Name: The AI-Era CMO: Leading Teams Through the Biggest Shift Since Digital
Uploaded: 2026-09-16T17:01:12.173Z
Duration: 45 min
Description: The AI-Era CMO: Leading Teams Through the Biggest Shift Since Digital

Transcript for "The AI-Era CMO: Leading Teams Through the Biggest Shift Since Digital": Hello, everyone. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you for joining us and joining this AI Marketing Alliance session on the AI Era CMO. This is, like, you know, the new wave of things. So, we're I'm excited to be here. I am not your typical host. That's typically Alex Bleeker, who's the head of community for AIMA. You're stuck with me, unfortunately. Hopefully, that's okay with you all. My name is Anand Patel. A lot of people just call me AP, and I lead product marketing at Goldcast as well as Cvent for our, digital events and webinar solutions. And I'm happy to be here with you all because this is a a super interesting topic. Before we get into things, your typical, housekeeping, you know, for any webinar or that you join, please use the chat. It's on the right hand side. Talk to each other. Again, this is a community. That community means chatting with each other, learning from each other, so please do that. There's also a q and a section on the right hand side. Ask questions for myself or our speaker, Robin. You know, the whole opportunity here is to learn. So definitely ask upvote questions if you wanna you know, if it's a question that you feel like you wanna learn the answer to as well. And the intention here is to spend at least maybe ten, fifteen minutes at the very end to go into q and a. So please do that. And as I mentioned, like, I'm I'm very excited about this session specifically because it's it's interesting, and it's just extremely relevant to where we are in kind of in this kind of new wave and transition in the marketing world. Right? How AI is changing the marketing org, how like, the type of skills are needed during this transformation, and what leadership looks like as we go through this evolution. And so I'm excited to be joined today by Robin Daniels who has put a lot of thought on this topic. He's currently the chief business officer at Zensai. It's such a AI powered human success company. He's a previous, three time CMO. He's hold it held a marketing leadership roles at some companies you may or may not heard of. You know, Matterport, WeWork, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box, you name it. But outside of work, Robin is an avid runner and a soft described movie nerd. And so I'm gonna welcome up Robin to the to the stage, and I'm gonna ask you Robin, once you get here, the question I'm gonna ask you is what are the three movies that you'd you'd always just keep watching if you had no choice and you you couldn't watch anything else? So we'll bring Robin up here. I got I got I'm I'm figuring this out as we go. Hey, AP. First of all, you're doing a. great as a sub. It's good to see you. So I think you got. to I think Alex has to look out for his job, you know, as host here because you you're nailing this so far. It's great to be here. it. I appreciate it. So so my favorite movie is that what you're asking? The the movies that I always kinda. go to? let's say you're on a, you know you know, a desert. island situation where you you can only bring three movies with you. It's not a book. It's a movie. But, like, you know, you can only pick three movies. Which which which are your top three? Okay. That's great. I would say Interstellar. I love it. It always like, amazing epic storytelling, and I love epic storytelling. And it's, like, it's both, like, exciting, but it also certainly pulls at the heartstrings. I would say I love Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Actually, all of the Indiana Jones early movies are just so great. Just like pure. pure entertainment. And then I'm a huge fan of the Marvel movies, honestly. I just saw, you. know, the new Spider Man. I thought that was awesome. I mean, I don't know if I that would make my top 10 top 20 list, but just in terms of pure enjoyment and and, entertainment, I loved it. I loved every minute of of that movie. Nice. That's a a little bit cheating. Just taking the whole franchise versus a single movie, but, you know, it's like, I'll let it slide. I I I enough. my top three is tough, but I know my top one. Ever since I was young, it's been The Goonies. So The Goonies will have to come with me wherever I go. I love that a it's a. great movie. and the audience audience, please, put your top movie or top three movies in the chat. We always it's always fun to see that. But, Robin, thank you for joining us. Before we go into this conversation, I'd love for you to just kinda share a little bit more about yourself. Yeah. No. It's I've been really honored to be here, and and it's funny to be part of a an event that's called, you know, the AI Era CMO when I'm a don't even have a CMO title anymore. Though I do run marketing just so so everyone understands. So that's why I'm here. I, I basically get I mean, I'm from Copenhagen Denmark. It's where I am right now, but I spent half my life in The US working in Silicon Valley at some of the companies that you mentioned. You know, I moved over to California at age 21. Didn't have a job. Didn't have a place to stay. Never been. Just wanted to always go and make something of my life. I love the way technology can impact the way we work and we live, and I and I just wanted to be part of the magic that was happening in Silicon Valley. And it still happens in Silicon Valley. I'm very impressed with just a lot of stuff that's happening there. Always loved technology, and I think we're I've gone through a lot of different phases of technology in my career, obviously, having spanned, you know, all these different companies you mentioned from Salesforce to Box to LinkedIn to WeWork to Matterport and now at Sensei. I've seen the kind of the Internet revolution and how that changed the way we worked and we lived. I've seen the mobile revolution, and now, of course, we're in the AI era. And that's also fundamentally changing everything. And, you know, of course, there are days when I'm as, kinda exhausted and overwhelmed as everybody else, but then I'm also really bullish on the what it can do for us and the way we just can optimize work so we can show up and do the best work of our lives, focusing on our gifts that we have, as humans. So so really excited by that. But I I love technology. I love marketing, and, I'm still still very much passionate about about what we can do together. Awesome. That's a a great intro and a great kind of transition into the topic overall. Right? Because there's a lot of change happening. And as marketers, as marketing leaders, there's a lot of evolution that has to come with that. And so I wanna start with just, like, the obvious. Right? AI is impacting marketing and marketing teams. It feels. like based on everything you see on LinkedIn and out in the world, like, cloud is basically becoming, like, the operating system for a lot of marketing teams as well. Right? Like, it's not always cloud, but that's the one everyone keeps talking about. But I'd love to kind of hear from you as AI is becoming more, like, ingrained and more, like, embedded. into marketing teams. Which roles are potentially, like, changing the fastest or the earliest in this transition? Mhmm. I think to to me, it starts with kind of a a simple kind of mission around where I think AI is super strong today. And I think of it this way. I think AI will disrupt anything to do with kinda hard skills. Honestly, it already has. AI can synthesize data faster, better than most humans can do. Right? And and it can probably come to conclusions around, you know, looking at different datasets or whatever it is and and and and help guide you in a certain direction better than anything. AI certainly is not there when it comes to soft skills yet. That means, you know, the the empathy, the compassion, the understanding of when you've had a conversation with a customer, the, collaboration, the communication that's kind of required to do great work every single day. And so I started with it that way and think, okay. Where where where can we point AI as as effectively as possible towards some of the things that it it is really optimized for? And, of course, that that's a lot of the hard skills, but it's also a lot of the skills that end up just becoming very repetitive because we we look at this frequently in marketing. You know? A lot of the data that we have to look look we we oftentimes, you know, in a modern marketing organization, you run marketing based on a lot of the data signals that you have. Now you can get that faster and the insights faster than ever, from from from from, of course, using a a good platform. Cloud is one of them, but there's many other platforms you can use. I don't think it I'm a little tired of the conversation around which platform because I feel like they're all kinda converging in some ways. I think you can choose whichever one is the best one for you. But then if when it comes to kind of the the soft skills, I think that's where the humans humans really really shine. So that's kind of the high level over. Then when it comes to kind of the the details of that, I think the way you set up your marketing team has to be kind of very different in the future than what it has been in the past. I think a lot of it is like you have to have some people within the marketing organization who really fundamentally understands how to guide, AI agents. Right? And you have to treat them nearly as team members. Like like like, if you hire somebody new on your team, you have to give them direction. You have to to to train them. You have to continually train them. You have to give them new goals all the time and so on. But you have to have, I think, some engineers in the team as well who understands how to do that and how to set up the agents for success or how do you use AI in in the maximum way. Because but like any other platform, if you ask an a a question or you wanna get some some kind of info out of it and you're not specific enough, you'll kinda get something average. It might sound like okay on the surface, but when you dig deeper and, like, what it's actually saying, it's it's it doesn't really mean anything. Right? So you have to be very specific with it. And it comes back to kinda I think it's something that's very fundamental in any high performing team, which is everything starts with clarity. As you gotta have clarity around what it is that you're trying to do. And AI can either enhance that clarity if you're really clear about what it is that you're trying to do. But if you're not clear, then adding AI to an unclear process or an unclear goal just adds more chaos, actually. So I think we have a lot of it starts with there. And can you use AI to get to that point of clarity? Absolutely. You know? Maybe you're not a 100% clear on what ICP you should be going after or, what what your what features you should be building or how you should communicate your message in the most effective. So AI can be used a lot to to help with that, but clarity real is really where it starts a lot. So I I think when I think about the future organization of of marketing, you have kind of, an AI expertise layer. You can call it GTM engineering if you want. I think that's a common term out there, but you can also just think of it as people who really know AI very, very well. Nearly more of an engineering mindset in some ways. You know, they they have to know a little bit of marketing, I think, just to understand your operating system of how marketing is and the different disciplines, but they don't have, like, have to be experts within these different differences disciplines. Then I think you have to figure out, k, what kind of business are you in? I think if you're in b to c versus b to b, that changes a little bit about maybe the skill set and the domains that you hire for. I think in b to b, for example, I know you're in product marketing, AP. That's not really as common oftentimes in in a b to c organization, then it's more brand related roles that they have. But you have to have somebody who owns, kind of the the core orchestration of of making all of this happen, launching products, launching campaigns, and so on. I think a lot of that sits with the person or the people who own the storytelling, the brand behind it, the the the messaging behind it. Again, and that's a little bit different for company to company. And then I would and then I think you have, like, a a a domain of creative folks as well that you have to absolutely keep. And the reason why I'm so passionate about this here, and I'm I'm really leaning into this here in our team as well is, we live in this golden age of storytelling. And I think there's so many great opportunities to tell the story about who you are, what you do, what you stand for, what your company does. You can use TikTok, and you can use LinkedIn. You can use Instagram, podcast, whatever it is. The downside of being in this golden age of storytelling is that, there's so much noise out there. It's just very overwhelming. And so the way you break through is you have to have courage in the storytelling that you do. And this is, I think, is still very much a human domain. So I'm leaning into the creativity of of humans because I think that's where we gain an an advantage. So meaning, I think humans will do of other going to be the ones that will come up with the very unique, provocative point of view that's going to get somebody to respond to your message. Because if you have an average message, which I think, again, AI is very good at, you're never gonna break through. You have to have some edges to it. You have to make people super excited or even have to piss people off. That's also sometimes okay, but you just have to have a point of view. And then and then I think so the creative domain is is of course, then you can use AI to scale that creativity. Make it it can sell you in different versions of your ad or your you know, what you post online. And once you have that core nugget, but I would not outsource that to to any AI platform. Maybe one day, but I from what I've seen so far, I I don't trust it enough to to nail that. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm very aligned on that, especially, like, the soft skill, hard skill piece of it. And as a product marketer, a big part of what I do is around the storytelling. What's. the how we positioning the product, the feature. And this was like I had this, like, weird moment just a few months ago where I was, like, working with Claude. I'm like, hey. How do we position this? And I'm like, asking all these questions, and I'm like like, this is my bread and butter. Like, this is what differentiates Mhmm. me as a as a marketer out in the wild, and I'm trying to now. outsource that to Claude. And like you said, it's just gonna give you positioning is about differentiation. Mhmm. Claude or any AI is not gonna give you a differentiation. It's gonna pull from what it already knows. Right? And so, That's right. That's your. point, a lot of this as marketers, like, we have this innate, like, ability to create uniqueness and and differentiation, Mhmm. right, in the way that we deliver on things. And so we need to hold on to that to some extent as well, not just outsource it to to the AI. Yeah. I mean and then creativity comes from, like, so many different interesting areas. Sometimes it's when you're least expected. You're sitting in a conversation with somebody and somebody something weird pops into your head. That's creativity. Or you're out there going for a walk and suddenly something pops into your head. Right? So creativity is not something that can be forced in that same way oftentimes, at least the moments of serendipity. And so so I think I think definitely creativity is something that that you can, like, figure out a way to cultivate and, again, use AI to amplify that because, of course, you should. I mean, like, when we think about the way we set up our our operating system here at at Sensei and, again, for those who don't know who we are, we're about 200 people. We sell, you know, b to b software in the HR, space, basically. So we're not a huge marketing team. And but we have, like, a creative team. And then we use, you know, certainly our AI platform to figure out, like, how do we scale that? How do we write then content? How do we scale the content out into get silly different pieces? How do we figure out the creative part of it and so on? But the creativity starts really with us, as a core. And I'm very, like, adamant that the team should not outsource this. Because, again, sometimes I see stuff, and I'm just like, I can just tell AI wrote this. It has it has lots to say, but no soul. And you're like, how do you think our customers are gonna respond to this? Right? And and, ultimately, it's about creating a connection with a customer. You're you're trying to elicit an emotion, and you're trying to get people to fall in love with you ultimately. I know love is not often a word we use in in selling software, but, ultimately, that's what you're trying to do. You want people to love who you are, what you stand for, and I think that comes from uniquely a human place, as well. Yep. So, yeah, so so so that's that's absolutely where I think you you should be going. But then there's also the the other part is the orchestration layer as well, which I think is a key thing that we're working on here. So so we're taking because marketing, of course, is a key part of the GTM mission, but it doesn't live in isolation either. It lives alongside sales and customer success and support and even product and so on. We're creating this orchestration layer where we're taking all the different data signals across the entire GTM funnel or a machine, and putting them into kind of a unified, you know, brain so we can query that and get much better and faster insights without having to go through kind of, you know, the system and that system. And like any other system that has been around for a while or any other company that's been around for a while, we have lots of different platforms. Right? So our data is, like, a little bit all over the place. And if you ask one system, you know, something using their AI because they all, of course, have added AI on top of theirs their platforms, then you get a very, like, skewed answer. The goal is to get a much clearer answer. And I think this is, again, where AI is imminently much better at doing this because it can look at all this data and give me something that's really unique that I can use to go push the team in a certain direction. Yeah. That that makes sense. And as we think, like, as marketers, as we think about, like, the evolution, and our role in this evolution with AI becoming such an embedded piece of our workflows. As you mentioned, like, the way that you kinda see the marketing org changing is that, you know, maybe the some of the hard skills get kind of offloaded to AI, at least in the short term, hopefully, maybe in the even in the long term to some extent. Right? But then you're bringing in, like, these layers of, like, AI g like, GTM engineers who can help kind of facilitate a lot of this stuff. I I guess from from your perspective of, like, people are in, like, varying stages of how comfortable they are with AI currently. Right? And from my experience, Uh-huh. like, growth with AI requires a lot of hands on kind of effort and tinkering versus just, like, having a one off training nest. for the most part. So what from your perspective, like, what does continuous upscaling, like, development look like as you continue to develop and grow your AI innate abilities and skills? Great quest first of all, it starts at the top. I think you as a leader, if anybody who's listening here, you have to model the behavior you wanna see in the rest of your team. So you have to be a superuser of it. And how do you become a superuser? You have to use it. I mean, so it's not like I don't know, AP, if you've ever, I don't know you with SuperWell, but if you've ever gone for a run, like, you don't you don't run a marathon by going on one. run. You have to, like, you have to, like, do it over and over and over again or try to, like, you know, eat healthier. Like, one one good meal is not gonna, like, change your life. You gotta make it a habit. And the way you do that is, like, you make it consistent. So so the the way you have to kinda scale that is figure out a way where you integrate it into your workflow. So you're using it hopefully every day, but if not even every day, maybe at least two, three, four times a week so it becomes a habit. It's very rare for something to stick if you use it once a week, once every two weeks, once a month, and so on. So there are ways you can do that. You can certainly think about what parts of your job can get better by using AI, which parts of your job are tedious, Which parts of your job are you do you feel like you're doing over and over again? Which parts of your job are you kinda answering the same things? Which parts of your job are are the ones where you feel like you're not really adding much value, but you're just kinda, like, going through the motions? These are usually good questions to ask yourself to figure out what parts of your job can you use AI for. And once you figure that out and you actually get really good at using AI, then you can also really figure out how to lean into the skills that you have. Because every human being, I think, have a unique set of skills that can be applied to the field that you're in, or maybe you move to a new field. But but in terms of just, like, learning how to operate that, it really starts with, like, making it a habit. So one one of the things that I've done, for example, just to make it a little bit concrete, I've been in marketing for many, many years, and and there's some things I'm really good at. I think I'm a good storyteller, good product marketing. I came up through the ranks of product marketing. Good at building brands and category incomes. I'm not always the most fluent when it comes to, numbers and data and so on. I always feel like it's just, for some reason, it doesn't stick as much. I mean, I can do it enough to be dangerous, but I'm not like a rev ops genius in any way or marketing op genius. So, for example, I created an agent, that goes in and takes all our different data sources, and then every day, tests me, on my data. You know? Because and the and the reason why is because I learn well through quizzes. I love games. You know? A lot of times with my family or my friends, we play games. We play quizzes or whatever. I love going to a good pop quiz or something like that. And I just thought, if I'm gonna learn this, if I just sat down and looked at a spreadsheet and tried to remember some of these different numbers, it's not gonna stick in my brain. And and I figured this is a great way to use AI, but also make it a daily habit. So every day, you know, my agent pings me and says, here, three questions. No more than three because I don't want it to be overwhelmed. And this kinda comes in with, what do you think is the answer to this question? It gives me, like, multiple choice, and I can kinda come back. And it, over time, helps me learn that AI is there as a kind of a a superpower that you can that I can use to uplevel and upskill myself. And I think there's so many ways that you could do that, you know, yourself as well. Just go find out what it is that you're not good at and try to find a playful, fun way to learn that. So I would I would absolutely. do that. But but the the key thing is you gotta just make it a daily habit as you can. And if not daily, two, three, four times a week. I don't know about you, AP. I mean, I finally kinda like in the beginning, of course, everyone goes into this little grudgingly, but now I'm I'm, like, I'm kinda AI peeled. I use it all the time. I I can't really do my. job as well without. it. Right? I agree. I mean, I mean, I'm using AI every day for something. Right? Mhmm. I. I I could probably do a better job of creating more systems around it, and I do have certain things that, you know, trigger. every week, every day, etcetera. Your example is a really good one because not only are you using it to learn AI, but you're then using AI to then learn other things about the business and continue. to kinda. Mhmm. That's yourself just generally. as well. So that's. like a a a an amplification of learning, right, which is. That's. right. That's right. Yeah. But. but something you mentioned earlier, it's something like it's it's top of mind. And for me, like, I I'll lead our product marketing. team here at Goldcast. It's a small team, but at the same time, like, we we need to I wanna make sure they're learning AI. They're developing for their careers just in general, right, whether it's here or somewhere. else. Yep. And, like, a marketing leader plays an important. role in that. And so, like, how do you build that culture? You had mentioned earlier, like, Mhmm. show and tell. Like like, show, don't just tell. Like, do do it yourself. Right? But, Mhmm. like, how do you build the culture of, like, experimentation and, Mhmm. like, putting some right systems in place? Like, how do. you. encourage great. that? Yeah. So first of all, I'm I'm I'm also a strong belief that you learn much better by doing. Like like, just reading about it and seeing other people, like, cool YouTube videos, it can inspire you. Absolutely. And you should absolutely go and look at some of those cool YouTube videos, Instagram videos about how to use AI. But at some point, it it only really sticks, I think, when you start using it. It's kinda like, you learn much better by, the the the emotional connection to learning is much higher when you actually apply it. I think that's been proven many times why, you know, the the the school setting oftentimes in the in the classes where you're actually doing the stuff, you know, you don't just, like, take something to get to do something. It sticks a lot more. But then in terms of, like, how do you spread it then? How do you inspire others? I think that's that's a great example a great question. You can do show and tells. You know? And we have, for example, there's many ways you can do that. You can either do that in your all hands meetings. I'm sure, you know, you at Goldcast probably do all hands marketing meetings. Maybe you do all hands meetings as the whole company as well like we do. And we talk about these great examples of people who have absolutely done something groundbreaking with AI. But we also share in our channels. We have our internal channels where we just kinda share amazing examples, and show how other people can do it as well because then again, that shares the the knowledge a little bit. And and, ultimately, what what you're trying to get to, and I'm very convinced of this, is, you're trying to get to an moment. And everyone it it you can't really force it, but you can encourage it. And the moment that can come from the weirdest moment when you're using it, when you finally realize that this is becoming a force multiplier for your job and your life. But you can you can try to encourage it by examples, by sharing. You can, of course, also send people on classes. You can also have them take learning, you know, send them on learning courses and so on. All valuable as well, but I still think, nothing beats, like, you sitting down, trying to build your own agent in Claude or or Gemini or Copilot or whatever it is that you use. Try to figure out again, asking yourself those questions. What part of my job can I can I automate? Just try to build something. And even if the first version of what you build is not great, it's better than nothing because you have to at some point. If you really wanna make AI work for you, you have to move beyond prompting. And I think most people are still very much using it for prompting. Nothing wrong with that. But AI really becomes a force multiplier when it's doing work for you twenty four seven without you getting involved. I mean, that's kind of what we were promised, you know, when we had the big chat TBT moment in 2022 is that it was gonna work for us all the time. And I think we're just getting to the point where it's actually much easier to make. And beforehand, you know, a couple years ago, it was kinda nerdy. You had to really, like, be specific. It was a little hard to set up. He said, now, honestly, you can go ahead and set up an agent in a few seconds, and it it works for you all the time. It never gets tired or any way like that. So I think it's a it's a really key thing to start to. The way I've done it myself personally is just I go in and I I built a bunch of different agents that simplify my job. And I have something, you know, obviously, that's, like I I call it Robin's daily focus. Based on all the messages I have, all the data that I'm seeing, all the emails that I have, what's the priorities that I've set up for for the business? What should I focus on today? And and, you know, doesn't mean that I have to follow it a 100%. No. But I just, like, wanna wanna see and make sure that I get to a point where I'm focusing on the right things. Because nothing is worse, or you lose motivation so fast when you get to the end of the week. And you're like, god. I really feel busy, and I work my ass off, but I don't really know if I made a difference towards the goals that I have. Right? You you we've all had those. weeks, and I still have them every now and then. Super demotivating. So if you can use AI to, like, get really hyper focused on the things that matter, you can you can become a superhuman. Yeah. I mean, I I agree. Like, I have a an agent or you wanna call it that, you know, every day, we'll be like, hey. Here's here's the main things. My inbox on my Slack gets crazy sometimes, but, like, don't. worry about it. at all. Here's, like, the three or four thing you definitely need to go look at and respond to. Right? Mhmm. But we. also Mhmm. I've I've set up an agent where, at least for my product marketing team, every week, it sends it it goes through the the transcripts of recent sales and customer calls and be like, here's three things about, you know, the the customer that you should be aware of. Like, just giving us more. opportunity to learn about the customer and have that customer voice. And then Reagan mentioned in the chat, Reagan's on the Goldcast team of, like, we did this AI hackathon Olympics thing where we split up into teams, and we worked as teams to, like, come up with an idea, for our marketing team. And I think for for me, what I noticed about that is it opened people's eyes of, like, oh, I didn't realize you can do this with, like we use Glean, sometimes here, and with it, Steven and and Goldcast. So, like, and they realize you can do this with Glean, and, like, it kinda opens up their imagination of what's Mhmm. right, Mhmm. just by working. in a team setting and seeing, like, you know, you know, that's, like, that's not all on you to figure out how to use AI. Right? You're working together, No. and. now you're opening. up your mind to what's possible. So there's definitely, a lot of fun ways. But to your point, like, it it's all about just, like, doing it every day, just going in there, setting up something, trying something new. And that's how you learn and kinda grow and expand. So, I I'm. definitely. Yeah. aligned with that. One one thing I'd love to learn from you is just like this the AI is obviously AI, but there's a human element to this transformation. Right? And I'd love to understand, like, how do you balance, like, the try Mhmm. like, the pushing people to become AI driven and make this AI driven change versus, like, balancing that with just the general trust and safety dynamics. Right? Your role's changing. Your workflows are shifting. There's a lot of change management happening. There's. mandates coming from everywhere. Use AI. Do this. Right? So, like, how do you find that right balance of pushing your team to become use to use more AI, become. more, like, AI focused, but also, like, the understanding of, like, the human elements behind what this change could mean? Mhmm. Yeah. It's it's it's interesting because, of course, there's a lot of worry and fear out there, and I get I mean, I read the headlines like like everybody else. I mean, the the best you can do is you try to to to tell the team that, AI is going to become a key part of how we operate. And each person's role is to figure out how you make it can parts of the job that you're doing more scalable. And the way we've done it at Sensei is and we very clearly said we're we're gonna continue to scale the business, but we're not gonna scale the headcount in the same way. So each of you have to figure out how do we, how do we scale to the output of marketing, you know, as a business scales because they're not gonna scale it. You know, like, usually, you just add more headcount. Right? Like, how the the classic way of doing it. But I'm also I mean, the way you provide psychological and I think this is this goes beyond AI. I think in general and company companies are just a collection of people trying to solve challenges together. That's that's all a company is. Sometimes these challenges are really small, and sometimes these challenges are massive. Right? Like, existential challenges. And And and then the way I've always thought about it with the teams I've led, I've led anything from, like, just a few people to hundreds of people at the time. I always say something, you know, if if if you like what you do and you show up every day with the right energy and conviction and you give it your all, then my job is to, to fight for you and try to give you every opportunity to succeed and, you know, give you the right resources or learning or skills or knowledge and so on, that that you need to be successful, because I think that's so key. And in marketing, of course, more than ever, we're probably the most collaborative part in organization. Everything in marketing happens as a team. Right? There's not really anything that happens just solo. So I always said my job is to fight for you and support you in any way I can if you love what you do and you show up and you do the best work or you try to do the best work of your life. That's my commitment. But what I can't commit to you is that the job always stays the same. Your role always stays the same. Your manager always stays the same because there's always going to be change. And and and technology is just another way that change is going to impact roles or your output, the way you do your job. So you can either embrace it or you can fight it. And I I guess if you fight it, you probably won't have a job for much longer. Right? Because that's not how you end up embracing the way of the future of how you how you're gonna work. And I'm and and I say this to to because not because I'm I don't care. I really love love my team, but I also want them to know that is it the AI has maybe amplified the rate of change, but we're always gonna be a company that's gonna be optimizing for the best possible outcome, best possible future that we can have so we can impact as many lives. I mean, our mission at Sensei is that we wanna create a world where every human can be as motivated and as fulfilled as possible in the work that they do. So we will fight for that mission. And if you're on board with that mission, then it's great that there'll be a role for you here if you could show up again every day and do a great job, and and or you try to do a great job and you fight for that mission with passion. But, again, trying to say that your job is always gonna stay somehow. Every time I've seen that in in, again, the past narrative or as leaders have tried to say that, it always comes back to bite them in in in in in the butt because you can't promise that. And so AI, of course, will how that does mean when everyone's kinda a little bit worried about their jobs, Have to can come out and say something very similar, whatever however you phrase it to your team that we're gonna be using AI to scale and grow because it allows us to do things that we could never do before. And if you embrace that and if you show up, you you work well together and you find new ways to be creative and push the boundaries of what we do, I will fight for you. Right? And and and that's all you can promise. And so so I I think that's what you because trying to to to live up to the standard of perfection and having the the perfect answer and the perfect outcome, you can't control it anyway. But what you can control and what you can impact is the way that your team shows up every day. And this is what leadership is. about more than ever. It's about getting people to come together towards a unified mission. Yeah. I I agree. And and it's not just about like, as a leader, it's not just about setting them up for success in this current role or organization. It's the success moving forward wherever they go. Right? Yeah. And AI is gonna play a role in that. If you go interview anyway, I'm sure one of the one of more multiple questions is is how are you using AI? Right? And so you need to have stories that you can tell and show that you're ready to kind of be part of that shift that's happening. One one other question before we get into q and a here is just thinking more of, like, from a marketing leader perspective. So I'm sure there's a lot of folks in the audience. who are leading teams, right, if through this change itself. Obviously, the the the newswires talks about AI in terms of, like, role replacement, right, kind of thing. And, like, that's, like, the fear that's happening. But how. do market leaders think. about AI's role in, like, expanding what people and their teams can actually be capable of versus just strictly about replacing roles? Right? To your point, like, if the business is growing, but the headcount is not growing, that means you're not necessarily replacing. Mhmm. roles. Mhmm. You're expanding what your team can do. Right? So how. how does a leader think of that? Yeah. I mean, I I the way I would think about it is that you use think about a AI as kind of a digital teammate. A a a team member that you can onboard and you can give it very specific tasks. Right? And depending on how well you train it, it can either act at the level of an intern, junior employee, maybe even a mid level employee, maybe even a senior employee depending on what the task is and how much you train it to do certain things. It really depends. But, I mean, you don't like, you can't just hire, let's say, somebody who's very junior and give them the most senior level tasks. An AI is not gonna be any different. So if you set try to build an agent and you give it very rudimentary data and instructions, you're gonna get very kind of probably rudimentary thing. It all it all takes work. And this is one of the things I think a lot of people don't wanna hear. It's like, if you're gonna train an AI agent to do director level work, VP level work, you're gonna have to train it and give it the A and lot of work. knowledge. Yeah. Like like like that, it's gonna be a lot of work. So it's so so it's not like you just set it and forget it and it just goes. So show me one example where a company has been able to do that successfully. I haven't seen it yet. Will that ever happen? Maybe. But I think you treat you treat the AI you treat AI as a kind of digital team member. That's probably the best framing because then it you you integrate it better into the team. What do you want the task to be? What can it offload from the team as well? But I'm also I I wanna be clear. I'm not that naive that I think that it's not gonna have some impact on certainly some of the the way that that marketing teams are set up. For example, if you have the obvious one that everyone talks about is content. Right? And because suddenly AI can spit out. I'm still a big believer that content needs teeth and a point of view. But do you need maybe five content people? Maybe you need three now in the future. Right? Because you can scale, of course, that content, you know, by using AI. And we're seeing that in other roles as well. So there there there's no doubt it's gonna have some kind of, some kind of impact. But I still think you gotta treat it as kind of a a team member. Set it set goals. So what do you do with a team member if you want a team member to be successful? When you hire somebody, AP, you probably give them they have some onboarding, then you give them some OKRs, Yep. then you continually train them, then you do one on ones with them. Right? Like like, just think about all the stuff you do with with somebody on your team. And then you every quarter, you review their OKRs and see, you know, how we're doing there. Some we we're good. Some we're not set high enough. Some we're stretched, you know, blah blah blah. And then you calibrate. It's the same with AI. Right? Because once you once you figure that out, then it can truly become an integrated part of how the team operates. Yeah. It's it's a very good point because, I I did this randomly just kinda, like, going through the process, but I I I was talking to a few other folks. And a lot a lot of times, the, like, a big concern or issue is people, like, they'll grab skills or something from somewhere else and, like, okay. Now we have a skill for doing this, process. But you haven't actually made made AI go through that process yourself. Right? So, like, the way that I like to think of it is, like, I'm a product marketer. If I wanna create, like, a release note for a new release that's coming out, right, I wanna actually go through the process. Here's all the information. Mhmm. What's the release? Mhmm. Mhmm. Let me let me give you feedback on what how you approach this. Let me you know, this is how I would do this. And, like, go through that process until you get an end result and an outcome that you that you like, then you turn that into a potential, like, a skill. that you can. reuse. That's? it. Because, like, to your point, right. you're training. this intern on how you kinda want. the things to be, and then now you create a system for them to follow versus just being like, hey. Here's the information. Go create a release note. Right? And then. Mhmm. that's. you. know, you're you're. you're doing that training with them, essentially. And you bring up a good point we haven't really talked about. You should always, for a lot of these very key things, have a human in the loop. Yeah. I think it's absolutely essential. Like, I'm not gonna take something an intern gives me and go present it to the board. I'm gonna. review it, criticize it, optimize it, all these things. Right? And it's the same. I mean, you should always is there some things you can automate without a human it's hard. Maybe I think and I think this is where b to b versus b to c is probably a little different. Maybe in b to b because it's so high velocity, maybe. B to b, I would be very because because b to b is all about building the long term relationships. And the moment you kinda screw that up, it's very hard to get that trust back. Right? Because because you're oftentimes dealing with much bigger deals, longer sales cycles, and all that stuff. So I. think human in the loop is really, really important. So you have to have somebody who has taste and judgment and and and understands what it is you're trying to achieve. I mean, honestly, I look at my inbox and how many crappy outreaches I get. And and not only is it do I delete it? I actually think it's destroying their brand because I'm like, I'm never gonna do business with these people because they. don't know who I am. It's obvious that they don't care enough to really do outreach that is meaningful. So I actually think if you're not careful careful, it could absolutely hurt your brand as well. Yeah. And, actually, Robin, that's a perfect transition to q and a because there was a there was a question I was chewing up here. It's from Brett of how does marketing get in front of sales using AI to get marketing support. Right? Like, marketing has to make sure everything makes sense or, you know, going through the. process, but sellers want things fast. So they're leveraging AI. to build a deck for them or, like, creates, you know, emails for them. And like you said, it may be not the right voice, the right message. And so what what's your advice. on how, like, marketing can can kinda work through that kind of challenge that AI is now bringing, because it's giving sellers the opportunity to go build stuff themselves. Yeah. And I don't think honestly, a lot of times there's anything wrong with that as long as there's maybe some guardrails. I mean, you should should absolutely use, the right tools to help the sellers scale faster, whether that's email or decks or, you know, better, like, competitive information. I mean, AI is amazing for all of this stuff here. So I wouldn't gate it. I wouldn't stop it. You need to have some guardrails upon it. I think that depends on getting it's a little hard to give, like, a very specific answer because I think it depends a little bit on the size of your company or kind of where you are in the trajectory. If you're a start up and you're just doing a lot of experimentation, I would be much more free to kinda go wild and try as many things as possible because you gotta experiment to see what works and what doesn't work. I think if you're a little bit more of a scale up or maybe even a bigger company, you wanna have many more guardrails because that's when your brand is starting to solidify in terms of the the your customer base and the market. And, you know, misuse of AI can easily screw that up. Oh, this looks horrible. It's saying the wrong thing. All of these kind of things as well. Like, the biggest the biggest, team I led was when I was CMO at WeWork. I had a team of about 400 people, and we were about 15,000 people when I was there. And, you know, one of the things that that I talked about with the CEO before I joined us said, you know, your your marketing is so disjointed. You have basically seven different marketing teams because they were all reporting into different regions and different leaders. I said, you're never gonna build a super brand if you have so many different interpretations of what you stand for and who you are. It's not how Nike does it or Apple does it. So you have to unify into into one team and one message and kind of one way of, you know, presenting yourself. And so that that's what we ultimately did. But I but I also think that's a different scale. So it depends a little bit about which industry you're in, what scale you're at, and so on. Again, if I'm a start up, I'm just, like, starting out, just kinda go crazy with it because you don't know what you don't know yet until you kinda start getting that that product market fit. Yep. And and I and I think this is also where, like, you had mentioned earlier on the session of, like, making sure you're feeding the right context into AI. Like, as marketers, making sure you're enabling your sales team and your your CS teams with that context so they can share, like, what is the story, what's our positioning, and, like, even if they are using AI to build emails and other things, like, at least that context and that foundation is still the same across the board. right. Right? So, It's it's exact exactly. yeah. I mean, think about, like, so many companies struggle with, very specific industry marketing. Right? Like, how do you I'm gonna write an email, but this customer is in this industry, and they wanna have only examples. And they're like, this is where AI is amazing. Right? If you have kind of a centralized brain like we've built at Sendside that has all this information, then a seller can go in and say, I'm gonna write an email to a customer or a prospect who's in manufacturing, and I wanna only pull in manufacturing examples and send that out. It's a great use case for how do you scale that and make it sound on brand, on point, and so on, but to really kinda make sure that the customer knows that you know them. Because in in sales, obviously, it's about show me you know me. I said it's a lot of what the it is. And if you can show that more, not getting. I think AI is really good at it. It's good. The other thing we I do with it is, before I meet with a customer, I have a very detailed agent that I run, a customer's name through, but also to people that I'm meeting with so I can get some personal information about them, you know, based on what's available on on the on the public net. And it just makes the breaks down the barriers to the communication. When I get on there, I have something I can kinda talk to them about and say, hey. I saw you did this, so you used to work here. And it's like because sales is very human, and you're trying to find connection points. You're trying to make them trust you, right, in many Yep. Yep. I agree. That makes sense. Alright. We only have a few minutes. left. So I I do I do wanna see if we get one kinda combined question here. And, and, actually, I'm I'm a go with a different question around and maybe if you give a thirty second answer, because those two questions. are kinda, to me, the same theme. One is around just asking, like, if someone is a senior marketer looking to, like, get into a CMO role with AI playing a big part of it, like, how do you what kind of advice would you have for them? But the other question was, like, if you're building a team from scratch, like a marketing team, how would you think about. that? Right? So in thirty to forty five seconds, like, combining this, like, what's your advice for new like, marketing leaders or wanna be marketing leaders, and, like, what they should think about as they go into this AI world, this AI marketing. team kind of driven, Mhmm. landscape a great we're. in. In terms of, like, what I would do to, like, set myself up for a CMO role, show that you can scale through systems and not just people. That's the the easiest advice. And if you can't show that, I don't think you're gonna have much luck as being CMO in the future. It's gonna be scaling through systems, not people. Every CFO, every board wants to hear that story. In terms of this one here, with the second question you had, if you wanna pop that up there, this one here. If you're building a marketing team from scratch, Yep. I think I think the skill set you probably need is a little bit differently. I mean, for example, when I thought of building my first team from scratch, when I was at a startup in Silicon Valley, it It was like, okay. I need somebody to run product marketing, then I need somebody to run kinda, you know, demand gen, and then somebody to run kind of a brand and and comps. And I think there's many of those things actually you can probably, automate a little bit better now. The the one I would not sacrifice in any way is the creative part of it, the storytelling part of it. I just think again, Yeah. like I said, I love the the golden age of storytelling, man. But if you're trying to outsource your storytelling to AI, I think you're in a world for so lean into that. You can scale demand gen actually to AI, I think, fairly fairly well and also comms, but you can't you can't you can't outsource your point of view. And as a product market, that's, you know, a big part of my role is storytelling and positioning, and I love to hear that. But, Robin, thank you for thank you for being here. Audience, thank you for joining us. Please go find Robin on LinkedIn. He obviously has a lot of great, context and and thoughts around kind of the how the world is shifting with AI. But we appreciate you being here, Robin. And, everyone, thanks again for joining us for the re the recent AMA webinar. I'm sure we'll have more content coming soon, so keep an eye out for that. Thank you all. Thank you so much, AP. See you, everyone. Alright. Cool. Cool. Cool.