Hernán Dillon Noval has a case for human judgment

Hernán Dillon Noval has spent years selling things that can be difficult to see. First came the structures of a business: the agreements, decisions and arrangements that allow people to work together. Then came digital marketing, where a client must pay for a strategy before the result arrives. Today, his subject is artificial intelligence. Once again, somebody has to explain what the machinery is supposed to accomplish.

His career offers a pleasing complication for anyone who likes a tidy professional label. The founder and CEO of ABCW is a Mexican lawyer who moved into digital marketing, assembled an agency holding company and later described plans for an app connecting sponsors with people seeking work and travel experiences. A single business card has rather a lot to answer for.

Born in Mexico City in 1987, Dillon studied law at Universidad Iberoamericana and graduated with an honorable mention. He went on to study organizational administration at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The sequence matters: legal training, then the management of organizations. Long before his public comments turned to algorithms, his education concerned the rules and coordination of people.

In 2012 he founded DTA, a corporate law firm. ABC Digital followed in 2013, offering digital marketing and information technology services. Four years later, ABC Digital, Cubos Web and Conéctanos came together to form ABCW. Its history is one of assembling capabilities across businesses. The shift from legal practice to advertising did not require him to give up his interest in how companies function.

Three letters, three verbs

ABC is an unusually modest name for a business in the attention trade. Dillon explained its appeal through the first letters of the alphabet: the foundations of communication, with the simplicity of counting one, two, three. The operating idea came down to three Spanish verbs: analizar, buscar, controlar. Analyze, search, control. One can imagine less useful instructions on an agency wall.

Behind that simplicity sat a practical sales problem. Established business owners could struggle to understand the value of digital work. Dillon described the difficulty of asking them to invest in something they felt they could not see. Winning their confidence demanded an explanation of what the work would do for their business.

His account of advising clients made room for disagreement. A customer might arrive asking for a particular service and discover, after analysis, that another would suit the business better. He said the agency should explain that difference honestly. The proposed relationship carried an advisory obligation: accepting an order was only part of the job.

That approach also appeared in ABC Digital’s description of its responsibilities to the final consumer. The agency wanted useful advertising, a client that benefited from the work and an audience that received something of value. The commercial ambition was explicit. So was the idea that a satisfactory transaction should leave more than one party pleased.

“Somos muy sinceros con nuestros clientes.”Hernán Dillon Noval

A holding company learns to cross borders

ABCW gave the combination an international purpose. The businesses brought together digital marketing, technology and creative services, with expansion beyond Mexico built into the ambition. Dillon’s wider business activity included board participation at the human resources consultancy Capital H and the property and travel platform Points 2 Be. His interests were already spreading across the practical business of employing, organizing and connecting people.

International expansion also became a personal story. In the Spanish language Hella Latin@ episode “En Búsqueda de Superación,” he discussed immigration and the challenges and achievements of taking a successful business into the United States. The subject moved beyond agency positioning to the experience of rebuilding in another market. His public LinkedIn profile lists Miami as his base.

The holding company’s own executive lineup pairs Dillon as CEO with Karla González as chief revenue officer and Guillermo Marín as chief client development officer. Those titles put distinct responsibilities beside the founder’s. The business he leads involves the continuing work of finding clients, developing relationships and turning services into revenue.

By November 2021, Dillon was describing company processes that had been fully digitized and an operation working remotely. His reflections emphasized preparation for unexpected events and careful consideration of decisions. There is an organizational theme here that runs through the geography: a company needs ways of working that travel with it.

The app with a very large ambition

In August 2023, Dillon discussed a separate project called Xperience. He said the application had been in development for roughly two years and was being tested ahead of an official launch. The proposal was to connect sponsors with people who could take on household support activities, including childcare, domestic work and handyman tasks.

His examples were both international and local. A sponsor in the United States could offer an opportunity to people in Mexico or Latin America who held visas; someone in Mexico City could also post an opportunity for people from other Mexican states. He described a financial module intended to handle payments and transfers to users’ local bank accounts.

The ambition was substantial. He wanted Xperience to become a Mexico-U.S. unicorn, with a company constituted in the United States and a Mexican creator behind it. That was the goal he set out in 2023. It belongs to the story as an aspiration, alongside the testing stage he described, rather than as a valuation or a completed business outcome.

He also identified himself in that conversation as a proud Mexican, a father and a husband. It is a brief personal glimpse inside an account otherwise filled with companies and projects. His language about Xperience joined national pride to the wish to build something used across borders. The scale of the dream was clear; the business still had work ahead.

An algorithm still needs an editor

By 2025, Dillon was publicly arguing that authenticity and empathy could not be replaced by algorithms. It is a useful position for an advertising executive to have to defend. An industry paid to help brands sound distinctive has a particular interest in what happens when producing more words becomes very easy.

His January 2026 outlook put three developments together: search engines answering questions directly, AI taking a larger operational role, and renewed value for brands with a recognizable voice. In his view, marketing teams would need to consider how they became a useful answer, how they used automated analysis and how they maintained the confidence of their audiences.

His February discussion of search added a specific caution: AI output needs human supervision and continuing review because it can contain errors. The emphasis was on understanding what a person was trying to find and producing information that answered the need. For a business built around visibility, the substance behind being visible was becoming a larger part of the argument.

In July, ABC Digital described a model pairing AI with strategic leaders, with Dillon taking the first such leadership role in the new arrangement. The division of labor was deliberate. Software could process signals and accelerate execution; a person would interpret the commercial context, the brand’s culture and the implications of a campaign. Someone would still own the decision.

Learning to explain the work

Dillon’s public activity includes explaining the trade itself. His LinkedIn articles have addressed search engine optimization and digital marketing in Colombia. The subjects move between the mechanics of discovery and the market in which a business hopes to be discovered. They fit a career that has required him to translate specialist services into something a buyer can understand.

His speaking appearances include a digital marketing conference for Prudential and a webinar for Nadro on digital security, social networks and streaming platforms. These are settings in which the executive has to make his subject legible outside the agency. There is little use in offering a sophisticated service if the person buying it cannot connect it to a problem worth solving.

His public profile also lists Google AdWords and Facebook Business Manager certifications issued in July 2017. That was the year ABCW came together. The dates place platform knowledge beside company building: the founder was assembling an organization in a field whose working tools also demanded attention. The public record contains both the executive title and the practical vocabulary of advertising accounts, search and campaigns.

The organization behind the opinion

ABCW’s September 2026 account extended that model across search, paid media and content. It described a strategic leader coordinating disciplines around one commercial objective, supported by continuous analysis. The company presented the change as a redesign of its work. The founder’s argument was consequently also a management proposition about who talks to whom and who decides.

Later that month, ABC Digital discussed its human oversight model through the perspective of revenue chief Karla González. Data supplied context, AI supplied analytical speed, and strategists interpreted the results. Bringing the revenue function into the explanation gave the idea a business destination: decisions had to connect with the client’s objectives.

Dillon’s interest in the people doing the work predates the current AI conversation. In 2020, ABC Digital described his support for younger talent and an environment where collaborators could develop their creativity. That was an ambition for the workplace, expressed alongside the agency’s ambitions for clients. The two would have to coexist in the same organization.

In March 2026, Iberoamericana included him among its alumni recognized in a list of Mexico’s 100 marketing leaders. Beside his name stood his degree: law. It is an apt detail to carry into the present. Dillon has moved through firms, agencies, a holding company and an app proposal. His latest public argument returns to responsibility for a decision. The software may be fast. The signature still belongs to somebody.