumer businesses, helping them apply artificial intelligence to brand-building decisions, operating models and execution. Parton has more than sixteen years’ experience across commercial, customer, consumer and digital marketing for some of the world’s biggest and best consumer brands, including Guinness, Vuse and Johnnie Walker. He has spent the last seven years in senior leadership roles, working in more than sixty global markets. Parton founded Destreza in May 2026 to help brands and founders make better use of AI, from the strategic choices that shape a brand to the way the work gets done.
Parton’s record in AI marketing predates the current generative-AI cycle. At Diageo, he led the 2019 launch of What’s Your Whisky, the world’s first AI-powered whisky selector. Designed to help people navigate whisky by taste, it launched three years before ChatGPT was released and has since reached more than a million consumers worldwide. Since 2019, Parton has consistently developed and deployed AI throughout the marketing and brand-building lifecycle, from consumer insight and strategy through creative development, activation, measurement and evaluation.
Most recently, at BAT, his work spanned global brand building, premiumisation and AI-enabled marketing across the full customer journey, from awareness through conversion to retention. That work covered three next-generation nicotine brands: Vuse, the No. 1 global vape brand; Velo, the No. 2 global nicotine pouch brand; and glo. At Destreza, Parton applies that experience to the strategic and operating choices that come before any campaign or piece of content.
“AI is now everywhere in marketing, but results are not,” Parton said. “Access to AI tools is no longer a competitive advantage. Almost every marketing team can now produce more research, more ideas and more content. What separates good brands from great ones is knowing how and where to apply AI, what to believe, what to reject and which decisions must stay human. Destreza brings judgement and precision to that gap, so AI improves the quality of brand-building rather than simply multiplying the output or reducing costs. The aim is to help consumer businesses come through the AI revolution with stronger brands, not just cheaper marketing.”
Destreza runs on its own operating system, the Destreza Operating Model: specialist AI agents with one accountable senior practitioner, and an Agentic Council that reviews and sharpens every output. The agents do the research, brand and campaign strategy, creative development, evaluation and market-by-market adaptation. Parton remains responsible for diagnosis, strategic choices and the final recommendation. More can be done before an agency is involved, which can reduce cost without weakening the outcome. Destreza’s initial focus is marketing leaders facing live questions about AI operating models, brand strategy, capability and agency configuration. Engagements take three forms: Survey, a short fixed-fee diagnostic; Shift, one defined change delivered end to end; and Focus, a sustained senior partnership. In late September 2026, Destreza opens The Playbook for AI Brand Building, a ten-stage working method that gives founders and lean marketing teams a professional discipline for building their own brands.
The name comes from La Verdadera Destreza, the sixteenth-century Spanish school of swordsmanship built on strategy and precision rather than power.
About Destreza
Destreza is an AI-native marketing consultancy in London, founded in 2026 by AI marketing pioneer Andy Parton. It takes the brand-building methods used by some of the world’s biggest consumer brands, advances them with AI and offers them in two forms. For marketing leaders, it advises on where AI belongs in brand strategy, operating models, capability and agency configuration, through one accountable senior practitioner directing a proprietary network of specialist AI agents built in-house. For founders and lean marketing teams, The Playbook for AI Brand Building rebuilds that method for one person: four foundations and ten stages in over a thousand configurations, so a founder can build a brand with AI and keep every material decision. More at destreza.ai.
Media contact
Andy Parton, Founder, Destreza
destreza.ai
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E. [email protected]Additional Contact(s):
Andy Parton
Founder, Destreza
[email protected]
destreza.ai
