Joshua spent the earliest parts of his career buried in SQL, only to watch companies hand out dashboards and call it strategy. Teams skim charts to confirm hunches while ignoring what the data actually says. He believes access means nothing without translation. You need people who can turn vague business prompts into clear, interpretable answers.More
Category Archives: AI
172: Ankur Kothari: A practical guide on implementing AI to improve retention and activation through personalization
Ankur explains how most AI personalization flops cause teams ignore the basics. He helped a brand recover millions just by making the customer journey actually make sense, not by faking it with names in emails. It’s all about fixing broken flows first, using real behavior, and keeping things human even when it’s automated.More
171: Kim Hacker: Reframing tool FOMO, making AI face real work and catching up on AI skills
Tool audits miss the mess. If you’re trying to consolidate without talking to your team, you’re probably breaking workflows that were barely holding together. The best ops folks already know this: they’re in the room early, protecting momentum, not patching broken rollouts. Real adoption spreads through peer trust, not playbooks.More
170: Keith Jones: OpenAI’s Head of GTM systems on buying martech with cognitive extraction and ghost stories
The best martech buying process isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a cognitive extraction exercise.
Keith Jones asks stakeholders to write what they want, say it out loud, and then feeds both into GPT to surface what actually matters. That discipline applies to agents too. Most teams chase orchestration before they have stable logic, clean data, or working workflows. More
168: AI’s talent crunch: Marketing jobs on the brink and those set to thrive
At risk are campaign operators, generic content creators, and report-pulling analysts. Set to thrive are resident AI implementation experts who select worthy tools, data orchestrators connecting proprietary data to AI, product/customer marketers with genuine empathy, ethics guardians preventing bias issues, and localization specialists understanding cultural nuances.More
166: Constantine Yurevich: Visit Scoring, an alternative to MMM and MTA few marketers know about
Multi-touch attribution is a beautifully crafted illusion we all pretend to believe in while knowing deep down it’s flawed. The work is mysterious, but is it important? The big ad platforms sell us sophisticated solutions they don’t even trust for their own internal decisions. Is it time we accept marketing causation is a thing we can’t measure?More
163: Danielle Balestra: Building AI and martech stacks inside regulated enterprise is more rewarding than startups
Beyond all that regulatory red tape and the perception of inertia, martech in regulated enterprise can be a ton of fun and provide the balance that tech startups just can’t. Vendor selection, proof of concepts, team structures… everything takes a unique form that requires you to become an internal business consultant, despite being a FT employee. More
162: Rich Waldron: How to build and manage AI agents from a single, composable platform without coding
Marketing ops folks stand at a crossroads where iPaaS platforms and AI agents are colliding in crazy ways. Rich pulls back the curtain on what happens when workflows become agent “skills”: Imagine your carefully built automations transformed into autonomous assistants that diagnose tech issues, provision applications, and manage complex Salesforce campaigns without manual intervention. More
160: Mac Reddin: How to leverage dinosaurs to get warm intros and drive better pipeline
Mac treks through the Jurassic wilderness of modern sales, where outbound campaigns cannibalize themselves while AI-powered sequences are degrading response quality by the day. Real marketing power flows through human networks, forward-thinking companies are transforming their SDR teams into relationship architects who measure success through network depth and authentic engagement. Be the team that does better.More
158: Jeff Lee: How Calm’s Billion customer message machine unites martech and engineering
Jeff built a billion-message marketing machine at Calm with three people. But it was a journey. Push notifications sparked a three-year battle until a new CPO, unburdened by notification trauma, green-lit the project in six weeks. It was a four-year battle for ML recommendations but the data tells an unexpected story. Jeff also shares tactics for winning over the most skeptical product and engineering teams. It starts with operational empathy by taking a stab at a working prototype of your idea but also recognizing that product and martech decisions often stem from personal bias that requires champions who have experienced positive outcomes.More