What would your marketing team look like if AI had always existed? Melissa spent 30 years studying how organizations actually change, from the floor of a Japanese truck factory to the front lines of agile marketing, and her answer starts with ripping out an org chart designed in 1911.More
Category Archives: AI
240: The Fall of lead scoring and MQLs and the rise of Agent Qualified Leads, with Gary Amaral
Gary’s built some of the wildest lead scoring setups in his day, one of them actually crashed a Marketo pod and took dozens of companies down with it. Then he co-founded a lead scoring company Breadcrumbs, sold it to MadKudu, and along the way, he started questioning the whole scoring and MQL thing. Scores infer what buyers want, but today an AI agent can just ask them. More
239: Personalization is a creativity problem not a data problem, with Christina Garnett
Christina spent 5 years teaching math before she became a customer marketing expert, and it shows in how ruthlessly she takes apart the personalization playbook. She makes the case for core memories a brand can’t buy, walks through what actually happened when Spotify Wrapped got the AI treatment, and introduces earned context, the idea that having someone’s data and having the right to use it are 2 completely different things. More
238: The system to make your prospects the hero before they buy, with Aditya Vempaty
Aditya has built marketing functions and named categories from nothing at Amplitude and Moengage, but today he takes apart the ‘make your customer the hero’ cliche with a test you can run on any case study in about 4 seconds, then explains why he pays customers $100 for 30 minutes before he will even look at the product he was hired to market. More
236: What AI replaces in data work and when not to reach for it with Julie Beynon
Julie came into data sideways from content marketing and turned that into a 15-year career running lean data teams at some of the coolest martech startups in the landscape. In this episode she breaks down how they cloned their best analyst into an AI agent named JimBot, why she pushes back on AI projects without ever saying no, and how she gets companies to fund the invisible foundation work nobody claps for.More
235: Why consent banners, tags and privacy policies never match, with Stéphane Hamel
Stéphane Hamel built the first web analytics QA tool back in 2006, watched an ad blocker quietly borrow his logic, and spent the next 20 years learning that tracking got harder to see every year while the industry got better at documenting it. Now he’s building MANTIS, a privacy observability platform that watches what a website actually does instead of what its policy claims.More
234: How to run a marketing ops audit and turn it into a roadmap, with Kelsie Dube
Sharon walks through why taste is now codifiable, why originality still belongs to humans, and how she pulled a McKinsey-grade deck out of Claude by feeding it her own best work. We get into the lost generation of junior executors and the beekeeper mindset that separates orchestrators from busy bees.More
232: How taste can be codified into systems and is no longer a durable skill, and what’s next with Sharon Gai
Sharon walks through why taste is now codifiable, why originality still belongs to humans, and how she pulled a McKinsey-grade deck out of Claude by feeding it her own best work. We get into the lost generation of junior executors and the beekeeper mindset that separates orchestrators from busy bees.More
228: The Dispatch tower (The Dungeon of martech architecture, part 4)
Every vendor in your stack just turned on an agent. Your ESP has one. Your CDP has one. Your MAP has one. None of them know what the others are doing, none of them were told to check, and nobody volunteered to referee it. Welcome to the final floor.More
227: The Correlation masquerade (The Dungeon of martech architecture, part 3)
Your warehouse is clean, your agents are running, everything looks like it’s working, and that’s the trap. This floor is where AI mistakes correlation for causation and scales the mistake at machine speed, eroding revenue behind a green dashboard. We unpack the fix: holdouts, guardrails, and a causal context graph that proves what actually works.More