Category Archives: guest episode

219: Elizabeth Dobbs: Inside Databricks’ stack with 3 AI agents, 1 lakehouse, and 6 years of data work

Liz spent 6 years at Databricks building the data infrastructure before deploying any AI on top of it. She’s shipped 3 production agents (Marge, Tagatha, and Atlas) and she’ll tell you exactly what broke first and why the team kept going anyway. You’ll hear how a marketing lakehouse becomes the foundation that makes every agent actually work, why the agent label debate is a distraction.More

218: Tata Maytesyan: Build a marketing career that survives AI as a deep generalist

Tata breaks down why the best AI automation targets are the boring, repeatable tasks nobody talks about on LinkedIn, and why the specialist-to-generalist shift in marketing is already happening whether your org chart reflects it or not. She also gets direct about the 10,000-hour threshold for building genuine competence across domains, and the self-preservation fear she hears from leaders every week. More

213: John Whalen: The next marketing advantage is pre-testing ideas on synthetic users

John has spent his career studying how people actually think, and his conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone who believes their marketing decisions are more rational than they are. In this episode, John explores how synthetic users built from cognitive science principles can fill the massive research gap that most teams quietly ignore, and why removing the human interviewer from the room might be the fastest way to finally hear the truth.More

212: Tobias Konitzer: The Causal AI revolution and the boomerang effect in marketing decision science

Tobi challenged marketing’s fixation on prediction. He has built highly accurate LTV models, but accuracy alone does not move revenue. Marketing is intervention. Correlation shows patterns; causality tells you what happens when you pull a lever. That shift reshapes experimentation, explains why dynamic allocation can outperform static A B tests, and highlights how self learning systems can backfire or get stuck in local maxima.More

210: Ronald Gaines: 6 Things the next generation of marketing ops leaders must learn

Ronald shares a framework for marketing operations leaders to move from reactive support into proactive systems authority by building influence through measurable credibility, structured intake processes, and disciplined governance. It argues that operational work should be managed like a product with clear boundaries, documented standards, and strong data discipline, which protects team capacity, prevents burnout, and makes impact visible to the business. More

209: Maria Solodilova: Why Adtech is really a marketplace with its own economics

Maria takes us on a guided tour across the adtech landscape from a bird’s-eye view, describing a real-time marketplace where mobile ad mediation converts app usage into revenue through auctions that price every impression. She explains how supply-side work at Yango Ads centers on SDK integration, auction behavior, and performance tradeoffs that directly shape earnings once systems operate in production.More