Agent-Native Distribution and the Collapse of Traditional Channels

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you. And we want to welcome Brandi Senders, CEO of Apromore by Salesforce, and it’s going to be our All-Star CMO Roundtable. Brandi, welcome back! How are you?

Brandee Sanders:

Oh, very good! Glad to be back here, and huge hello to everyone who has joined us in previous panels.

As we know, it’s always a good time when we have a chance to sit with an amazing, trio, or I should say, actually much larger than a trio now, it’s usually a trio of CMOs like we have in the room today, so super excited to be back, hosting this session, yeah.

Julia Nimchinski:

Amazing. Take it away.

Brandee Sanders:

Awesome. So, we will lead in.

Traditionally, we do our intros, but I want to just set the mindset here of the question that repeatedly is coming up, and by the way, if you have your buzzword bingo out, now is the time to hit that button, because we’re about to say Agentic and AI a thousand times, but what if your next customer Never, you know, visits the website.

doesn’t come to the website to find you. No search, no clicks, no form fills, no comparison pages, really not even, maybe not even an analyst report. Instead, an AI agent evaluates dozens of vendors, looks at G2, looks at comparably, listens to blind, looks at other third parties, and narrows the fill, makes a recommendation, and in some cases.

believe it or not, can actually initiate the purchase before a human ever even gets involved. Not even your SDR, right? And for decades, as we go into this conversation, just to kind of set that framework, marketing has really been built around the act of human discovery.

So we know that we’ve optimized for eyeballs via search engines, now generative search, social feeds, websites, apps, push notifications, app stores, paid media, you name it, we’ve done it as CMOs and leaders and go-to-market.

And this is all because humans were the ones evaluating our products, our platforms, and our solutions, and they were usually the ones looking at those options and then making the ultimate economic buyer decision. And so that assumption, as you’ll hear from not just this panel, but another one coming later on Agent to Agent, is starting to break.

It’s starting to falter and rapidly evolve into something very different. And so, as AI and agents increasingly mediate discussion.

and become involved in that top of funnel, and through comparison, discovery, all the way to the final solution there, those purchasing decisions, the search engines, the social feeds, they become… The place where, you know, they’re not longer just, like, competing for eyeballs and human attention, but rather for inclusion, and an agent’s… recommendation set, and I think that’s something that is very… relatively new, to most leaders in the market who maybe have a decade or two, depending upon your… where you are and your seniority here in the market.

So, we’re gonna… we’re gonna jump into that fire, and as, Julia mentioned earlier, I am Brandi Sanders. I am the CMO at Apromoria from Salesforce, Process Intelligence Leader.

Super excited to explore what is gonna happen when distribution becomes machine-mediated, and then we’re also going to talk about what replaces these traditional channels, what CMOs should be doing to get ready for that from both an operational revenue mindset, tech stack work, and then also how to prepare for this, what is already here, an AI-native future, well beyond the superficial, I’m using Gemini, I’m using Cloudco work.

Just GPT for content, copy, the whole nine yards. So, I do want to take one quick second and welcome all of our esteemed panelists. I’m going to give you their quick hit runs here. So, Leo, we’ll start with him, leads product marketing at Zoom. Welcome, Leo.

His team shapes go-to-market strategy, messaging across enterprise and online products, and he’s really focused on how go-to-market architecture itself must evolve as AI and automation reshape buyer behavior and business workflows. We also have esteemed Jared joining us here. I’m gonna murder this name, Bavoon.

Please tell me I’m saying it right, Jared.

Jarod Greene:

Gerard is the name, and…

Brandee Sanders:

Rod, thank you.

Jarod Greene:

All good. And, Vivid is the company.

Brandee Sanders:

Bivin, perfect. I’m gonna murder both of those, please, you’re amazing. Thank you for correcting me.

Jarod Greene:

It’s all good.

Brandee Sanders:

Wonderful! So he drives the company’s go-to-market strategy, marketing position, category leadership efforts. That’s going to be pretty critical for what we’re talking about today.

And he is also focused on the intersection of AI sales and technical expertise, exploring how AI agents in emerging architecture are going to be coming together to kind of formulate this new go-to-market. We also have Kathleen Booth. Kathleen and I have been on many panels here at HSE together.

She is a world-class B2B marketing executive, community builder, and writer focused on the intersection of AI brand and rev growth.

Previously, SVP of Marketing and Growth at Pavilion, which many of us know here as well, wonderful community, supporting a global community of 10,000 plus, I was about to say 1,000, I was like, I know it’s more than that. Go-to-market leaders, and is VP of Marketing at SQL.io. She also leads an AI-first, brand-forward approach to building pipeline.

And then we have two other amazing folks who are joining us, Bill, Habib, am I gonna say that right? Habib?

Bill Hobbib:

Close enough. Hobbit, like the movie.

Brandee Sanders:

Hobbit, perfect! Like, the, I really love the 1977 version of Hobbit, by the way. Just throwing that animation out there for you, fans out there. Chief Marketing Officer at Demand Science, leading the company’s transformation around AI-powered go-to-market.

More than 25 years of B2B marketing leadership, including exec roles at Oracle, Bullhorn, Data Robot, etc. And lastly, I will actually let, Gabby introduce herself. Really quickly, and give us a quick intro, and then we will jump directly right into that fire.

Gabie Boko:

I am Gaby Bocco, I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at NetApp.

Brandee Sanders:

Awesome, thank you so much. Alright guys, so we’re gonna go ahead and jump into it. I know there were a couple of us that had some really great questions we were talking about before this, but welcoming those esteemed panelists, we’re gonna start off with Leo.

So, Leo, one of the things that was coming up was SEO versus GEO, and we definitely talked about SEO, if you’re looking back over the past decade, even to 15 years. We’re looking at the generation of growth, because eyeballs surged and humans clicked.

And in an agent-native world, many of those actions are disappearing, or at least evolving into other iterations.

So, the question for Leo to lead, and then we’ll jump in with the rest of the panel’s responses here, is the future simply GEO and answer engine optimization under a new name, or are we actually entering that world where agent to agent, marketers need to kind of optimize for entirely different signals, such as trust beyond just share of voice and interoperability, but machine-readable context, etc?

How are you thinking about that? And the follow-up question would actually also be, if Zoom lost 50% of its website traffic, but gained 50% agent recommendations, would you consider that a win? Leo, lead us down the path.

Leo Boulton:

Sure, well, let me start with the first part. I don’t… I don’t know, I definitely don’t agree, actually, with just… SEO is just a new name that we have with GEO and AO, it’s a lot more than that. But they are… they’re essentially similarly, right? Like, in that they both are optimizing more for visibility.

What’s changing is what you just call that trust part, the trust layer, and basically that means that… agents are not clicking, right? They’re evaluating the content in itself, right? And they’re looking for the structure, they’re looking for machine-readable signals that they can understand, they’re looking for that integration depth, etc.

So in… the comparison, I guess, is In a human-driven, go-to-market world, trust comes more from the brand, the creative aspect, the, you know, the marketing message, all those campaigns, the sales conversations that I’m sure Gerard’s gonna talk about with Vivin, and the website content, like, that trust is built that in the human world, but the agent is different, right?

We have… they trust more the structure in itself, or the metadata, or the backend, and that’s the part that we have to structurally change, right?

Not to keep using the same word, like, because agents can… they cannot be persuaded by, look at that creative, look at the amazing colors that are out there, or look, this is, you know, this emotional connection that I’m hearing with that message, right? It’s more actually the con… is this actually resonating with the person I’m trying to talk to?

So we have to think deeper. About what type of content we even put on… On these websites and on these channels, it’s just more than just driving clicks, for sure. Oh, what was the second part?

Brandee Sanders:

The second… the follow-up question was going to be, if you lost a certain percentage of your, website traffic, say 50%, but you gained 50% higher agent recommendations, or via GPT, or Gemini, or Claude, would you.

Leo Boulton:

I had to qualify the answer, I guess. Like, so, if we were to lose 50%, I call that a win if and only if the pipeline quality actually holds, right? But it’s not just about losing the clicks and the eyes, right? It’s really about the pipeline quality. That’s all that matters. How you get there is different, right?

So it doesn’t matter if it’s one person, as long as it’s maintained, that’s really what matters to me.

Brandee Sanders:

Yeah, I love hearing quality over quantity every time. I feel like that is worth… I will beat to the ground. And then for the rest of the panel, any thoughts on that take on Leo’s take?

Bill Hobbib:

I’ll just volunteer. He mentioned it has to be readable by a machine, and I could not agree more. more with that. Like, we’ve optimized up till now to be understood and recommended. Now, it is very much about structure. How do you structure this content so that you build trust and authority?

And it’s not how much you progress from a volume perspective, how do you structure it so that the machine develops confidence in you? And there are very specific ways to do that that I find super exciting today.

Brandee Sanders:

Yeah, and I think there’s some things that, for sure, because there’s one other session we’re holding later, actually, with the leader at G2, Goddard, which I’m sure many folks on this call will be very familiar with, where we’re going to talk about the future of agent-to-agent, by the way, because unbelievably enough, it’s very likely around the corner, and I think that affects how we as CMOs or marketing leaders, go-to-marketing leaders, are thinking about shaping that layer of context and the layer of trust for that.

So, second question, we will actually… we’re going to tee it off to Gerard. So I’m very curious when we are looking at brand. So, historically, brand created, for the most part, a preference before a buyer enters the sales process.

So, way before we get to the SDR, the BDR, the AE, demo, anything like that, they’re usually going through third parties, they’re looking where we have content syndication, do we have kind of the pretty aspects we’ve talked about earlier on the call, like, is this attractive, does it resonate with me and my problem, solution, result?

And what happens, I think, when that buyer’s first interaction is actually with AI that’s already narrowed the vendor list? And does brand become more important?

I think I know the answer for, like, 90% of the people on this call, because I feel the same way, and I think we’re all in tune, but would become more important, because agents do need signals. And when we’re thinking about that, on your side, for where you are, is there an equivalent of brand awareness?

Like, if the audience is an AI agent rather than a human, and beyond, like, say, like, a share of voice or something, yeah.

Jarod Greene:

Yeah, absolutely. I am team, brand becomes more important, but I think it becomes more important for a completely different reason. You mentioned this, Brandi. It, used to be completely optimized around humans. I like to say that your old search started with the three Gs, right? I’d Google because I got a problem I gotta figure out.

I would Gartner to see if there’s, you know, a magic quadrant or a market guide that has these things in it, and then I’d I G2 it for, for proof from other users, right? So those are the three Gs. I don’t think that changes, in the grand scheme. I think that changes the way the searches and the queries start.

So it doesn’t need to change, but we absolutely need to build brand affinity for the agents, as Bill and Leo alluded to. We talked about it. An agent isn’t emotional, right?

Doesn’t care about the Super Bowl commercial, doesn’t care about the vibes of the feels, but I think the vibes and the feels are really important, because those are the things that allow you as a company to create consistency. You’re going to need customers that validate your solution, does what you say it does.

And then those voices become incredibly important for the LLMs and for, you know, GEO and SEO optimization. It cares whether or not these independent sources or claims you make are backed by real human beings. So I think brand shifts away from just general awareness, and we’re out here into creating confidence. We talk a lot about trust.

It underpins every buying decision, whether buying a house, or a car, a piece of software, or a service. If I don’t trust the vendor on the other side of this equation. I don’t care what the LLMs say, I don’t care what GPT says, I’m not gonna make this decision. So, I think so much of the work we’re starting to do, and this is all of us, right?

Our websites, the customer stories, the… analyst reports, the documentation, what is said and what happens in the community becomes so important to curate and to manage and to nurture, because those are the pieces that the AI works to validate. So one more equation for you.

I said on many panels that if you have content with context, you’ll start to create confidence. And I think with that confidence, it now needs to be dripping with credibility before you have any shot to start to win the hearts and minds of the modern buyer.

Brandee Sanders:

It’s such a 4C. I feel like you could make a t-shirt that’s, like, 4C. Because, literally, that’s true, and I think if anyone needs, like, a testimony to brand the Nixon 5 Nike commercial. Right to the heart. So if you’re in marketing, you’ve probably seen this. They shot it same day that the Knicks won.

Nike went out directly to the streets, where their people were, like, running around, celebrating here in New York City, going absolutely crazy, and it was a time capsule of a moment. that hearkened back to their original Jordan. If you go back and you look at the very end, it nets right back on their pillars for Dream It, Do It, Be It.

And I think brand, when you see something like that, and it will spread on its own, especially if it resonates with the people that we’re really targeting and bringing across the board there. So, completely, completely agree with brand necessity. I don’t think any of that would be a surprise for most of the CMOs on the call.

Alright, so is there anyone who wants to add to that, out of curiosity, on the equivalent of brand awareness, or how we’re feeling about trust signals in the market?

Gabie Boko:

Yeah, I’ll add in. I think that brand is the ability to help us continue to cultivate and progress. And I think that that’s the most important component. I do think that there’s a balance between cultivating in AI world.

in the… in the digital… former digital world, and in the physical world, and that’s where I think that the brand starts to really decide if you’re going to break through into that trust factor as well, as… as Gerard was saying, right?

If you’re cultivating, then you are creating that confidence, but you’re doing that in a relationship that… that is maybe maximized by where you’re going online, but you’re also creating an environment where you’re establishing a relationship, and you see that a lot with, you know. brands are building sponsorships now, right?

You’re experiencing a moment, like with the Knicks game, and you’re turning that into something viral. What I find really fascinating about this is that none of that is new.

Brandee Sanders:

Yes!

Gabie Boko:

Like, we were all doing it before.

Jarod Greene:

Big shout.

Gabie Boko:

You know, 60-80% of the buying cycle was always done without you.

So I think what this does is it just says, hey, listen, I am going to use tools that are going to help me cultivate and progress, maybe much faster, maybe much more targeted, hopefully I’m going to meet the right buyer in the right moment, in a much more prescriptive way, and then you’re going to be able to turn that into, like you were saying, Gerard.

that confident relationship that you can expect with sales. So, I really like that. I like brand as this… as this aspect. I just love that it’s having another moment where it isn’t a bad word.

Brandee Sanders:

Yeah, or what most CFOs would put on the byline as optional?

Which I think is hilarious, I’m not gonna lie, everyone, like, when watching all this… and PR, by the way, is another thing that the LLMs greatly value and put significant weight on algorithmically, and if everyone has ever sat in a CFO board meeting, you’re sitting around talking about where does this dollar go, and we’re like, guys really need some PR, we need some brand building, 9 times out of 10, you’re gonna get the, what’s the ROI on that?

And I love hearing from, obviously, people… we have decades of shared experience here, that everything old is new again, which actually is a perfect segue into your question.

So, obviously, CMOs like yourself have spent many years investing in demand gen and brand building, and there’s, like, a lot of experience that comes with that on understanding all of that on the human side.

The question that was originally in here was if AI agents become the primary discovery mechanism, should marketers, speaking of spend, be shifting budget away from influencing just humans towards influencing things algorithmically.

So, and then, the second to that, I think, is a good point here, is at what point, as leaders, are we actually racing to optimize for that KPI dashboard, right, for machines, rather than customers?

And if it does come down to that, like, who’s gonna win the company with the best product, per se, or the best brand, or simply those who are optimizing to that AI algorithm. And that’s definitely for you, because you had such a good lead-in on that last conversation, Gabby.

Gabie Boko:

Oh, great, okay, yeah, I’m happy to take that.

Brandee Sanders:

Perfect, it’s a perfect tee-up. Holy!

Gabie Boko:

Listen, I think it’s, it’s totally a balance, but I think we as marketers, have always been doing that. Again, it’s, again, it’s not like it’s anything new. If something’s working, you’re taking dollars, you’re taking budget, and you’re saying, I want more of that because it’s going faster, it’s producing the results I want.

I think the bigger thing now is. Marketers are looking maybe less at the… at all of the undercover KPIs and transactional metrics that we often get trapped in, and we’re really looking at what those outcomes are.

I think AI really helps us get to outcome, but I think the most important outcome to this… to this question is Is it helping you drive growth? Is it helping you drive revenue? That’s what your company wants to see out of marketing.

I think that that’s one of the best moments for CMOs, for marketers, for this… for this AI moment inside marketing as a whole, because it allows you to validate the spend choice. But it allows you to also validate spend in technology like we’ve not been able to do before without the help of IT.

It allows you to help much more spend, potentially inside of, inside of, media dollars, because it’s maybe not traditional media, maybe it’s now a little bit more news. So, I think that it’s… it’s a moment that I think is good.

I think it’s on us to be able to show the flexibility and agility to say, we have to win, as we always have, in the environment, with the budget dollars that we have, and to be able to prove that we need more. more investment, or a different mode that we need to go sell the company on.

But, I am happy to take the panel’s assessment of that answer as well.

Brandee Sanders:

Do not be a quiet group, guys, I will not allow…

Bill Hobbib:

I love it! I love a game. The impact…

Gabie Boko:

Good, thanks!

Kathleen Booth:

I was just gonna say, I think the proving it part is the hardest part, because, you know, when you talk about proving that the dollars are working, I think that’s in this new era we’re in, where it starts to get complicated, because so much of that initial process is happening agentically, and people interacting with agents, agents doing it on their own, and this, you know, I might be scooping myself in my answer here, but, like, you know, we used to, because people had to interact directly with our content before, we used to be able to, like, measure leading indicators so much more effectively, and we can’t do that as well now.

And so, you know, we’re measuring people who are much further down funnel. That makes it harder to justify those… top-of-funnel investments in a way that’s directly traceable.

And so I do think there’s gonna need to be a culture change within companies around how we think about justifying spend, you know, and what granular level we go to in terms of the need to prove, like, this is working, and here’s the direct output, because that’s what got us in trouble in the first place, is trying to prove that every dollar spent was resulting in $3 coming in, you know?

That results in a real short-termism mindset, and deprives us of brand dollars.

Brandee Sanders:

I think about that, and I’m going to be thinking about that Nike commercial forever, because I would love to be at the table where I hear, what’s the ROI on this commercial? Because you know it was a scuttle, and of course, Nike has a much more impressive term sheet and financial.

Jarod Greene:

Excellent.

Brandee Sanders:

There’s entire teams dedicated to that, but I think that that’s really interesting, because people also do kind of get stuck in the dashboard mindset, where we’re all just looking at a number and trying to match it, versus, say, like, actively listening to, like, are there trust signals in the market?

Like, are we lifting in category with that top of funnel? And I always reference, you know, G2 and other places for, like, third party, but are we appearing and getting clicked on more in that category? category, because they’re so far away from us right now, you can’t even get that.

And then secondarily, there are ways, with multiple different products in the market right now, to kind of see if you have a category, or, you know, have known competitors in the Gemini, in Claude, in Perplexity, and GPT. Show me how we rank against them on, like, a pie chart. Like, am I 30%? So you can kind of see that.

There’s arguments, I think, that some of those things aren’t necessarily 100% in real time and accurate, so that’s a tough one. And then we have… the latency, like the TiVo delay up top of to mid and mid to late.

So if I spend a dollar now, that sucker might not close for two quarters, depending upon the size of the deal and the velocity of that pipe. So I think that’s all, like, such a… It’s a bit of a spinning and plates act for whoever is owning the justification for that spend, for sure.

Leo Boulton:

If I may add, Brandi, like, Kathleen said something that I don’t know if it’s clear to everybody who’s listening to us right now, like, the website is not at all the same thing of the world we’re going to, because the complexities are so much bigger. That is very, very difficult, nearly impossible to measure the effectiveness.

And what I mean nearly impossible is, it’s not just people going to ChatGPT instead of going to Google.

Companies are deploying their own AI tools internally, they are developing their own tools, they have vendors that give them tools that are customized, craft, like… it’s so federated, so distributed, that it’s a very, very difficult task to measure that.

People tend to think it’s just ChatGPT, and I go to Claude, and then that’s… no, it’s just incredibly federated.

Brandee Sanders:

Yeah, and the velocity of that, and I would also argue the accuracy, the governance of all of those AI pilots. Usually uniquely divorced from their processes, which I could talk about all day, but the things that are there are typically also created within the AI.

So if you are going to build an agent, you are asking the kid holding the keg, how will we build the keg? I would like the cake, and it’s going to… it’s going to create according to its own recipe book, which comes with a whole load of other things that you can look at, including biases and algorithmic predages and all kinds of stuff like that.

So I do think, to agree with that, to a certain point, it’s nearly impossible to keep all of those plates spinning.

But at least being aware of them and trying to, like, cross-educate, because marketing, 9 times out of 10, we’re sitting there explaining to people what’s actually happening, because they’re knee-deep in the quarter, or the… or the pipe, or the churn, or the burn, and they’re not.

front lines, because if there’s anyone close to the front lines, aside from that SDR, it’s definitely gonna be that marketing team. Every day.

Jarod Greene:

Absolutely. Yeah, 100%.

Brandee Sanders:

So, I think it’s actually a good, tee-out going over to And let me take a look here. So I think, actually, Kathleen, we just… that’s what you meant by biting into your own answer. We were just about to go in, too. So, if go-to-market teams For the majority, there’s still a great deal of CMOs thinking this way. Traffic, clicks, forms, funnels, etc.

are this primary path to growth. That is still what I see in a lot of North Star decks for marketing leaders. Occasionally, you’ll see one who’s on the edge that does, like, share of voice across the LLMs and stuff like that. Like.

what advice would you give to CMOs, even, honestly, I would say CMOs and CROs, both, because these people both own the growth lever there at the organization, on communicating to the boards, to the VCs, to the investor, to the PE, on thinking about AI, not just as, like, an internal tool, or something that’s just creating, like, punch lists and doing the menial grunt work.

and not just a productivity story, but rather the distribution story. Like, how would we… if you’re a brand new CMO, you just stepped up from VP, this is your first time at bat, hell of a time for that to happen, by the way, RIP to your inbox. But if you’re coming into it. how… how would you, like, summarize that?

Like, it’s not just… GPT and Gemini being productive and botting along and doing agent work, but it’s really a distribution story in how we approach that distribution.

Kathleen Booth:

Yeah, I think a couple things. One, I do want to just start by framing and saying that I don’t think, especially for high consideration, high ACB, B2B purchasing, we’re really going to see agents take over buying. Certainly not anytime soon.

And the whole panel has alluded to this concept of when somebody buys, that they draw from two parts of their brain, the logical and the emotional part.

Agents are great for solving for the emotional piece of a purchase decision, doing all the research, you know, and that’s where, yes, you have to produce the content, and I agree with what someone said earlier that, like, actually AEO isn’t that different than SEO.

You’re just, you’re creating educational content, there’s just a different consumer of that content. And the way that people interact with it is filtered through an agent, and so they’re getting to their answer in a much more, like, narrow and bespoke way.

But we still have to solve for the emotional side of people’s brains, and so people… people will still be a part of these purchasing decisions, especially at these higher ACVs, especially in B2B, where if you buy the wrong thing, your job is on the line. It’s the famous old, you know, nobody ever got hired.

by buying IBM, which is why brand is still so important. And so, I think, you know, there’s two pieces here, and so, in terms of communicating to the CEO, the board, the CFO, we have to invest in educating the agents, for sure, but I think the misnomer is that more content equals more pipeline. You know, AI.

Jarod Greene:

has made me.

Kathleen Booth:

it really easy to produce more, and that’s where all of this concept of slop comes from. It’s not a volume game.

Like, you’re not gonna win on volume, you’re going to win on quality of content, specificity, and then, to your point, there’s, like, a distribution issue, and this is where I think AI can be really helpful, and that’s where agentic solutions in particular are helpful. There, you know, there’s two kinds of AI users.

There are the ones who just use it generatively. and… Those are the ones that are producing the slop, because they’re just using it to create more.

And then there’s what I call the builders, which are the ones who are producing systems that compound, that run without them, and… These are the kinds of AI applications where they can be updating your content in real time in different places, and seeding it out in different channels, and making sure you’re maintaining consistency in your messaging across all these different places where you’re showing up.

Finding opportunities to answer questions in places like Reddit.

So there’s lots of great AI applications that you can That you can construct to help you with distribution, but the thing… the point I did want to make sure to make is that One of the most valuable channels, actually, that is not going to go away is the human channel, the word-of-mouth channel.

And having spent 3 years running GoToMarket at Pavilion, I saw this firsthand every day. We had 10,000 members in our community, which is a private Slack channel. The number one sort of type of post that people made in Slack. were vendor recommendation questions.

So, even if people are getting their shortlist from AI, or from Google Search, or wherever they’re getting it, they’re still then going into their peer communities and saying, hey, what are you using? What do you really like? Who do you trust? What’s your experience been? That is absolutely not going to change.

If anything, it’s going to be more important because We’re all gonna have access to the same AI information. We all know, as marketers, we can train that AI eventually to say what we want it to say, so we want the truth coming from somebody who’s experienced the product. And so we have to solve for that, and that human component, that trust.

is where, like, the real magic’s gonna happen, and it’s only gonna become more important, which I also think is only gonna make marketers more important.

So, I’m very bullish on, like, the future of marketing, because I think we’re going to be the ones that help really differentiate brands and companies and products when everyone has access to these tools and is creating more content at scale.

Brandee Sanders:

Otherwise, that echo chamber gets really crazy with AI slop, and there are places you can see this that are very easy.

Reddit has thankfully not been so terrible, but I do know on LinkedIn and, like, other primary thought leadership areas, we’re used to have these really, kind of, like, thoughtful discussions that would be that peer-to-peer collaboration, even in Slack groups and things like CMO Coffee Chat and Pavilion and places like that.

I think there’s a value in that, because it’s… there’s no… there’s no bullshit aspect.

I’ve just attached my name to this referral, and the same way, if you go to give a referral for someone to get hired, you damn well hope that you’re attaching yourself to something of quality, your name is in a public sphere, you understand, like, what’s happening there, and I think that that’s… it’s pretty tremendous, and that actually ties back to something a few other people talked about, which is, like, how do you appear in the places that will drive peer-to-peer conversations?

That’s through third-party events, partnership environments, referral-type environments, even things like cabs and other, like, internal communication areas that you can go through that customer network to find someone who looks like your next best deal, and be able to kind of push that through.

Kathleen Booth:

Yeah, and I’ll just add, I just wanted to add, I think before this whole AI thing happened, a brand that did this really well was Gong. I would see this in Pavilion, where Gong built a brand that people just loved, and when somebody would ask for a recommendation for a platform that did what Gong does.

people would answer and suggest them, even if they’d never been customers. And it was because they just loved the brand, and there was a trust that they had developed in it.

And so I think, like, that’s such a great example of Developing loyalty, even among non-customers, because people just love you, and love what you’ve built, and that is such a hard thing to measure, but it’s… that’s the real value that marketing.

Brandee Sanders:

You know it when you see it, though. You know it when you see it, and I feel like, first off, his budget was second to none. I would love to have… I wanna… I want to be a fly on the wall with those conversations, because I’ve sat across from him on a few panels, and I’ve been like, hey man, I don’t know how you did it, but it was Disney.

Kathleen Booth:

How’d you get that billboard approved?

Brandee Sanders:

Little commercial? Come on, guys.

Kathleen Booth:

Yeah.

Bill Hobbib:

Super Bowl, lads!

Jarod Greene:

Yeah. It was.

Brandee Sanders:

I was like, I want to know more, please. We could do a whole panel on that, Julia. Get in here and make it happen. But I agree, and I think that these are all super valid points. And there’s kind of, like, there’s two secondary questions here down by the way. I know we have one more lead-in.

Bill, I’m gonna do with you, and then we’re gonna kind of open that mic, Julia, to anyone in the chat, and then also do a quick roundtable on, I hate to say it, but, like, predictive ideas, For this year leading into next, and honestly, this year, 5-year, 10-year, would be wild to think about.

But on your end, Bill, I did want to give you a quick thing here to just think about. So, if AI, which it remains to be seen, becomes the primary interface between buyers and vendors.

We know that there are factors here that definitely help deterministically show whether an AI would recommend us, algorithmically, one company over another, but if there’s something that you would say that you’ve learned on your own, marketing transformation is, like, your bread and butter, there’s so many great stories that were there, something that would be, like, practical advice, what would you give?

Like, every CMO in the room, every go-to-market engineer, or newly-minted whatever title is they’re going to give that is technically still marketing, but they want to add something spicy to it so it feels new.

Just to start implementing tomorrow, like, if there was, like, one quick win, they’ve walked into the role, when we’re thinking about this as a subject, what do you see in your mindset as a guest?

Bill Hobbib:

It’s a great question, and it’s going to follow from what Gaby said about Bo Brand and doing things that we’ve done before, but in this case, I think we have a new audience to influence before a human ever raises their hand. We know this already. And we’ve talked about it’s all about confidence.

AI confidently needs to explain who we are, what you do, why you’re different, and find enough evidence. So what’s a practical… what are practical steps here?

If I was going to give advice to every CMO, and I’ve drank my own Kool-Aid on this, or champagne on this, and I’ll tell you what happened as a result, I’d say, over the next 90 days, I’d do first Decide what you want to be famous for, pick 1, 2, 10 strategic topics, really narrow those down. What do you want to be famous for? And own them.

How do you do this? Build a knowledge ecosystem, not a content calendar, not a bunch of blog posts. Create pillar content and topic clusters that comprehensively answer your buyers’ questions. You are teaching AI why your company is an authority. And let me say, you can You can own this yourself.

You can own this on your website, and I’ll tell you exactly what I did that’s got me more excited than anything I’ve done in the last several years. The third, measure AI visibility alongside SEO. track the AI share of voice, your citations, your recommendation frequency, not just rankings and traffics.

I drank my own Kool-Aid, my team drank our own champagne here, and we wanted to test it ourselves. We picked a topic that we were not found in before, and we were nothing in this topic. Nada.

In less than 2 weeks, we went from essentially zero AI visibility to appearing in roughly 1 out of 4 AI-generated responses we were tracking, and we also increased our organic page 1 keyword footprint by, like, 40% in less than 2 weeks. My surprise wasn’t that it worked, it was how quickly it worked.

And so this ties to what Gaby was talking about, impact, it ties to what you were talking about measurements. We can measure this.

We can measure this, and we know it has business impact because it drives traffic from people who are far along in a decision process for whom the LLM, or the AI search, has actually changed their mind later in the process. It is so, so amazing. The question isn’t how do I rank higher, it’s when buyers use AI to understand my category.

Does it have enough confidence in my expertise to consistently include my company in this conversation? I think that’s actually new competitive advantage. Not that I’m passionate about this.

Brandee Sanders:

I was gonna say, hello, this is that, this is that, like, definitely, like, deep Colombian roast energy that I love on these things.

Gabie Boko:

That was a Go Bill moment.

Bill Hobbib:

I was engineering. I love this copper!

Brandee Sanders:

I was like, and I feel like it’s a great thing, because everything that you’re saying, it ties back, honestly.

to the bigger picture, which I think a lot of people… it’s so easy, sometimes… well, first off, depending upon your leadership team, you can get shiny object syndrome, you can get easy distracted, every quarter a new ICP, or target, or growth, or whatever, and I think, like, keeping people kind of anchored on what you just talked about is huge as a leader.

And then, there’s something else here that I do want to bring to this group, leaping right off of Bill’s energy here. So, we’ve talked a lot about technology, we’ve talked a lot about AI, agentic, agent to agent, human beings, SEO, GEO, app, this, that, the other thing. The one thing we really haven’t touched on yet as leaders is people.

I think this is… a very interesting question in the world of layoffpalooza, and the death of SaaS, and the SaaSpocalypse, and, like, every other thing that makes me have to box down my hair once a month now. Like, I do want to kind of address that… that monster in the room, which is, what about the actual people when it’s related to strategy here?

Because as a marketing organization is transitioning from optimizing for human eyeballs from SEO to GEO, and GEO to maybe agent to agent.

Like, what does this modern team that’s gonna be doing everything that we’re talking about here, because we can’t do it all, and we do have to delegate and build those structures and those teams, what does that look like?

Like, and I can definitely give a vouch on my end that I’ve had to lean more heavier away from those traditional storytellers who can make things look very pretty, but cannot tactically understand revenue generation and do not understand how we tie to Northstart KPIs or OKRs, and simply do not under… they only understand, like, that one little piece.

I’ve actually started looking at people who have a unique understanding of, like, the psychology of buying, literally the neurological and psychological aspects of buying, and there’s a couple courses I’ve dropped people in, like MIT Sloan, and, like, Harvard X, these really great courses that teach us not just, like, hey, here’s how to drive a strong CTA, and, like, use AI for generative content creation, and creating all of those white papers and case studies, but rather, like, understanding the psychology of buying, which most marketers, unless you came from sales, which is less of a traditional path, sales to marketing, they don’t have that.

And then there’s also the data aspect. So, like, do you think When we’re looking at this from a 3,000-foot view, do we need fewer content writers, or fewer, you know, people who are just kind of, like, creating pretty things, and more data scientists, or does that shift actually demand a return to this kind of deep.

hyper-human storytelling mindset that machines simply can’t replace because AI doesn’t have good taste.

Jarod Greene:

Yeah, I’ll start there, Brandi. I feel passionate about this one because I’m guilty of being a kind of content machine in the past, so being a former product marketer, working at kind of high spot as a content marketing platform for sales. So much of my ethos as a marketer was, you know, publish or perish.

You have to get as much content out to the machine as possible that meets different, stages of the buying journey, that understands different personas, different geos, different segments, different industries. You could quickly boil yourself into a world where you know that 70% of the content you create never gets used by sales teams.

What we found is that generative AI helps us be one of the types of, kind of AI users you talked about, which was the generator. we can create an agent that understands our brand guide, our copy guide, our tone, the way… our visual identity in the world, our position, our message, our release schedule for product updates, our sales methodology.

We can take all of those things and create an agent that can quickly produce an asset. And it gets us about 80% down the path. We kind of like where it fits, and then that final mile is still where I think you need a good designer. You know, you need a good copywriter to edit against what good looks like, but you don’t need a team of those folks.

And so now it’s important to say, where do we put this content? How do we optimize it across the channels it sits in? How do we make sure it’s actually moving our buyers down the funnel it’s supposed to? Bill talked about this. It’s going to be machine-readable, but how do you get to a place where it’s driving the results you want?

I think that’s where a lot more of the emphasis goes.

And so the ability now for not just a single content marketer or a content marketing team to create this, but really for the marketing team at large, and really anyone on the go-to-market team’s ability to create, not AI slop, but the kind of materials you want to get out in the world that you never had the time to, has changed, and we’re never going back to it.

So now I think it’s more around the governance, the application of those things. and now your ability as a team to shift into, again, the data optimization, and I really feel strong about getting out to the field where your buyers are to, again, build that affinity, build that trust, build that connection.

So I… I don’t want any of the content marketers that may be listening to get scared and think that the job’s going away, but I do think it changes forever, and it opens up opportunities to do much more impactful things as a marketer.

Kathleen Booth:

I’ll build on that. This might be a little bit of a spicy take, but, I think that certainly RevOps is going to become continually more important. You know, there’s this term, GTM engineering, which I don’t necessarily look at as part of RevOps. I think that’s more of, like, an AI-powered growth hacker, if you will.

I think that’s a really important role, because the tools allow us to move in faster cycles and sprints and iterations around growth. But the way I’m looking at my team, and I mentioned this earlier, is like, I want to hire people who are builders. I don’t want people who are just generative AI users.

I want the people who are like, I’m gonna go in, and I’m gonna create a system, and I’m gonna automate it. And I’m gonna work myself out of the drudgery. Because I don’t want my team working on the things that a machine can do.

And so, I need people who are close to the work, who understand the jobs to be done, and who can build a system that will eliminate that from their job description. And they’ll oversee it, but they won’t do it anymore, right? So, if I had a team of only builders, I’d be thrilled. That, to me, is the dream state.

But… and this is where it gets a little spicy. I am not sure that we’re gonna need, really, people creating a lot of written content, because I don’t think people like to read, candidly. And I think AI is giving them written content already that’s pretty good, it’s good enough.

The exception to that is that I think there’s this concept that Cassie Young at Primary Venture Partners has coined called the Zero CAC CEO, and she referred to it, like, when they’re investing in companies, they look for a CEO who has a network and can bring business in through their network.

I think the same is true of CMOs, of really any individual contributor. Are you a zero CAC employee? Meaning, can you create pipelines simply through your presence and your involvement?

And that’s where I think, like, building personal brands and hiring people who are… Willing to participate personally and put their personal brand out in front as the headlights are going to be more and more important. It’s why I started a substack. It’s why, you know, you see people creating video and having live events.

The Clay team does this really well. They have… they highlight their team in their How Clay Uses Clay events. And they’re telling stories, and it’s wildly popular, because people are craving that interaction with other people, but you have to hire people who are willing to put themselves out there, and to be content creators.

So yes, you want someone to be a good writer, but only if they’re going to be willing to write in their own byline. You want someone to be able to appear on video, to be on a podcast. That’s that zero CAC employee that can bring you business. and add that value on, on top of what you’re doing to train agents.

So, I don’t know, maybe that’s a spicy take, maybe it’s not.

Gabie Boko:

I don’t think it’s spicy at all. I think, I love those directions. I think I was going to come up a little bit above. When I’m sitting here doing all the same things, and appreciate that, and support that, and… yes to both of what you said.

I’m also experiencing the barriers that exist inside a traditional organization that are still grappling with the change. And I think that if we’re going to really affect true change as marketers and be marketing leaders, we have to be that for the company as well.

And a lot of the legacy systems and processes, and again, I don’t want to date myself here, or even date aspects of a company, but if you think about it, right? we’re worried about security. Well, let’s go through a security review, right?

And the security review is what the same security review we had 10 years ago when we were evaluating Marketo, right? So that is not fit for purpose. Same for… same for culture. Are we gonna go through an HR? You know, are we diverse enough in our language?

Like, it is… we are educating the entire company, and I think my… my focus and my… My drive for my team is to not just deal with what we’re talking about here for what we do with marketing, but to also be a big voice box or megaphone to my company that says, let’s stop carrying legacy process with us. It’s an anchor.

It doesn’t help us move quickly. It impedes the progress that these humans that we’re trying to keep in the mix are driving the new riders, the new employees we want to bring in, like Kathleen said, the new processes. Jared, like you were saying, so… It’s very, very much an all-in game, and I think marketing has a big chance to say.

let’s look at this holistically. Let’s remove all the barriers, and let us help do that so that we’re here for the humans as well. So that’s just… that’s just my personal take.

Leo Boulton:

Yeah, the world is changing for us in marketing, but also for all of our constituents as well inside of the company, right? So we are part of the equation. I don’t… I don’t… I think it’s in this month’s HBR magazine, where there’s an article about the cognitive load that AI brings into different functions in a company, if you haven’t read it.

The number one is marketing. Right, because we are a very creative content producers type of function, and it’s hard, right, to do this.

The change that actually we’re implementing in our product marketing product, like Jared was talking about earlier, is we’re thinking of the function changing dramatically, as in, it’s not just about producing content and serving our constituents. And if you think of product marketing, like, buying persona definitions.

Positioning of new products, messaging, that’s in its most simple terms. Yeah, you can produce content and do those things. But we’re shifting the team to become more of a COE model, where we’re educating.

The job is literally changing to, you’re educating AI, you’re building context, you’re building the knowledge layer that then someone else or something else, like an agent, is going to then use. We are literally launching buying persona archetypes inside of the company for all of our buying centers.

that any marketer and any seller can ask a question, what’s your top of mind, or I’m trying to sell to you, or can you help me build a slide to present to someone like you as my customer? So, the function of the PMM in this case.

It’s more about training, or cultivating, or farming, is what I call it, like, farming that content, that knowledge, they have to tend to it. Oh, there’s this new article, there’s this new report, we just run this research.

We’re learning that our buyer is changing in… the buyer behavior is changing in this way, so they’re not building content anymore. They’re actually building knowledge, and that’s how, essentially, that PMM function is changing for us.

Brandee Sanders:

Bill, what are your thoughts on that? I’m just curious.

Bill Hobbib:

Oh, so, Gaby, I could have… you took many words out of my mouth. How do you get the organization to move and leave, sort of, old practices when those practices were working and people have, to some extent, sort of grown up with them, at least in your company?

And, I think there’s sort of a couple of pieces to this, and I don’t dispute what my colleagues have also said, but one, when you’re bringing in new people, make sure they have a growth mindset. Are they, you know, are they willing to fail? Are they willing to take risks? Are they unwilling to take no for an answer?

I got 99 people who’ll tell me, no, something can’t be done. I need one person who can tell me, yes, here’s how I’m gonna do it. And so, how do we cultivate those and help everyone sort of adopt a growth mindset in your organization? But also, kind of towards something Gaby said, I’ve taken to telling people, it’s okay to blow this up.

We are going to have to blow something up. I don’t mean slightly tweak, I don’t mean incrementally change, I don’t mean add agentic AI to some broken, inefficient process already. Literally, like, that’s what we’re doing! What’s that gonna do? It’s gonna create more slop faster for something that was already broken!

Brandee Sanders:

Create a lot of people out on PTO, is what it’s gonna create. Yeah, conveniently, I’m just gonna.

Bill Hobbib:

Oops, I’m sorry, I’m sick today!

Brandee Sanders:

I’ll see you guys in 90 days, when all of this great stuff is done. And this all ties back to processes, which at Apromori, by the way, process intelligence, process mining, you literally can’t automate or agentically apply anything if you’re running off of processes that were born in 1983 or when Reagan was president, which you would be shocked!

Jarod Greene:

Thank you.

Brandee Sanders:

I would be shocked! Some of you young kids have no idea what I’m talking about on this call, but, like, listen, man, alright?

Like, there was a time when some of this… these… even some of the structures, like the actual architecture of the instance that we’re in, that person is about to maybe retire, and all that knowledge share goes out the door, and then, who wants to be… it’s always marketing, but who wants to be the body that gets thrown in front of a transformation project that… 90%, what is it, 80-90% of it fail, according to Gardner and MIT Sloan?

Like, it’s Well, if the processes are not… adjusted for reality, not what you think. And by the way, C-suite’s idea of what processes are actually happening, what’s happening down at the director, manager, SDR, BDR, AE level, they’re very different.

They think it’s like 5 steps to go through this, and then you look at the other side, and you’re like, actually, it’s 15 to 25 steps, and there’s a ping-pong here between two execs who like to get involved with decision making, and if you take away the that stuff. Do you know what happens?

People get upset, you’re taking them out of the flow, that was my job. It’s a very… speaking of human, that transformation is a very difficult thing to do, and process marketing intelligence definitely makes this a more factual thing that is anchored on the reality of how something is running.

But I think there’s a whole other section we could do, Julia, on just the legacy mindset that is a very difficult thing and a dangerous place for CMOs who are now getting replaced with growth revenue architect, or they’re getting amalgamated into the CRO role, or they’re getting turned into a team of five go-to-market engineers at some of the earlier stage places where we, air quote, might not, you know, survive the SaaS apocalypse.

And so I think that is a super interesting chasm over which many of those larger, more historical enterprise-level legacy organizations will have to cross. I’m hoping it’s on a magic carpet, but I sense it’s going to be through the valley.

Gabie Boko:

Let’s make sure it isn’t on a Six Sigma belt, and then we’ll be good.

Brandee Sanders:

Listen, you know, they’ve gotta… they’ve got it on LinkedIn, it’s gotta go somewhere.

Jarod Greene:

Gotta put…

Brandee Sanders:

that cred somewhere. Speaking of, there is one quick thing that’s coming from the group, because I know we’re 7 minutes to time, Julia.

There was a question coming from the chat about what are these new KPIs in regards to, aside from the idea that we might all be chief growth architect, or whatever, in the next 18 to 24 months, what are the new KPIs that we should look at? So I will say the one thing we’ve talked about earlier, and there are various amount of tools here.

I will literally let you go to AI and find them, so I’m not, like, dumping any supportive, like, product pitches here, but I would definitely say share a model or share a voice within those models.

There are tons of ways to literally get that pie chart and say, if it’s me and my other five folks leading an XYZ category, vertical or industry, platform, like, process, solution, we’re 25%. And then over time, the proof with the pudding comes from watching that bit of that pie chart, that share of model or share of voice grow.

And you can really run, like, automated category queries using AI monitoring platforms. I’ll let you do the research on that one. The two others worth mentioning, and some of them are a little bit more technical than others, so this is where that fun new go-to-market engineering person comes in.

Recommendation inclusion rate, so RIR, you know, we have to have our KPI acronym here. But that’s how often an AI agent actively, like, selects a product. So, as a top solution, when prompted with those specific things that we’re trying to train the models on. So, like, complex buyer constraints.

I am in the Northeast, oil and gas, and I need X, and my budget is X. What is my solution? And there are ways to programmatically audit model, right, outputs via developer APIs. OpenAPI, OpenAI API, and then there’s a few other, like. mock buyer persona things that it sounds like some of you are natively building, which is phenomenal.

And then I would mention just one more quick thing.

On that PR side, on that brand building side, the citation and attribution velocity, I would say, are, like, definitely two things that have come up, at least in my world, where we’re talking about tracking and monitoring the frequency of hyperlinks that generative search engines append to answers.

So if you’ve ever asked GPT about blah blah blah, you will see it has, like, 1, 2, 3. It’s gonna point back, old school SEO, guys, it’s a backlink. It’s gonna point back to us, and you can do referral reports.

This is, by the way, in GA, so you can filter referral ports in GA Analytics 4, if you’re in it, to isolate traffic from, like, Perplexity or GPT, or Claude or whatever. Get your MOPS person or your RevOps person, going on that. So, is there anything for the rest of the group, I know that’s kind of, like, the top 3 that I’ve working with.

On your ends, is there KPIs, if you’re looking at that board report, if you’re looking at your North Star metrics, how do I prove efficacy as it relates to this subject? What are you seeing on your end?

Bill Hobbib:

AI-influenced pipeline, I’ll just say, getting to something that Gaby was asked… was mentioning a few cycles ago. How much pipeline originated from buyers who used AI during research?

It’s not perfect, but as you were just saying, we can capture those UTMs and the places that they have come from in some degree of specificity, so AI-generated pipeline, I’m looking at, very much so.

Kathleen Booth:

And I’m… I would take it even a step further and say I’m very focused on conversion rate by channel, because it’s one thing to say, like. we’re getting this pipeline, it’s another to look at, is it actually closing? What are the ACVs?

And so, looking at that, you know, that last mile of how do things go from, whether it’s demo requests or opportunity creation to close one, and what’s the size of the deal, I think that’s really important to look at as well.

Gabie Boko:

We’ve also added in speed, simply because this is allowing us to move a lot faster, and especially in a B2B space, you don’t want marketing to be the slag, right? So, if all of these things, even that Bill and Kathleen just called out, there’s an aspect of conversion or speed that we’re adding in.

Leo Boulton:

Reverse attribution is another one that we’re looking into, like, why is some of these agents recommending you as a company as well? It’s very good for competitive differentiation, to determine, like, why is it, why are we winning, why are we losing? That’s a new pattern that is surfacing.

Jarod Greene:

You know, and I’ll double down on that one, Leo, as well. We want to be able to see where we stack and rank competitively, as there’s a million solutions out there that make the same claims we do, so we want to make sure that we at least come out on top, or at least show up in a space where we get a shot.

Brandee Sanders:

Fun fact, by the way, and I just know this from literally having dinner with an engineer from OpenAI, name will not be disclosed, but sitting down, there was a lovely dinner in New York City at a James Beard house, sitting down next to someone, definitely a big champion for OpenAI.

We started talking about, like, what is weighted in the algorithm, and how will that change in the next 6 to 12, 18 to 24 months? as I am, you know, steering things across AI and Agentic and all of this great stuff. And aside from, obviously, peer-to-peer and places like G2 and stuff like that, it actually came up, events just like this.

The one that we are talking on, that will be crawled to high heaven across YouTube and third-party places and being shared on social, this is a great way for that to show up, because we’re literally talking about product solutions, innovation, and results.

And so, it’s literally things like this that allow us to kind of push that forward as CMOs, and as folks who are leading go-to-market. So, Julie, I actually just saw the amazing Maria from Previously Scale. Hey, Maria, welcome to the… welcome to the chat gang gang.

But it looks like we are right up at the hour, so I just wanted to say before we close the doors, amazing panel. Thank you all for giving your valuable time here. I can’t wait to see the algorithm absolutely shower and adore us, all with wonderful referral traffic from social and from Julia’s team.

Julia Nimchinski:

Phenomenal panel, thank you so much. Brandi, thank you, all our esteemed panelists. Can we just do one minute of quick, shameless plugs? Brandi, let’s start with you.

Brandee Sanders:

Start with me! I’m Simo at Aprimori from Salesforce. Speaking of Agentic, if you’ve got that button, hit it right now. Super excited. Obviously, process intelligence and process mining are the cornerstone for AI, excellence.

There is literally no way without a system of context that you are going to be rocking that AI pilot and sitting down with your CFO and talking about what’s my return on this project without understanding your processes first.

So I think more than a few of us knocked that out of the park already, so you can definitely connect with me, as always, on LinkedIn. I will be at Dreamforce, naturally. Please come and say hello to the Apromore team. Super excited for our launch coming up.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you, Gaby. How about yourself?

Gabie Boko:

Baby Boco, NetApp, data infrastructure for the AI era. You’re not running your AI unless you’ve got the best infrastructure on the planet, and that would be NetApp.

Julia Nimchinski:

Definitely…

Kathleen Booth:

Kathleen Booth, VP of Marketing at SQL. We are the only video and webinar, live engagement platform that was purpose-built to host events on your website, which allows us to collect end-to-end, first-party data on not just what someone does in your events, but all the pages they visit on your site, and you can score that and orchestrate off of it.

And you can find more information at SQL.io.

Julia Nimchinski:

Gerard.

Jarod Greene:

Yep, Gerard Green, CMO of Vivint. We’re the makers of Hero. It’s an AI sales teammate that helps your sales team before, during, and after sales calls. You can find us at meethero.ai, and I’m often on LinkedIn for connections and conversations.

Julia Nimchinski:

Leo.

Leo Boulton:

Yes, Leo Bolton from Zoom, feel free to follow us on LinkedIn as well, that’s where I’m most active, but I’ll leave you with a thought. Just think about how different and how important are conversations when it comes to context and knowledge compared to structured datasets, based on everything we talked about.

Conversations carry those emotions, and those… you know, those secrets that we all talk about, so they are very, very important for AI agents.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you, Bill?

Bill Hobbib:

I’m Bill CMO at Demand Science. Everybody’s faced with having to deliver more pipeline.

We’re an AI-managed, powered-managed service that runs brand and demand on one system and signal foundation to help people accelerate their ability to build pipeline, including being found in LM, so if somebody wants the recipe for how we achieve what I shared before, just, DM me.

I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn and love to help other marketing leaders Bend the laws of demand gen physics to build more measurable pipeline.

Brandee Sanders:

Define gratitude.

Bill Hobbib:

Defy Gravity, there we go, thank you, I love that, even better, Defy Gravity! Thank you so much. Can I use it for Andy?

Brandee Sanders:

You better, and I want to hear you sing it, like, straight up, we need…

Jarod Greene:

Wicked.

Brandee Sanders:

Listen, there’s more ex-musical theater majors in this room than I would give credit for right now, so super excited for the energy, guys. Thank you so much for being a part of it today.