Value & Context Engineering: The OS for Human-and-Agent GTM

Julia Nimchinski:

The god of MarTech. Welcome! How have you been, Scott?

Scott Brinker:

Hello, hello. I’m not sure God of MarTech is quite the right framing of that, but, yes, MarTech nerd probably is just the better interpretation of that. Well, what a fantastic panel! That was great to listen in on that.

Julia Nimchinski:

Awesome. Welcome to the show again, Scott Brinker, Randy Wooden. What a treat. Super excited to dive into this, the OS for Human and Agent GTM. Let’s go.

Scott Brinker:

Alright, terrific. Well, actually, if it is possible, we… couple slides that Randy and I collaborated to pull together, just helping guiding in our conversation as we talk about value and context engineering for agent-to-agent go-to-market.

So, yeah, the more modest and accurate representation of who I am and what I do is I’m a long-time MarTech analyst advisor, but I’ve also built my own MarTech SaaS company once upon a time, ran a platform ecosystem for HubSpot for 8 years.

And, yeah, as you’ll see in a second, if you haven’t already, contributed to the world that crazy, crazy graphic of all the different marketing technologies out there. Randy?

Randy Wootton:

Yeah, you’re being a little modest, Scott. I mean, I’ve known you for years, and the conferences that you’ve held, I think you really have been a beacon for all of us who spent time in ad tech and martech, trying to figure out what was going on and where it was going. So it’s a lot of fun to be here with you on the panel.

I’ve been in go-to-market tech for 25 years, was the CEO of Rocket Fuel, one of the first-gen AI companies for a period of time.

I was at, percolate, and sold that to Seismic, and then finally I went into the office of the CFO, because I thought the whole world of MarTech was going to blow up, and then they was this whole new AI-powered reality, and so it’s been a lot of fun to look and think about where the world’s going.

Today, I’m a partner with CEO Coaching International, work with a set of clients. In terms of helping them unlock their potential, the potential of their business, and the potential of their teams. And so, I still am a MarTech nerd, and would love to see all the innovation that’s happening, and appreciate your continued leadership, Scott.

We’re going to talk about your report, which is a beast of a report. But filled with an enormous number of insights, which we’re going to try to summarize and get through today.

Scott Brinker:

Yeah, well, we definitely have a packed agenda, you know, as we were prepping for this. We definitely wanted to touch briefly on current reality, where things are headed, dive into context, which definitely seems to be the word of the year here in MarTech now. We’ll even, like, talk a little bit about how the tech stack is evolving to support that.

And then we want to close out with, like, actual, actionable, like, here are things you gotta go do. So yeah, as you mentioned, some of the source material will be drawn upon from this. Yeah, one is the State of MarTech 2026 report, that Franz Riemersman and I, published, last month. And… This report on winning in the age of AI discovery, Randy.

Randy Wootton:

Yeah, it’s much more humble than your MarTech report, and shorter, too, but the intention, what I’ve heard a lot of people talk about is hey, you know, SEO, what do we do? It’s this new world of AEO, and the difference between GEO, and so what is AI discovery, and what does that look like?

And so, more like a primer to help both CMOs and CEOs think about the systems, processes, and tools that they need to be putting in place today to make themselves relevant, especially around brand authority and building that credibility in the marketplace that will today solve for AEO, GEO.

But tomorrow, we’ll be setting up the agent-to-agent go-to-market, which we’re going to get into in detail. So, available on my website, and I know yours is as well. Both, worth a read.

Scott Brinker:

Sounds good, sounds good. And shorter is better, right? You know, Mark Twain would definitely agree on that.

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I have to flash this up because I’m required to, but, you know, having tracked this MarTech landscape here over 15 years, this is the current state of what it looks like with, yeah, I mean, all these equally unreadable microdots, and I’ll just take this moment to apologize, having inflicted this upon, you know, many of the listeners here.

You know, but it certainly helps us, like, just sort of frame this Cambrian explosion that had happened over the past 15 years, at least in commercial MarTech solutions. You know, the crazy thing was, up in… I mean, it was growing exponentially for a while, crazy enough, you know, but when it hit 2023, it just started to level off.

when once again, like, AI appeared, and there was this just explosion of new startups, entrants into the market who were leveraging new, creative, AI-native ways of doing things. It started to level out here, finally over this past year, but maybe not for reasons that you would expect.

Because we were still seeing a tremendous flood of new companies coming into the MarTech space. What was different is, boy, we finally started to see the culling of so many of the previous generation of MarTech solutions.

I feel like every year when we produce that, like, crazy graphic, you know, one of the questions people ask, it’s almost like a prayer. It’s like, when is this going to consolidate? Well, you know, you can take a little bit of comfort that there is consolidation happening below. you know, mostly out of those companies in the 2010 to 2020 cohort.

We’ve got plenty that are still thriving, but those that Those that never really fully were able to break out, you know, relative to their competitors, we saw quite an exit rate, you know, this past year.

But I think where this sort of leads into our discussion on the agent-to-agent side of things is for all the just mind-blowing growth in the commercial MarTech landscape, what is wild is how much is now actually happening with Custom-built Martac.

Randy Wootton:

now.

Scott Brinker:

And I’m not saying that people are custom building their own CRMs or marketing automation platforms, at least I certainly hope they aren’t.

What they are building is everything on top of that foundation that really allows them to craft their particular workflow, you know, the way they want their go-to-market operating system to work, the way they want to start to be able to expose their own agentic experiences to their customers and prospects.

And because with AI coding, or, you know, vibe coding, if you want to interpret it that way, you know, has just put these powers within reach of so many people, as well as accelerating what professional developers are able to build, is this explosion.

If we had the long tail of commercial MarTech, it now seems to be the case that, okay, we’re also dealing with a hypertail, you know, of custom MarTech as well, too.

And so, we get ourselves into this, you know, state we’re in now, where the old world of marketing and go-to-market and the operations and technology support that, it is definitely dissolving. we see this future emerging out of the fog of, you know, a new generation of what it’s going to be like for businesses in the AI age.

But honestly, we’re not quite there yet, you know? And so when Franz and I were, you know, writing up that report, and we’re trying to capture, you know, this fact that, yes, we are in a transformation. But we’re… it’s not just the, you know, we came from this… spot A, and now we’re here at Part B.

It’s somewhere in between A and B, and that’s, you know, when the metaphor of, you know, the butterfly going from caterpillar doesn’t just immediately, instantly transform to the butterfly, it goes into this really weird and honestly somewhat disgusting, Chrysalis stage, you know, the messy middle of that, but, I don’t know, I mean, Randy, what’s your take on, you know, what you see with the CEOs you work with on that?

Randy Wootton:

Yeah, well…

Scott Brinker:

Jesse Miller.

Randy Wootton:

I think the thing that you’ve nailed is we’re all in the messy middle, right? And the idea of how do you think about a system? So, a system is, you know, the market that you’re operating in, the tech.

well, I would start with the strategy that you want to execute, and then the organization, the structure and roles and responsibilities you need to be successful, and then the tech that enables it. And what I loved about your report was it allows someone to look at it and look along these different dimensions and think about that.

So the big aha, which we’ll get to in a little bit, is this idea of, today, the great rebundling struggle, which we’re all feeling. Which tech should we be buying, and how does it work? Do we have RevOps and go-to-market ops?

And I think you’re seeing, broadly in the market, people are holding on investments, hence Syspocalyx, because they’re like, we’re not sure how this is gonna play out.

The new factor, and so, and to that point, as you think about context as a service, if that’s what we’re working towards to really create a better understanding of that, well, what’s the technology that enables that? I think the other point that you just made about, and who does what?

So the other thing we’re seeing is, or younger generations in general, tend to default to this idea of being builders. And so how do you unlock or unleash their capabilities to take advantage of some foundational tech built on a data stack. To then start being creative. The challenge is, you know, those are all little experiments.

How do you systematize that? How do you create the capabilities that are going to survive that Gen Zer that builds something and then leaves?

And so I think that’s what we start to see, where we are today, multimodal operator, as you will talk about, into a value engineer or a context engineer, very, very different than and connect… Salesforce to, you know, Service Cloud, right? Like, having those two components.

So I do think the broader structure for CEOs thinking it’s a system, where are we going, what are the levers we should pull, and how do I design that system in partnership with my CMO for the future of agent-to-agent?

Scott Brinker:

Well, alright, since you bring up, value engineering and context engineering, again, I feel like the word context, boy, if we aren’t already sick of it, by the time we get to the end of this year, I mean, it is context everything.

We have context windows, and context graphs, and context layers, you know, so, what Franz and I tried to do, you know, in our report was, like, sort of step back and say, like, okay.

From a marketing executive perspective, you know, how should you really think about what we mean by context, and we sort of framed it as these three overlapping circles of a VIN diagram, because, you know, again, being a nerd, a VIN diagram is the language I… my love language.

You know, we sort of broke it into this idea of, like, there’s Customer context, which is actually the context we’re normally talking about when we’re talking about implementing context of, like, okay, understanding, you know, the particular intent, the history of a particular customer, like, how do we serve that?

Luckily, we are now starting to talk more and more about this idea of the company’s context, the business’s context, you know, its knowledge, its processes, you know, its capabilities, a whole bunch of things that we’re now starting to embed in things like Claude Skills and whatnot, you know?

But this third circle of systems context is honestly where, you know. A lot of the work has yet to be done, which is to say, the customer’s context It exists. The customer has a context. Whether we actually see that context, or understand it, or can act on it, that’s another question. Same thing with the business.

We have a context in which we’re operating. The question is, like, how much of that from a program… programmable perspective is accessible for us to use with AI and agents. You know, and so systems context is that portion, you know, that we can actually see. But that is not THE most important thing.

The most important thing is actually how we drive this alignment between the customer’s context and the business context. And, you know, this is some of what was actually just being discussed in the panel we came from. I mean, this is the reason business exists, is like, okay, what is the customer’s job to be done?

How do we align what we’re able to do as a business to deliver on that?

And for all the wonderful talk about technology and AI and systems and how we can do this, I think it’s just so critically important that before we get down into the weeds of that systems context, we really make sure we’re driving the alignment, you know, the value development between customer and company context. Would you agree?

Randy Wootton:

Yeah, and I think what’s interesting is we think about value, everyone talks about value. You want to deliver value, you want to price based on value, but I’ve never… when I read your report, I was really struck this idea of this requires a different way of thinking about work and executing it. And what does it mean to be value engineering?

And I do think the three components of what do customers ultimately want to do, and it can be expressed, and the interface will be different from human-centered to agent, what can you provide in terms of the value that you’re able to deliver, and do you have the systems to be able to support it?

And having someone at the center of that to really be able to shift the conversation from value being A positioning and messaging exercise. To being a company capability. And who do you hire to do that? How do you train those people? How does it look different?

Because, you know, a lot of value engineering, I think, in the old world, like enterprise sales, value engineering comes in and builds the ROI for the enterprise customers, and says, hey, we’re creating value, and this is how we’re going to deliver it, and this is what we’re going to capture, and hopefully we do, you know, some outcomes-based pricing or something.

But what you’re offering in your report, and in this this, in this recommendation, it’s how do you really bring it together, understand what you have, and deliver it for a customer, and to your point you make below, it’s really focused on value creation across the system, versus, we’re gonna go execute a bunch of campaigns.

Scott Brinker:

Well, once we’ve got the clarity there around, like, what’s important, what’s actually important to the customer and the business, you know, that’s then when the next stage is like, okay, and how do we actually implement that in our systems and be able to execute it, you know, in the speed at which agents are moving?

To me, this is the way to think about the term context engineering. You know, that we’re, you know, context engineering is about trying to get the right instructions, the right data, the right information, the right Access to the right tools so that agents are able to actually execute, you know, reason and execute the way we’d like them to.

that’s context engineering, but I think of it at this VIN diagram view of, like, okay, well, once I have the clarity there around the company’s context and the customer’s context, how do I get that represented within our systems? I don’t want to go…

Randy Wootton:

Before, before, before you…

Scott Brinker:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Randy Wootton:

I, you know, I just… all I want to do is double-click, because I think the. The point you made is where the company’s knowledge becomes machine-readable. We’re create… like, think about the website design, right? Think about the content you’re producing.

How do your white papers get produced in all the ways you, you tune it so that it gets picked up by… how do you figure out citation? It’s no longer important… it’s no longer just enough to make a claim. You have to have credibility.

How are you building that credibility and brand authority on things like Reddit, which is, you know, we’ve never really… I mean, some people have played there before, but we’ve always thought, oh, we’re gonna optimize for search. what are the agents reading?

I think that’s been the thing over the last 18 months, which has been really interesting, is this whole new world is not just solving for Google and Bing, right?

It’s this broader world of all the LLMs, what are they doing, and how can you figure it out, and how do you measure it, and it’s… and people are… it just reminds me of the very early innings of search engine optimization, and you had search engine agencies that helped you do SEO and SEM.

whole new world, but the primary Point is to make it machine-readable. And I think there are a lot of CEOs out there that are like, well, I don’t know what that means.

And I think your report, in my report, sort of starts to set up a set of checklists for you to think about, are all your programs and output contributing to context that can be engaged, not just by the humans, but for the agents. And I think your next slide tees this up incredibly well.

It’s moving from workflow automation to systems of context, so please…

Scott Brinker:

Yeah, well, I mean, again, this is sort of the most enterprise-y version, you know, of a reference diagram, but the main point of it was, for a lot of companies, it’s not that this is a wholesale replacement of their existing tech stack. In fact, actually, a lot of the systems of record, you know, a lot of the systems engagements they have.

are still foundations that they want to be leveraging.

What’s fascinating now is it really is about having this agentic layer, both inside the business, but increasingly connected to the outside world, you know, buyer-side agents, you know, be it, you know, AI answer engines, you know, from an AEO perspective, are honestly even now starting to see buyer agents that are able to interact directly with companies through things like exposed, external MCP servers.

This is… this is fascinating. The main thing is, you need those things in your core MarTech stack. to be able to play well with that. Luckily, we’re seeing most of those companies move pretty quickly, in expanding support for things like MCP, expanding their API support for agents, CLIs.

Man, it feels like if we do one thing better than any other industry on the planet, it is absolutely come up with three-letter acronyms. But, alright, well, enough of that crazy thing.

I think one last point we wanted to make here, you know, was that so much of when we’re talking about agents and marketing, it’s very easy to… to focus just on the agents that are inside helping us as marketers, because that’s the thing that, you know, I mean, we’re hearing from all of our vendors, you know, all of these solution providers, and that’s great stuff!

But those agents, in my view, are very much just about improving how marketing gets done. Valuable, but it’s an incremental set of capabilities. What is really the most exciting stuff here is, as we’re starting to see more of this buyer-side agent experience. that’s the stuff that’s actually disrupting marketing.

We’ve certainly seen it in a huge way, and I’d love your, yeah, perspective on this, you know, with AEO and just where that shift of buyer behaviors to that, but I suspect that’s actually just the tip of the iceberg of how that behavior is going to evolve.

Randy Wootton:

Yeah, I mean, I talked a little bit about, you know, what’s happening before the click now.

people are showing up with a point of view, they’ve already sussed you out compared to all the competition, have a RFP written by a LLM, and they’re gonna ask a bunch of questions, and, you know, it’s just a very different experience from the discovery of what we had before.

So, I do think the… understanding, and, you know, maybe, Scott, maybe this is a question back to you, is How do you figure out what your buyers are doing? Well, you do surveys, right? You engage with them. How did you find us? What did you use? We used to, you know, did you find us on Google? Did you find us on Facebook?

Did you find us… like, how did you use AI to find us? What LLMs did you use, and what were the prompts that you used? So to help tune, to acknowledge that the buyer process has changed. And… Go ahead.

Scott Brinker:

No, no, please, continue.

Randy Wootton:

No, I was just saying, if the buyer process has changed, then you, as the vendor, selling to that individual or the buying committee needs to change. How you demonstrate value needs to change. And so, what do you represent on your website? How do you arm your salespeople? What’s the call-down?

So, I think it’s going to radically change this augmented human phase before we go agent to agent. It’s gonna, you know, in the next 3 to 5 years, it’s all gonna be based on how do you play the game more efficiently and effectively, knowing that there’s this disruption because customers are adopting agents.

When we get to agent-to-agent, it’s, you know, it’s the matrix. It’s a whole different world, but we need to be putting those… if you just go back one slide, we need to be putting the pieces in place for that. So we’ll talk about the go-dos.

I think this is a wonderful slide for a CEO to go to their CMO and or their ops leader, or their IT leader, and say, just map out what we got today. Red, yellow, green. Like, do we have a piece? Do we have this piece? Do we don’t have the piece? Is it on the plan? If not, how do they connect? How do we think about it?

What do we really want versus what we don’t want? And it’s the core set of technical capabilities that allow you to speak to and redefine the value that you’re delivering in an augmented human. And then, is this… the other question is. Is this gonna set us up for the future?

Like, we know we’re going to agent-agent, is this the right… Is this the right construct? And that’s decisions you need to make today that are gonna take the next year to put in place.

Scott Brinker:

Yeah, the optionality there cannot be understated. Like, we know the world is changing, we don’t have… perfect crystal ball vision as to what we’re going to specifically need 2 years from now, 3 years from now.

But if we set up our systems and we really develop that adaptability, you know, both technically but also organizationally, that’s pretty much… we can be guaranteed that is absolutely going to be an investment that pays off. There’s something you said here that I just wanna, like.

underline, which is, you know, one of the best ways to actually have the insights, you know, on your market and your customers, is just go talk to your customers.

You know, one of the downsides of so much of this technology and the data and AI has made it easier for us to do all sorts of wonderful data analysis, which is all great, you know, but it’s not a substitute for actually getting out, you know. leaving your office or home office and going and meeting and talking to real customers.

There’s just a level of depth and understanding there you can’t get any other way.

Randy Wootton:

You know, Scott, just on that point, I think it’s really interesting. There’s a couple companies I know out there that are doing message testing and market research by building digital twins of the persona, right?

You have the ICP and the persona, so we want to sell to people, technology leaders in 20 to 100 million dollars, and, you know, they’re tech folks, not go-to-market folks, and blah blah blah.

And I think that can really augment your ability to have listening posts in the market, and the, you know, the digital twin is giving you feedback and tuning, etc.

But to your point, I mean, maybe I’m old school, I got a lot of gray hair, but I still think your core market research You start with your very best customers who pay you a lot of money, renew every year, and think of you as a strategic partner, and then when you’re able to sign more like that. How did they find you?

Like, that whole market engagement is… listening is a critical role for the CEO to help determine the future of the company, what they need to deliver, and for the CMO to figure out how to articulate the value. in a way that’s gonna be shown and found.

Scott Brinker:

Well, with that, let’s, close out with our go-dos, and I think I would start with this first one here, where I showed that VIN diagram, and we’re like, okay, we want to get this overlap between the customer and the company, and that’s where value engineering happens.

Oh, and then we’ve got this other circle of how do we actually get this stuff represented and actionable and visible in our systems, you know, and that work is what I consider to be the mission of content Next engineering.

Well, if you do that Venn diagram, and you look at the intersection of those three circles, that’s what I would humbly suggest is the golden context. And so when you’re driving, you know, as your recommendation to, you know, the CEO, to be asking the CMO, the CIO, how are you setting up these systems?

It needs to be, how does that align up against what we’re actually trying to achieve from a value engineering perspective?

Randy Wootton:

Perfect, and then the next step was what we were just talking about, is you take your little snapshot that you had provided and say, hey, how to audit your current Martech stack, and then are you asked… are you preparing for the future? Do you have that new agentic reality incorporated in your roadmap?

Or are you just buying stuff because the team recommended it? This is a change in that whole direction. The third one is really around define what you… redefine what you measure. Like, clicks don’t matter in the New World Order, so, like, shortlist inclusion, inbound quality, AI share of answers.

If you don’t have a team that’s thinking about how do you know that your brand authority… you’re establishing and extending your brand authority, that’s another area to really spend some time and energy.

Scott Brinker:

Yeah, and I think, like, as we’re going through this transformation, and we’re rethinking, like, okay.

This is such a great opportunity to reset how marketing sees its role and its responsibility, how the marketing operations, the marketing tech teams who support and are a part of that marketing organization work, you know, and… humbly suggest, you know, that VIN diagram is a way to get aligned on this, to be really focused, first and foremost, on the value engineering.

Who are our most important customers? what are they buying from us? You know, Clay Christensen, jobs to be done, we, you know. And then even third, like, how much margin, you know, do we make on those?

I mean, my one disappointment, well, or maybe not the only one, but my… one of my disappointments with, you know, this, like, 15-20 year arc of marketing technology is we have gotten so focused on the tech And the tools, you know, when really, like, what matters 99% is the customer and that value engineering side, and then bring the sort of work on developing our systems context, that context engineering, on top of that.

Randy Wootton:

Yeah, and then the last one is really, you wrote a really big report, I wrote a little small report, but it really is, how are you establishing thought leadership as an individual? People trust people, not companies in this new world reality.

It’s even more important as a CEO or CMO to getting a point of view out there that is both interesting and accessible to the humans. But as you think about working into the agent reality, how is it machine-readable? what are you doing about it to tune it?

Much like we did to optimize for SEO and SEM, there’s a new way of writing, there’s a new way of representing, there’s new channels, there’s new forums, but the core of having a unique point of view It hasn’t changed.

Scott Brinker:

And with that, I think we are, like, perfectly at time.

Julia Nimchinski:

What a phenomenal discussion. Thank you so much, Scott. Thank you, Randy. Our community is asking if they can get a copy of your slides.

Scott Brinker:

Absolutely. And you can also get copies of each of our reports as well, too. I think if you just Google those, is that the best way, Randy?

Randy Wootton:

Yeah, sure, I mean, you can come to our website at… well, my website is CEOx.io, and at your website, Scott, but we can put the assets together, Julia, so people can have access to it, for sure.

Julia Nimchinski:

We’ll share in the chat. Thank you so much. What a treat.