Through Avanti Creativo, entrepreneur Domenica Pilo is bringing marketing, artificial intelligence, and software development together to help businesses adapt to changing consumer behavior.
For Domenica Pilo, founder of Avanti Creativo, one of the biggest problems in marketing isn’t a shortage of tools or strategies. It’s that businesses are expected to keep up with an industry that rarely stands still.
A company might invest in a new website, hire someone to manage social media, and spend money on advertising, only to find that these efforts aren’t working well together because each service is managed by a different provider without a unified strategy. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is changing how customers discover businesses, evaluate products, and make purchasing decisions.
Pilo built Avanti Creativo around a different approach: bringing marketing, AI, and software development under one coordinated strategy, with the flexibility to change that strategy as technology and consumer expectations evolve.
An Entrepreneurial Career Built Around Change
Pilo’s interest in business started well before her professional career. At five, she was selling handmade bracelets to neighborhood children. By ten, she had built her first website.
As a teenager, she spent weekends experimenting with graphic design, technology, and emerging online platforms. She became particularly interested in social media as it began giving ordinary people the ability to build audiences and connect with others outside traditional professional networks.
That experience influenced how she approached marketing. Rather than treating new technology as something to adopt once everyone else had caught on, she became interested in identifying opportunities early.
Pilo later studied marketing and international business at The University of Memphis, freelanced during college, and joined a marketing agency after graduating. There, she began incorporating AI tools into her work, recognizing their potential to increase productivity without proportionally increasing overhead.
Eventually, she decided to build something herself.
Her first agency, founded with her childhood friend, reached six figures in revenue within six months, according to Pilo. The partnership ultimately ended when their business visions diverged, prompting her to pursue an independent venture.
The transition brought considerable personal and professional challenges. Pilo describes a period in which she lost all of what mattered to her, including her health, and spent months rebuilding. While developing her next agency, she also worked a sales job to finance the business, sometimes putting in 100-hour workweeks.
That period shaped the philosophy behind Avanti Creativo: businesses, like their founders, need to be capable of changing course when circumstances demand it.
Why Avanti Creativo Takes an Integrated Approach
One of Pilo’s central criticisms of conventional marketing services is how easily they become disconnected.
A business might have separate providers handling its website, search rankings, advertising, and email campaigns. Each provider may be responsible for delivering results in its own area, without necessarily considering how those efforts affect the business as a whole.
Avanti Creativo was designed to address that fragmentation.
The agency brings together specialists in SEO, content, social media, email marketing, and software development, coordinated by strategists responsible for the broader growth plan.
Instead of delivering recommendations and leaving implementation to the client, the team works on execution, testing, and adjustments over time.
Pilo also limits the number of new clients the agency accepts each quarter. The intention is to maintain enough involvement to develop strategies around each company’s needs rather than apply the same process to every account.
Her broader objective is to help businesses strengthen their company’s valuation, rather than focus exclusively on individual marketing campaigns and short-term growth.
AI Is Changing How Customers Discover Businesses
The growing role of AI in consumer research has added another dimension to Pilo’s approach.
Businesses have historically invested heavily in appearing in traditional search results. Now, potential customers can ask tools such as ChatGPT to compare providers, explain product differences, or recommend companies that meet particular requirements.
An August 2026 NielsenIQ report found that 74% of shoppers surveyed were using AI for product discovery, illustrating how quickly these tools are becoming part of the buying process.
For Pilo, this creates a new responsibility for marketers. Alongside traditional SEO, brands increasingly need to consider how their information is understood and represented by large language models, an area often described as LLM optimization.
But she doesn’t see AI visibility as a reason to abandon the fundamentals of marketing.
Her view is that technology becomes most valuable when it helps businesses understand and serve people more effectively. AI can assist with research, operations, and personalized communications, but the underlying customer relationship still depends on trust.
That distinction is central to how she believes businesses should adopt emerging technology: use it to improve the customer experience rather than simply automate more activity.
Building a Business That Can Keep Evolving
Pilo’s long-term vision for Avanti Creativo is tied to a lesson from her own career: a successful approach today may need to change tomorrow.
Her family motto, dating back to the 1600s, “HAEC OBTINUI PER EA QUAE FECI,” translates to “I obtained these things through what I have done.”
It reflects her belief that progress comes through action, experimentation, and the willingness to evolve when something no longer works.
For Avanti Creativo, that means continuing to evaluate new technology while keeping marketing, operations, and business growth connected.
Pilo’s experience building and rebuilding agencies has made adaptability more than a talking point. It is a principle that shapes how she has built her company and one she believes will become increasingly important as the marketing industry continues to evolve.
