S2: E26: From AI layered onto workflows to AI built into workflows

Applied Systems is an insurance technology company that sits at the center of the insurance lifecycle, serving both independent agents and carriers. On the agent side, Applied Systems is the leader in agency management systems. On the carrier side, it operates the largest network of carriers, helping flow risk data between agents and carriers through its technology.In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, we sat down with Lauren Malcolm, Director of Communications at Applied Systems, to learn how a 60-person marketing organization built hundreds of AI agents in five months by starting with structured frameworks, not just prompts.Topics Discussed:How Applied Systems brought AI into marketing through a structured offsite with an AI consultantWhy the GRACE framework (Guardrails, Goal, Role, Action, Context) became the foundation for every agent the team buildsHow the comms team built a multi-agent system for customer testimonials that covers story angle recommendation, interview question customization, and six different asset creatorsWhy AI did not speed up the preparation phase of testimonial work but made it more grounded in dataHow Applied Systems operationalized agent governance through an AI Tiger Team, use case submissions, and a tracking systemWhy every Tuesday and Thursday the marketing team runs AI show-and-tells to share what is workingHow the incoming CEO made AI adoption an organization-wide priority with bi-weekly company-wide show-and-tellsWhy attention to detail is the most important skill in the AI eraGTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:Start with frameworks, not free experimentation: Applied Systems brought in an AI consultant who taught the GRACE framework before letting teams build agents. Lauren said the distinction between "just prompting" and building agents with guardrails, goals, roles, actions, and context was the difference between getting generic outputs and getting work that matched the company's messaging and standards.Use agents to enforce brand consistency at scale: Lauren described how AI agents loaded with messaging documents eliminated the feedback loop where new team members would produce off-brand content. Brett noted that giving new team members an agent to run their work through "basically brought it to zero" in terms of compliance conversations.Build agent systems, not isolated agents: The customer testimonial program uses multiple agents in sequence. A story angle recommender analyzes the vetting call transcript against product messaging, buyer personas, and asset templates. An interview question customizer builds a brief based on the recommended angle. Six asset creators then produce the content. Lauren said the preparation phase did not get faster, but it got "a lot more focused" and "a lot more grounded in data."Let experimentation run before operationalizing: Applied Systems gave teams a month or two to build freely before assigning a leader to track and consolidate agents. An AI Tiger Team tested submitted use cases and identified which ones worked best. Make AI adoption visible and social: The marketing team runs AI show-and-tells every Tuesday and Thursday. The incoming CEO hosts organization-wide AI demos every other week. Lauren said visibility helps break the fear barrier and shows people across the organization how AI is being used, not as a threat but as a tool.Give AI to new team members early: Lauren described how a summer intern was able to contribute to real content work because AI agents gave the intern the context and guardrails that would normally take months to build through experience.// Sponsors: Front Lines -- Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

HUD is building a runtime intelligence sensor for developers - a tool that helps engineering teams understand what happens in production in real time and solve problems using AI. The company is well funded and sells to developers.In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, we sat down with Shai Alani, VP of Marketing at HUD, to learn how a demand generation specialist who ran his first Google Ads campaign at sixteen built a career around asking the questions that AI tools won't ask - and why that discipline has become more important, not less, as AI reshapes how companies build and distribute content.Topics Discussed:How Shai ran his first Google Ads campaign at sixteen in Israel, before it was widely available, and got hundreds of leadsWhy Shai considers himself a "foundational marketeer" and what that means in practiceWhy marketing principles from a 1970s book are more relevant today than they were ten years agoHow Cloudflare's announcement that agent traffic now exceeds human traffic changes how marketers need to build for the webHow to build a website that AI agents surface in response to the problems real buyers describeHow to use call recordings and AI analysis to close the gap between positioning and what customers actually sayThe three pillars Shai uses for a first-ninety-day plan in a new marketing leadership roleWhy the CMO or VP of Marketing typically has the shortest lifespan on a startup management teamHow setting explicit, measurable goals early in a role creates the breathing room to build trustGTM and Marketing Lessons:Marketing principles are not optional, they are foundational: Shai draws a clean line between marketing mediums - TV, newspapers, Google Ads, TikTok, ChatGPT ads - and marketing principles. Mediums change constantly. Principles do not. In his framing: "if you'll read a marketing book from the 1970s, the essence of the things that will be written there will probably be relevant today more than they were 10 years ago."The question AI won't ask is now marketing's most important job: Shai's argument about AI is specific. "In in 99% of the cases, Claude Code wouldn't challenge whatever you say. He wouldn't ask these questions. It's our job." The job of the marketer is to sit in the room and challenge the narrative - to ask founders who actually buys this product and why, before building anything around an untested assumption.Build your website around problems, not products: Shai's framework for marketing in a world where agents read your website: "if I have a kick-ass website that explicitly explains what value do we bring, what problems do we solve, these problems will probably be a prompt done by someone." Agents surface what matches the prompt. Your job is to match real problems with the language buyers use to describe them.Use your call recordings before building your narrative: Shai's process for getting to root-level insight - take all recording transcripts from Gong or whatever call tool the company uses, upload them to an AI agent, and ask what problems the company actually solves. The CMO has the shortest lifespan for a reason: "The founder has expected one thing, and the marketeer has delivered something completely different. Both of them were good, but the alignment was not there." His answer: set explicit, measurable goals in the first thirty days. Brand mentions, pipeline conversion, sales qualified leads. Quick wins buy the time to build strategy: Shai's first ninety days include identifying where immediate value can be delivered - demand generation, an executive dinner, a content push - to create the breathing room that allows deeper strategic work to take root.// Sponsors: Front Lines - Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Everbridge is the leader in critical event management, providing life-saving technology to federal, state, and local governments as well as enterprises. Their mission is keeping people safe and organizations running. When David Alexander, Chief Marketing Officer, set out to bring AI into a 70-person marketing org spanning product marketing, BDRs, and sales enablement, the team quickly discovered that layering AI onto existing workflows was not the same as becoming an AI-first organization.In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, we sat down with David Alexander, Chief Marketing Officer at Everbridge, to learn how his team moved from using AI as a workflow accelerant to rebuilding the entire go-to-market workflow from the ground up.Topics Discussed:Why Everbridge moved BDRs into the marketing org and what that signals about where top-of-funnel automation is headingThe difference between "AI layered onto workflows" and a true AI-first organizationHow Everbridge rebuilt its entire go-to-market workflow from scratch and why they are about 70% through that transformationWhat a proprietary internal AI front-end looks like in practice for a 70-person marketing teamHow Everbridge runs branding and pricing research in 24 hours using virtual boards of AI avatarsWhy David's creative lead can now produce a data sheet in three minutes and a white paper in six minutesHow content on demand is changing the seller experience at EverbridgeWhy AI adoption happened organically across the org without mandatesHow token cost management factors into enterprise AI strategyThe two-part framework David recommends for marketing leaders earlier in their AI journeyHow the CMO role is shifting from approver to hands-on creatorGTM and Technology Adoption Lessons:Rebuilding workflows, not layering tools: For the first stretch of their AI journey, Everbridge did what most organizations do -- took existing roles and workflows and found places where AI could speed things up. Governance before scale: Early on, Everbridge gave teams point solutions and watched what happened. Over time, they moved to enterprise-wide sanctioned tools, a clear governance model, and a proprietary internal front-end.Organic adoption signals the tools are working: One of the clearest signals that Everbridge's AI rollout landed is that it required no mandates. David said: "Most of this stuff we don't have to mandate... we have given them new ways of working, but we don't have to mandate that you're gonna go use this because they wanna go use it." Individual-level automation is where transformation compounds: David drew a clear distinction between org-level change and individual-level automation. He said: "For the individual, if we give them the tools to go and automate their roles, things that they do every day that I have no insight into, that's when it really becomes powerful." The product marketer role is shifting from gatherer to analyst: David described how the job has moved: "The role ultimately changes from a gatherer to truly a person that's out there refining and taking in these signals and trying to glean insights from those signals." Research cycles collapsed to hours: Everbridge ran branding and pricing studies using AI advisory - "essentially a virtual board built with AI avatars" - for first-round feedback. Combined with user testing tools, David said they can complete a full research study with customer feedback and board-level input in 24 hours. Framework for leaders earlier in the journey: David's two-part recommendation: first, build a foundation around your workflow connecting insights, impact, governance, and trust. // Sponsors: Front Lines - Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Synopsys CMO Ann Minooka has repositioned the company twice in under two years, tied to acquiring simulation company Ansys. On Unicorn Marketers, she breaks down timing brand shifts to real inflection points, running a lean AI Martech stack, and scaling AI adoption without adding headcount.Topics Discussed:Why Synopsys repositioned from design solutions to engineering solutions after acquiring Ansys, and the debate it requiredThe three tests Minooka applies before adding any tool to her Martech stackHow her team scaled AI adoption using internal champions instead of a dedicated AI or GTM engineer roleHow an AI agent on the Synopsys site exposes content gaps and routes buying intent to a sales calendarWhy executive buy-in for a repositioning has to produce a documented artifact, not just a workshopHow marketing and BDR teams scaled trust from one proof of concept to a company-wide modelGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Evaluate tools against three tests, not enthusiasm: learning curve, maintainability, and whether ROI is measurable. Minooka cited Clay as one platform that could replace 10 point tools, and treats that consolidation as the goal.Time repositioning to real inflection points, not the calendar: Synopsys moved from "design solutions from silicon to systems" to "engineering solutions from silicon to systems" right after acquiring Ansys, once AI was confirmed to change how customers design, deploy, and manufacture, not just design.Buy-in is the artifact, not the workshop: a two-day executive offsite plus individual 1:1s fed into a documented brand playbook and internal training class, both updated regularly and outliving the launch.Scale AI through champions, not new titles: two or three self-selected enthusiasts build use cases (one cut a case study from days to about 50 minutes), then teach peers via lunch-and-learn. Synopsys evolved Martech engineers into AI experts rather than hiring a new title.Let an AI agent qualify inbound intent: an on-site agent, live about two months, surfaces content gaps from questions it's asked and routes recognized buyers to a sales calendar.Scale sales trust from one proof of concept: the BDR partnership started with a single joint campaign and shared reporting, then expanded to other go-to-market leaders once that first partnership proved out.

Vanta is an agentic trust platform that uses AI to automate compliance and risk monitoring, serving everyone from startups getting their first SOC 2 to enterprise GRC teams at companies like Snowflake, Atlassian, Icelandair, and Ramp.In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, we sat down with Scott Holden, CMO of Vanta, to learn how the company is moving upmarket without abandoning the downmarket dominance that made it famous.Topics Discussed:● Scott's mandate: shifting Vanta from a transactional downmarket sale to a complicated enterprise sale, plus the corporate narrative and brand shift behind it● The new narrative: 70% of AI entering companies is shadow AI that skips security review, and companies spend $2,000 making AI better and faster for every $1 making it safer● The Trust Graph, the GRC industry's first data and intelligence layer, running 1,400 tests every hour● The Calm Compliance campaign: why CISOs are ducks paddling quickly on the water, and the "Make audits your beach" line● Hiring the Saturday Night Live photographer and real actors to counter AI slop with real humanity● The Brex "Concur." campaign and why upmarket advertising softens the ground for sellers instead of driving signups● What Ramp got right: early infrastructure investments that let decisions and experiments compound● Go-to-market engineering, why it was "better marketed by Clay," and when founders should make the hire● Running 2,000 agents and 150 Claude skills across the go-to-market team, and why consolidation beats proliferation● The message hierarchy flip that lets one campaign serve founders and CISOs● Losing the famous Mission billboard on day 89, and the new 101 billboard debuting the reinvented llama, Ilma● The Table Top podcast, comedian in residence Alexis Gay, and justifying podcast ROI between vibes and real demand

Karen Kaukol is CMO of Entrust, a cybersecurity company with a nearly six-decade history securing identity for the world's largest banks, governments, and regulated institutions. In this episode of Unicorn Marketers, Karen breaks down rebuilding Entrust's positioning from zero and how AI has restructured her team's creative cycle.Topics Discussed:Rebuilding foundational positioning with no documented framework to start fromAuditing internal messaging against unscripted customer languageReframing competitive analysis around mindshare, not just direct competitorsChoosing a specific job to be done at industry events instead of competing on spendGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Positioning debt compounds even at mature companies. Karen found zero documented positioning at Entrust despite decades of history — it lived as tribal knowledge that shifted with whoever told the story. She rebuilt it in three layers: one brand position, a set of use-case categories, then specific positioning within each. The category layer lets a sprawling product line collapse into "mental file folders" a buyer can hold in their head, instead of 40 SKUs they have to sort themselves.Audit your messaging against unscripted customer language, not internal conviction. Karen pressure-tests positioning externally with people close to customers before finalizing it, specifically to catch daylight between internal narrative and buyer reality. Brett's example sharpens this: he matched his own site copy against client testimonial transcripts and found zero overlap with how clients actually described the value. Run that same audit against your own transcripts before your next positioning refresh.Track what's stealing your buyer's mindshare, not just who sells your category. Entrust had built a campaign around the post-quantum encryption transition, a real compliance deadline, only to watch AI absorb all boardroom attention and budget overnight. Mindshare is scarcer than market share. Map what's actually competing for your buyer's attention this quarter, not just your logo-slide rivals.Pick the job an event needs to do before deciding how to show up. Karen opted out of spend-matching at RSA, where booths included baby goats and jigsaw puzzles. She defines one job, brand exposure with a named audience or partner development, and designs the presence around only that. Benchmark against the outcome you need, not a better-funded competitor's booth.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co//Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

GLG created the expert economy 27 years ago, connecting decision-makers across financial services, consulting, and corporate strategy with verified experts anywhere in the world. Today, the company holds 90-95% market penetration in its two largest segments — and faces a genuine inflection point: when AI gives every client access to the same public data, what is expert access actually worth?In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, we sat down with Fell Gray, Chief Marketing Officer of GLG, one year into the role. Fell walks through the data challenges, the channel rethink for a buyer allergic to traditional marketing, and how GLG is positioning human expertise as the only layer AI can't replicate.Topics Discussed:Why verified human expertise becomes more valuable as AI commoditizes access to public dataThe year-one playbook: centralizing teams, realigning to business structure, finding GTM gaps in a service-forward modelWhy real-time behavioral data tied to project activity is Fell's top priorityHow to market to sophisticated buyers skeptical of traditional channelsBuilding a two-sided expert network against competitors and AI training data companiesThe launch of GLG's AI Leadership Council — experts with practical AI expertise across the full tech stackWhy GLG's messaging standard is demo-ability: no press releases that use the word AI to muddy the watersWhat's shipping: a new agentic experience, compliance tech, expanded AI moderator, and MCP integrationsGTM Lessons For B2B Marketers:When AI commoditizes your inputs, your differentiation is the layer AI can't touch: Verified expertise provides nuance, judgment, and direct experience language models cannot generate from public sources.The service team is an underutilized marketing channel: Service teams in daily contact with clients are a legitimate demand channel — equipping them for precise conversations is a marketing motion.Real-time behavioral data before personalization at scale: Her priority is aligning real-time project-level data to marketing execution. Data alignment first, personalization second.Build internal LLM tooling before buying another platform: GLG is building custom LLM-based tools to make team interactions with their own platform less labor-intensive.Incumbents have to earn the right to be seen as innovators: Her standard — only announce what is demoable and real. GLG works in pilot and beta before any public messaging.Two-sided marketplace retention requires a supply-side strategy: GLG competes for expert attention with community managers, expert events, the GLG Institute, and the AI Leadership Council.//Sponsors:Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co//Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I HireHosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Briana Belisle is the Executive Vice President of Marketing at Field Nation, where she leads a 22-person team. In this episode of Unicorn Marketers, she joins Brett to break down the structure of the marketing AI hackathon she ran — the pre-training sessions, the event design, the mistake she made asking for metrics inside a safe-space event, and the workflows that actually made it to production.Topics Discussed:How Field Nation's marketing org is using AI — briefs, automated manual tasks, and higher-fidelity outputsThe three-part hackathon structure: pre-work, the event, and post-event follow-upThe four pre-hackathon training sessions: prompt writing, custom GPTs, Zapier, and core tool functionalityThe mistake of asking for metrics inside a "safe space" event and why it broke the learning dynamicThe workflow that made it to production: Gemini for account research → ChatGPT for tailored outreach sequencesA revenue marketer who independently built a Chorus call scoring rubric in Claude to predict large-deal likelihoodTeam saving 4-5 hours per person per week — ~10% capacity How she structured the hackathon to work across mixed AI fluency levelsGTM Lessons For B2B Marketers:AI adoption fails without a forcing function: The failure mode isn't resistance — it's telling your team to experiment without protecting time. "It can come off as a very difficult message where it's like, hey, go learn AI and oh by the way, do all your other stuff." The hackathon forces the leader to commit: protect a full day or admit it isn't a real priority. There was pushback going in; results on the other side justified it.Run pre-event sessions before the hackathon: Most of Field Nation's team had never or rarely used AI before the first event. Briana ran four short sessions — prompt writing, custom GPTs, Zapier, core functionality — to establish what was possible. Without that baseline, teams stall during the event. The 77% jump in self-reported AI knowledge was built on that prep, not the day itself.Don't ask for metrics inside a safe-space event: Briana called this her clearest mistake — framing the hackathon as a confidence-building exercise, then asking participants what metric they'd move. "That was a violation of the safety element." Keep outcome accountability in the follow-up, not inside the event.Anchor on the problem, not the tool: When mixing fluency levels, the frame "here's a problem — how can this help solve it" works better than "here's how to use AI." Her strongest AI user owned the structure and ran short peer-led sessions with recorded examples. No certifications, no vendors.Expect almost nothing to ship directly: Very few projects made it to production from the hackathon. What eventually shipped was shaped by what the team explored during the event. The one example: a team member built an account-specific prompt in Gemini, executed it in ChatGPT, and produced highly tailored outreach for target accounts. The hackathon created the conditions for it.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co//Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

G2 is the world's largest software marketplace — 200,000+ products, 2,400 categories. In early 2026, G2 made its largest-ever acquisition: Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp, adding 10,000 customers, 200 million buyers, and 6 million reviews. In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, we sat down with VP of Marketing Palmer Houchins to unpack what five years at the center of software buying behavior has taught him — and what G2's own research reveals about a buyer journey that has fundamentally reordered itself.Topics Discussed:How AI has compressed and reordered the B2B buying journeyThe shift from SEO to AEO — and why they're less different than most assumeWhy third-party verified signals now determine AI search outcomesG2's acquisition of Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp and what it unlocks for vendorsThe category creation playbook — why timing matters more than visionGTM Lessons For B2B Marketers:The buyer journey hasn't gotten shorter — it's been reordered: "It's the same amount of scrutiny and everything just in a shorter time period and it's got kind of reordered." What AI has done is front-load discovery. The work that used to take six months of awareness-building now happens in a 30-minute AI session before a buyer touches your funnel. Most GTM teams are still structured for the old sequence. That mismatch is the real problem.Winning AI search is a corroboration game, not a content game: AI search is "the most exhaustive investigative journalist you've ever seen" — it cross-references your website claims against reviews, Reddit, and creator content. G2 rejects roughly a third of submitted reviews it can't verify. That trust infrastructure is why AI models treat it as a reliable source. The battleground for AI visibility isn't your website — it's your third-party corroboration stack.69% of buyers picked a different vendor than they expected — because of AI: G2's research: 51% of buyers now start with AI, not Google. Of those, 69% chose a different vendor than they anticipated going in. Palmer's read: "If I were the incumbent, I'd be looking over my back." For startups with strong AEO presence and solid reviews, AI is actively redistributing market consideration.In-person is the counter-cycle investment: As PPC efficiency eroded and organic click-through collapsed under AI overviews, Palmer's team reallocated toward events and community — not just trade shows, but dinners and high-touch virtual formats. These held their conversion power precisely because everything else got noisier.Category creation is a timing and wind-reading exercise: Before recruiting competitors into your category, "figure out which way the wind is blowing." Getting on G2, achieving critical mass, generating quarterly grid reports — those aren't vanity moves. They build the third-party signal stack that AI search will eventually surface.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co//Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Lindsey Irvine, Former CMO at Square, joined Unicorn Marketers to share her framework for leading a marketing organization through genuine transformation — not AI theater. She breaks down what actually stays the same in marketing's core functions, what has to change underneath them, and what entirely new roles are being created that most orgs haven't hired for yet. She also gets direct on what separates functional marketers from true business partners, and why narrative clarity may be the most undersupplied competitive advantage in B2B right now.Topics Discussed:What stays, what changes, and what is entirely new in how marketing functions operateThe two-lever framework for creating real AI experimentation capacity without killing executionThe sprint model for forcing genuine AI-native rethinking vs. AI-assisted versions of old workflowsHow the marketing org chart is being redrawn and which new roles are emergingThe "context librarian" concept and why it may be the most important hire you haven't consideredWhat it actually takes to shift from functional marketing expert to genuine business partnerWhy narrative clarity is a strategic moat in an AI-washed marketGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Treat AI transformation like a sprint, not a side project. Telling your team to use AI "when they have time" while keeping them at full capacity guarantees the status quo wins. Lindsey offers two concrete structures. The first: cut team capacity to 80% and protect 10-20% of weekly time for deliberate experimentation. The second is the ratio flip: cordon off a small group of people critical to high-value use cases, give them 80% of their time to rebuild those workflows from scratch, and only 20% to maintain current delivery. The sprint prompts she uses: Where would you involve human judgment and review? How far can an agent take it? What data from which systems? Where do things break? What does it take to reach production? The 10-20% dabble model rarely works because people default to what they know. The sprint forces genuine rethinking.Every marketing function should pass one test. When reimagining a function with AI-native tools, if the answer to "what would this look like?" lands exactly where you are today, you are not pushing hard enough. Start with the business outcome, build from first principles, and let the process follow.Hire for go-to-market thinking, not channel expertise. The old hire: five years running this system, owns this channel. The new hire: someone who understands the full go-to-market motion and ICP, thinks in systems end-to-end, and defaults to AI as the starting point for driving toward a business outcome. Deep functional expertise is giving way to broad systems orientation with AI-native instincts.Build a context librarian before you scale your agents. As AI agents get deployed across go-to-market workflows, their output is only as good as the context they operate on. Someone has to own this: what do the agents know, what are they allowed to know, is that knowledge current, and how is competitive context being fed in. Lindsey breaks this into three components: information architecture, market intelligence and competitive strategy, and governance. Without this role, you scale stale or wrong context at machine speed across the entire motion.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co//Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM