How CMOs Are Deploying AI Across Marketing

Hey, it's Dave.

I want to give a quick shout out to Knack for sponsoring today's episode. Knack is a purpose-built email and landing page platform, and they're also one of our longest running sponsors. When I create our newsletter each week, I spend a bunch of time, more recently, with Claude, my friend Claude, as my editor. But once I'm done editing the newsletter, it's not as simple as just getting my copy from a Google Doc and hitting send. If you're a B2B marketer, you know that. So what happens? Someone has to take that output and turn it into an actual email that renders in Outlook follows brand guidelines and ships. You know this story. The last mile still feels slow and manual. Knack has made this a lot shorter. They just launched an MCP server that connects your AI assistant directly to their platform. So now you can describe the email you need in Claude or ChatGPT and draft it like normal, but it automatically starts building in Knack for you. You get an email that comes out following your brand rules automatically. No manual cleanup, no broken HTML, and even better quality than anything your team built by hand. The marketing ops team at OpenAI is actually running this workflow right now. They intake internal campaign requests from Slack, an AI agent structures it into a ticket, Knack MCP generates the email, and a marketer refines and ships. This is the future of marketing. You should go check it out at knack.com. That's K-N-A-K dot com. Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to Vectr for sponsoring today's episode. Vectr is a contact-level ads platform. You probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones on your site that are clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. They're launching an MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude or ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Hey, which ad creatives are fatiguing? Which companies are engaging but not converting? What's actually driving pipeline right now? It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Go and check them out. It's vector.co. That's V-E-C-T-O-R.co. Vector. You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt Show.

Exit 5.

1, 2, 3, 4. Exit 5.

Super excited to do this session. So my name is Dave Gerhardt. I am the founder and host here at Exit 5. We have built the top community for B2B marketers to learn what's going on in B2B marketing. And man, is it a wild time to be a marketer right now. Super fun. I feel like I'm relearning new stuff every day. And because of that though, there's a lot of noise out there and we want to make it our job to help separate the signal from that noise. That's why we do these. We do these twice a month. It's just absolutely not a webinar. Twice a month we do these ExitFive live sessions and we bring on a group of people who are doing the things that you're doing right now, and they're going to share specific examples. This often works like therapy because you realize you're not alone in feeling behind and feeling stuck and feeling you didn't know how to do that. But also gives you a source of ideas and inspiration. And I know that you're gonna get at least one or two new ideas today. If you pay attention and take notes, you'll get one or two new ideas today that you can bring back into your company with you. So I have an awesome panel. We have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. We have 5 marketing leaders behind, behind the stage that are gonna talk about what they're doing with AI. And what's cool about this session is we have people that are at all different parts of their journeys with AI. So you're not just gonna get super advanced complex, crazy stuff that makes you feel lost. We're gonna show you a bit of like what would be crawl, walk, run approach to AI today. So first though, if you're hearing me right now, I just want you to put your name in the chat. Let me know like what's your name, where are you writing in from, and then why take the time outta your day to attend this session? What's going on with you and AI? What do you need to learn about AI? Drop that in the chat just so we know that you're here. All this is gonna be recorded. You will also get a replay after this. Matt, big fan, exit 5. While the chats roll in here, by the way, one of the best parts about doing these live sessions that it is all marketers who show up. And so one of the best things is to actually participate in the chat, help each other out, ask us questions, share what you're doing, like be an active participant in the chat. Makes this so much better. Also makes me feel less alone here, here in my house talking into the camera. But this is great. Michelle in Florida, excited to get some new ideas and see where others are in the journey. The Claude propaganda. Is there a lot of Claude? There will not be any Claude propaganda on this, I can promise you. Kennedy's in Texas, Calgary, trying to make the leap from AI to AI tools to agents. Want to see what others are doing. Kevin's in Boston. Learn a ton from these not webinars. Let's go. Thanks for coming back. Aaron Griss in Utah. Shout out to you. Shout out to you. Big fan of ExitFive. Allison's in VA. Julia's in London. Everybody wants to know what they— this is great. Come on here. We could do this every Friday. Every Friday, come in here. We're going to talk about AI until eternity. So I'm excited to be here. But hey, before we get into today's session, I bring up our guests and show you some really cool stuff. Everybody's got some cool stuff prepared. I just want to give a quick shout out to Optimizely for sponsoring this session today. Optimizely is an all-in-one digital experience platform that acts as the operating system for modern marketing teams, helping you create content, run experiments, personalize experiences, and optimize your website, all powered by AI. They have a really cool product called Opal. We're going to see some of that in a little bit. An AI agent platform built specifically for marketing teams. It helps you build agents that understand your brand. Connect to your tools, and handle the repetitive work so you can focus on the strategy and creative. Their team is actually here today. Shout out to them. And they're gonna show you some of these ideas and how to build agents for yourself. They've also put together an AI playbook for you to take home. It covers how to go beyond just prompts, how to build and govern an agentic marketing engine in a 30, 60, 90-day plan to get started. They'll be sending it to everyone after the session, so keep an eye out. We'll hook you up with all that, the recording, the notes from all this, and this from Optimizely. It should be in the chat right now. Thank you to the team at Optimizely for sponsoring this session. The word of the day is AI pilled. I'm taking 'em all. I'm in. That's my favorite new term. It used to be inbound marketer, content marketer, whatever. The marketers today, everyone's talking about AI pilled marketer. That's where we're at. So, okay, Allison, why don't you bring everybody up here? We're gonna do quick intros with everybody, talk about what they're gonna show you. Everybody's then gonna come back up, show you one or two examples of something they're doing with AI, and then we're gonna bring it all back together. For a group discussion, answering all your questions live here on this session.

Okay.

All right. Here we are. Now I get to come up for air and see. So let's go my left, right? So Tara, Julia, Lily, Kevin, Paige, tell people, granted, there's a lot of people here and there's a lot of you. So quick intro, who you are, what do you do for work, and what's cool to you about AI and marketing and maybe a teaser of what you're going to show later.

Sure.

So I'll start. Tara Corey. I lead marketing at Optimizely. Been with the team for a little over a year, and it's an extremely exciting ride throughout my career. Focused on marketing operations, demand gen, and always like leading transformation. I think this is the most disruptive period for marketing ever, and it's like exhilarating. I was also, you just mentioned you were going down to Florida. I was down in Florida a few weeks ago, and it kind of reminds me of that like rollercoaster thrill, right? Like you got fear, anxiety, like excitement. So it's really an exciting time to be a marketer and embracing AI and, and how it's really gonna evolve our roles. As we go forward to hopefully do some of the things that we love, like connecting with customers, telling great stories, being creative. So we hopefully don't lose that in this world of AI.

Love that. I love that. Let's bring it back. Let's make marketing about doing creative and fun stuff again. Next is Julia, and we already got one— Julia hasn't even talked yet, but we got a shout out to your title, Director of AI and Adoption. So who are you? What do you do? What does the Director of AI and Adoption do?

Good question. Marketers might relate to the, like, you have a title and then you have your comma that just, like, tries to give a bit of explanation on what you do. But I'm Julia. I work on, yeah, integrated marketing AI adoption. I mean, I've had the integrated marketing side for a while. I've been at Optimizely 8 years, not doing that for the full 8 years, but kind of in the past few years focused on building the systems, processes that connect our pretty big diverse and very distributed marketing team. And over the past maybe 6 to 12 months, AI adoption has been added in as a kind of natural next chapter, running our Agenda AI program in marketing optimizedly. And I think the interesting part here is like making sure we are customer zero of our own platform, proving it out in our marketing team, supporting other customers who wanna do the same.

Cool.

All right. More, more on that in a minute. Lily Bond. Hi, Lily.

Hi, nice to be here. Thanks for having me. I lead marketing and sales at 3Play Media. We're a human-in-the-loop AI dubbing and captioning solution for media based in Boston. And I think our team has had a lot of false starts with AI, and I think that's probably something most people can relate to. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about what didn't work for us and then what has, uh, really transformed our team this year. This year to go from what I view as 10 to 1,000 on AI. And obviously the limit doesn't exist, so who knows how low 1,000 is in context, but it's just a really exciting environment now and I want everyone else to feel like they can get there. So I'll talk a little bit about that.

Man, I love that. My job is like, I'm literally, I talk to people about this for a living and that's what everybody wants. They want someone to be real about like, hey, we did this, it didn't work. Here's the thing that we finally got to get it right. So I'm excited to go through that. And Pedj is here. Pedj is the CMO at Menlo Security.

Hi, everybody. Yeah, I'm CMO of Menlo Security. I've been here about 3 years. For us, this was about finding ways to work down that list of things we've always wanted to get done but never managed to find the time to. We found that AI gives us the ability to be more efficient, to be more agile, and taking those early wins and stretching that throughout the team is what our goal is moving forward. And we're off to a good start. Excited to share this with everyone here.

Cool.

All right.

Good intro. And last is Mr. Kevin Clark.

Yeah.

So I'm Kevin Clark, CMO of CompTIA, and we're the global leader in IT certifications and kind of expanding out of that area as well. And we sit in kind of an interesting position because we're not just figuring out how we implement it internally. We're also helping to train and credential the people who will be using AI. So it's kind of a— we got to do what we talk about a little bit. We have a very small marketing team. So for us, AI is beyond kind of something we want to do, it's something we kind of have to do. But as Tara talked about a little bit earlier, it's kind of also in that kind of rollercoaster stage. I was thinking about it of, have you ever seen a wobbling baby come lurching at you across a room? And it's awesome to watch, but also a little terrifying. That's totally us, right?

My daughter learning to walk, this could be my parental instinct, her falling flat on her face and breaking her nose. Is that what's gonna happen right now? I don't know. Or is she gonna take it?

Exactly. Like you're watching them come at you and you're thinking, are they gonna hit the coffee table, the ground? Like what's going on? And I feel like all of us are there a little bit. I mean, I definitely, I don't wanna project on everyone else, but that's kind of where I feel like we're at.

Ah, do you hear that? Everyone should just sigh. Like we all just kind of admitted like this isn't gonna be the, you know, Claude Code will blow your mind in the next hour session. We're gonna have some real practical conversation about what's going on. With that, okay, cool. Good intros. We'll see everybody in a bit. We're gonna leave Tara and Julia up and the format real quick is gonna be everybody's got a couple of minutes to show or talk through something that they just teased on their, on this journey. So your job is hang out in chat, be a good participant, ask questions, put notes in the chat, help each other. We're gonna go through everybody and then I'm gonna bring everybody back on stage and we'll do a bunch of Q&A to hopefully help you out. Okay.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Dave. And one of my, I think, secrets in my career has always been to try to find some of the rock stars. In my organization and look for those change agents and champions. And that's exactly what Julia is. She's like the type of person within the organization you absolutely have to have that knows where all the bodies are buried, how they were buried, where to find things, how things work. And I think that's one of the things that's so critical from an AI perspective is like you have to know the processes, where the work is done, the workflows, and build on a solid foundation. And Julia knows exactly how to do that. So she right out of the gates, just became a natural at building agents and understanding how it could really work across the team, both from a people perspective, but also from a process standpoint. So I'm gonna pass it over to Giulia, who's gonna share kind of how we actually operate our marketing and do the work, have our priority programs, and ensuring that we're leveraging AI into our workflows where the work's being done.

I have one question to you before we— this was not planned, but do you think if you were to bet out into the future, do you think more marketing leaders, VPs, CMOs running your marketing teams are— feel like more of your colleagues are finding someone like a Julia to own AI? Like, it seems to need to have an owner inside of a team. Just curious, like, that strategic decision on the team.

I get to speak, which is the one fun part of being in the role that I'm in, is working and getting to connect with a lot of CMOs across organizations. And I think absolutely that's— we're seeing that where it went from a decent— or it started with everybody doing agents and so forth, and it really needed to be kind of more centralized. And we were going to talk a little bit later, but we're seeing that like pendulum swing to where we started with like, hey, here's a hackathon, everybody like go at it. And then we went to the more—

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they're like, whoa, this isn't working. Right? We've got now all these agents and they're not, not all agents are created the same or some are sloppier, some are better at it. So then we went to a more centralized controlled model and I think we've actually swung the pendulum to sort of be in the middle, right? Where Julia's sort of the shepherding our entire AI adoption strategy and approach where we're still letting, not squashing the enthusiasm of building, but really making sure we've got some controls and guardrails into the mix and how we're actually rolling that out across the organization.

Nice. Okay, great context. All right, Julia, you got it.

Nice. Well, I think Tara mentioned, yeah, the whole, we're not trying to squash enthusiasm, but adding like a bit of centralized governance around things. And one thing that we did was a lot of like use case discovery. I actually think Pej later is gonna talk through his version, so I won't tap into that. Too much, but our ethos generally in finding AI use cases is uncovering those ones that are gonna free marketers from the kind of mundane, repeatable, or like easily forgettable but very important steps in their day-to-day work. And part of that is just making sure we're sort of building agents in the platforms that our teams are working in every day.

I have some things to share about what we're doing now, but I wanna start with what we've tried and then what's finally working. So a year ago, like beginning of 2025, as an org, we set an initiative for the company, like all teams are gonna adopt AI this year, and there was a lot of momentum behind it, but nothing really clicked in place. And I think in reflecting back, the things that didn't work about it were that leadership wasn't jumping in to like lead by example with it. We were asking other people to make this happen, and the tools that we were using required development support. So we had development support, but it meant that go-to-market teams couldn't really be autonomous in thinking about it. And what has changed this year are those two things primarily. So if you find yourself in that boat at all, my recommendation is to like stop, pause, and start over. What really changed is like for the go-to-market side, I personally just started investing a lot of time in listening to podcasts. Reading, and then every time I heard about something, I tried it. And I found really quickly some tools were hard and some tools were easy. And diving into the ones that were easy helped us make so much progress quickly that then we could move left and tackle the harder things. But you need to start in the right place in order for it to take off. And the amazing thing about marketers is that we have incredible ideas and incredible vision, And for the first time, I'm seeing the marketing team be able to have that vision and immediately put it in action instead of having to like wait for ops, wait for dev, wait for other teams to do it for them.

Big fans already popping into your chat because a lot of people, Ken, are like, relate to what you're saying here, which is awesome. I was going to ask this too, and then it popped up in the chat. Would love to know a little bit more about, you mentioned some tools are hard, some tools are easy. Could you just give us like the narrative on that? If you tell, we sent this email on Tuesday at 7 o'clock AM, if you want the specific name, name the tool, name the thing, like all that.

Yeah. So last year we bought Cassidy AI, which is a platform to help you build agents, but it was really hard to use. And I think that that's what made us fail initially. We're actually now using it again because we've gotten more sophisticated and we're successful with it. But the things that kicked off our team being super successful this year First off is Lovable. If you are thinking about trying it, if you're like, how do I do this? Literally just go to the homepage and put in an idea that you want to implement and it's gonna build you something beautiful. Their base prompt has beautiful in it 13 times and everything you produce is gonna be like a gorgeous marketing-ready page, app, tool, experience. And that was like mind-blowing to our teams is just like how quickly you could produce something that like on WordPress would be a nightmare and take you a week. So that really kicked off the excitement and the idea that you could do anything and like, you can't actually do anything, but that feeling has been like lightning in the org.

Also love the point that this was my experience too, is anytime the manager is telling team, use this, use this, use this, use this, use this, but not using it themselves, it just works differently than like when you're now showing the team. I notice even on our small team, a change was happening when I started showing everybody like, yeah, I just want to show you something like, check this out. I did this thing in Claude and everybody's like, oh, I get it now. And I think when you're the leader and you're doing it and you're drinking the same Kool-Aid and then also tale as old as time, humans, we don't like to do what we're told. We need to like experience it first and then pretend like it was our idea all along.

And so I love, I love the way that you kind of like broke, broke Yeah, so, and I see some comments in here like, it's great, but it's a little difficult to uphold brand guidelines. There's a point where Lovable is not the right solution for you. And we've actually moved left to really building on Claude Code now, which is the same thing. You don't actually need to code in a terminal. You just vibe code your goal and you have a lot more control over the brand guidelines and things like that. But at the end of the day, we have taken a lot of the goals that we had and thought about the right tools to achieve them in. So, Lovable was the thing that kicked it off, but since then we've started using a lot of different tools to achieve a lot of different goals. And what I'm actually going to show you today, assuming I don't run into the same problem that Julia did, is one of the things that we wanted to improve is we kind of used a forcing function around our inbound process where we had promoted two of our BDRs. We had three BDRs. We had promoted two of them to AEs and we decided not to backfill them. And instead we decided to implement agentic prospecting for inbound responses so that we would produce the same pipeline value with one BDR for inbound instead of three. And we started by using some of these tools. Like we started by using Cassidy and Claude and HubSpot data underlying to try to build an agent. And what we actually ended up doing is using HubSpot's agents, and I think that's a really easy jumping off point for people that was surprisingly impactful for us. A year ago, HubSpot's agents were not good, but recently they must be on Opus or something now because it's improved dramatically. And for inbound responses from human response to prospecting agent, we improved our response rate from 18% to 46% and our meeting booked rate from 5% to 35% by moving to a prospecting agent, and I will show a little bit of about what this looks like. It's super simple, but really impactful. So you set up your inbound agent. If you're a HubSpot user, looks a lot like workflows. You can either set it up as a sequence or you can set it up as adaptive where it will respond based on prospect actions and it'll delay emails based on like the best time to respond to someone. And the entire template is prompts. So every single part of this conversation is a prompt and it's using research on the contact, on what they've done to build the response. So I'll show you an example. I contact MQLs, they go into the prospecting agent and immediately it's gonna kick off research. And it's gonna look at the contact data, any previous call data, any notes, any recent engagement. So it's pulling in all of the webpages they've viewed, all of the forms they've filled, any webinars they've attended. And it's also gonna pull in company research, both CRM and web. And then it's gonna draft—

so many people are saying damn right now in our private chat and this one.

This was so easy. I built this first draft in 30 minutes and we were able to launch it the next week. This was such an easy workflow to like totally transform our inbound process with the tools we already had. This is just HubSpot's native solution and it, it did a great job. So the subject line was super personalized. It pulled in those prompted sections of the email perfectly, and they actually booked a meeting on this first email. So I won't show more detail, but just a, an example of like, this doesn't have to be that hard. It can be really fast to make impact if you just dive in.

Was this something that was already existing and you thought of how to improve it with AI, or was it, did it not exist before?

Our inbound process is someone MQLs and a BDR follows up with them. We basically replaced the BDR follow-up with this Agentic follow-up. So, the process was there, but the AI versus human was different. And now our, our single BDR is just spending all day on calls and in meetings, which is really the goal.

That's the goal.

Love that.

Great job. She does have more, but we can't share all of it. That's a wrap on you, right?

Yeah.

Okay, cool. Good job. Great job. Lots of comments in the chat. Let's go. Shout out to Lily, CMO Council member. No big deal.

That was a great example. I love that. That example was killer.

So are you seeing— Good afternoon, Julia, and my nice—

Good, good.

Yes.

Okay.

So we're trying to find and uncover AI use cases that are kind of freeing up marketers from mundane repeatable and easily forgettable, but very important tasks that are happening in their day to day. But one of the main things that we're trying to do is making sure we're integrating AI agent use cases into the work and the platforms that our teams are in every day. So this nice view here is our content marketing platform. It's kind of like any other sort of— well, it's not like any other. It's an amazing platform, work management, content management platform. And we run every single deliverable that our marketing team works on is run through our content marketing platform. So we wanted to introduce AI into our workflows and our day-to-day work. So I thought I'd kind of share two use cases that kind of take you on the journey of content creation, ideation through to optimization and how AI agents kind of work throughout. And I think content creation is often like the first assumption that people take when thinking about how AI can, how AI can support. And that's not wrong, but we're trying to go beyond just like AI for content creation and more finding those use cases throughout the content creation journey. So this is a blog post that one of our team is working on. It's all done in the platform, the brief for the blog post, they're writing the blog article here. We're pulling in a preview from the website. And we have repeatable kind of templatized workflows that we're running. And I wanted to share this example because I think when people talk about agentic workflows and human in the loop, sometimes it can be a little bit hard to like picture that. What do you mean? Where is this happening? Like, how am I then handing something off and then receiving the information back? So this is one example where we're actually in our content creation workflow, handing off work to our AI agent to do those kind of checks and balances that our teams know are important, but don't necessarily have the time to do. So in this instance, our content marketer, Leah, she completed her brief, she wrote the content, and then we actually handed off that piece of content, that article to our EAT checker. So anyone who's in the world of SEO, you know, it's a super important step that runs it through.

What does that mean for those of us who are not in that world? What is the EAT checker?

Expertise. Someone remind me of the second E. Authority and trust. Expertise, another E letter word, and authority and trust. My mind's gone blank. Someone in the chat will 100%.

Yeah. Maria says experience.

Experience and expertise. Experience, expertise. Exactly. They sound like quite similar words, but I think that's definitely it. Once it's completed that step, handing over to the brand voice checker and how our platform actually then runs that feedback back, is that this agent went off and did its work. It grabbed the piece of content from here and highlighted, okay, for the EAT checker, this content has 1 critical issue and 3 advisory flags to resolve before publication. There's unsupported claim, maybe some outdated references, an internal linking opportunity, which is one thing our content marketers say they always forget to do, and shallow external citations. All feedback that's super valuable when you're still writing. And you'll notice that even though the brand checker step was completed, it didn't leave a comment, and that's quite intentional for us. We also don't want AI just giving you information for the sake of giving it to you. So our other ethos is like, let's— Opal, let AI agents recommend the work, but if it's not gonna give you something helpful, it should just stay out of your way. And we really don't want our marketers to have to remember to go into another platform to initiate work. So that's kind of an example of how we're literally handing off work to our AI agents in the platform and happy to go into like the more kind of technical details of how that works. But I thought this was a nice visual to kind of contextualize that.

Did you mention the— on the brief, do you— did you mention how the brief gets created at all? Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand generation agency that I've actually personally hired twice.

That's right.

Before I was a thought leader, I was an actual marketer, an operator, a VP of marketing myself, and CGM was one of the best agencies that I've ever hired. They help high-growth cybersecurity, DevOps, and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are actually forming opinions about which products to use. CGM is great because they offer the combination of AI SEO, modern paid advertising strategy, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team that you need today. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by a former VP of marketing who gets this space. They really understand B2B. So if you're in search of a new agency that can help you hit the number this quarter and you need help with things like AI, SEO, and paid media, you should definitely go and check out Compound Growth Marketing. I call them CGM, Compound Growth Marketing. Go and check them out at compoundgrowthmarketing.com. And tell them that Dave and Exit5 sent you.

So we also have brief agents that we can set up. So directly in here we have our AI platform, our Opal window, and this right here knows that it's on this task. So if I wanted to say like, who's the author of this blog post brief, it would scan this, Leah Messenger, which by the way, Leah Messenger, what a great name for a content marketer. And it can make changes. It understands exactly kind of where it is. So yeah, briefs are completely ripe and we have plenty of brief agents to support making this. And then once you have a brief, you can open or suggest content based on that brief. But obviously no good content is like finished without doing some analysis. And we're all marketers on this call. You can probably relate that we, I at least hate GA4, it's the worst thing ever. No one wants to go into it, or either you have kind of one person in your org who somehow likes GA4, and then they become a bottleneck for everything that you need, all the data that you need to find. So we have our GA instance connected right up into Optimizee Opal. This is just a general past 90 days kind of traffic report from GA, but it grabs so many insights and it's not only just giving you the data, but kind of giving you an action plan of what you can do. And this is completely kind of editable. If I wanted to make some tweaks here and then actually just download it as a PDF or a Microsoft Word document and share it to Tara to tell her how the website's performing, I can totally do that.

Oh my, we've come so far. I used to have this meeting every Friday. There would be this like management meeting and I would have to come in and I'd have to present. And for some reason, the CEO and the two founders obsessed over like website traffic and it just fluctuated a lot. And I didn't have a good story on, on why. And so like you'd have to go in GA, piece together this, match Salesforce data, try to come up with a story to be able to like chat with an AI agent and be like, can you help me figure out like, okay, what are the plays? Because then it wasn't just about going to that meeting and being like, the worst thing you do is like going to that meeting and be like, traffic is down, traffic is down and here's why and here's what we're going to do about it is like just changes the whole tone of that conversation. I'm sure, you know, that's like Tara can understand that as a, someone brings that to you on the team, it's like, okay, we've, we gotta plan here.

Exactly. And we also kind of try and build our agents with this three sort of letter term of identifiers, identifying an issue, it's recommending a solution, and then it's resolving. So actually another, just my final example is like, yes, this is a general traffic report just from our.com, but kind of going back to what would happen after the blog article is launched. We could also probably relate to maybe a bit of a set it and forget it mentality sometimes with content that we publish, remembering to go back and see if it's performed. So I just showed you like a full-scale example of like our full dot-com platform. You can also get that same report on one single page, but this is a workflow we set up. So again, our content marketing platform has a kind of like ticketing work request system that raises alerts to people when something needs to get done. And this is an agent workflow we've set up that kind of just scans our website every single day and identifies if there is a piece of content that was published 30 days ago. It will then run a traffic report and identify whether that article didn't hit what we've set as our benchmark traffic metrics for the first 28 days. So in this instance, we had 180 sessions on this article in the first 28 days. It's gonna highlight this, literally assign the work so that the marketer is aware of this and make some recommended actions. Leah could then jump in, accept this work, and literally start a task to run her optimizations and add another AI workflow to support this. So I just kind of take you on a journey of like a content creation example that goes way more beyond just kind of generating the first copy and kind of keeping the human in the loop.

Also interesting because like this shows how the role of in hiring content people over the years, it's always this weird mix of you want someone who cares about the craft of the content to make great content, but oftentimes that person is more of a creative marketer. They're not as analytical for all the different reasons. I think because of tools like this, because of AI, you can almost marry those two things together. Now we can have this super creative person who's able to do stuff at a more technical level and analyze content and measure content without having to be like, ah, that's not my side of the brain. I'm not going to manage that. We can like democratize that a little bit, which is exciting, right?

Yeah.

You don't have to have a content person and a growth content person. They can be one person.

Yeah, exactly. And the human voice is becoming all the more important. So you're not just sending out AI-generated content that's not going to attract attention. So this is, yeah, truly just kind of augmenting the human skills. You're so right.

Let's bring up Paige.

Hey there. So I want to talk a little bit about the process that we're using and are attempting to use here. One, we wanted to make sure that when we started, we found there was a ton of interest. Like everybody started playing with the different chatbots and the LLMs, but that kind of left us in a little bit of pilot purgatory, pilot paralysis, for lack of a better term, as we weren't really moving the ball forward with things that were generating a tremendous amount of ROI. From a workflow perspective. So we've got this process now that we're in the midst of going through here still, but the key things that like were the aha moments for the team were getting out there, experimenting is key, but in many cases, you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what's out there. And if you latch onto a given set of tools, things are changing very quickly. So focus on the outcomes. And to do so, we needed to map out the roles, map out the workflows, find the areas where there were opportunities to optimize. If we saw huge chunks of time allocated to a given set of tasks, that's where we're starting to hone in on. And so that's kind of one variable.

The other variable— Lots of people want this slide, by the way. Number— let me teach you something about hosting one of these things. Number one thing is when people has a slide and either you're in an event and you see people taking pictures or people ask for it, that's how you know you got something. I think the reason this slide is hitting, because I think one thing I've noticed, Pedj, is like, it's very easy to just chase a shiny thing and like, look, you know, there's, I can make cool videos. Like I could use this voiceover thing. I can make these cool videos. I could do this random thing. It's like, okay, those end up just kind of be additive. It's like making a meme for your market, just making an image or something and having no plan for it. But I think this is why Lily's example hits so hard with people too, because it's like an actual thing that fits so perfectly in the motion of the business. And now we can improve it with AI as opposed to just finding like, new stuff to staple on, right?

Yeah. The key thing is this gives you this process, whether you use these steps specifically or something like it, it gives you a roadmap of where you can hone in and focus. And two, it also plays to the different capabilities that you have on your team. So as if you're a marketing leader, there's going to be different degrees of enthusiasm and capability there. Some folks on my team are, which I'll show in a moment, are diving headlong into cloud code and building custom applications. Some are happy to just do a process improvement, you know, interacting with the chatbots, and some are kind of in the middle. And I think that's okay. You've got to cater to all those different skill levels. So that said, though, one of the key things that we were really taken with is branding and tone for us. That was a big challenge of over a dozen, dozen and a half content generators on the team from product marketing through content marketing. So we have a number of writers. Everybody has a different tone. Everybody has a different voice. And we started— we've seen the divergence away from our brand tone and voice. So this is a tremendous amount of manual review that was happening. Now we can incorporate our branding guide directly into an application. So if I take a blog post that we just did recently, ironically on AI security, and I want to go rank this, I can just drop this URL in here. It'll score it for me. It'll automatically rewrite it for me if I so desire. It can give me just recommended changes or some combination of the two. So here I'll have it go give me a scorecard and the tracked changes that it's going to make. So, but the beauty of this is, again, this would be a very manual process requiring one or two levels of review against a— I'm sure you guys have this in your companies as well— a very dense branding and guideline document. Ours is about 40 pages long, and that takes something that would be hours. And if we're going into launches or major releases, these sort of activities stack up as you expect. And here you can see in just a few seconds it's gone out, it's giving me an overall score, and it's outlining the dimensions. So here it's, it's saying for the voice characteristics, it's talking about the parameters and the rubric that we've set up for voice against archetype alignment. Audience language patterns and so on. And it's giving the recommended changes, or I can opt to go with something that's just done for me automatically depending on the level. But this gives me that human-in-the-loop ability to review and refine as well as understand what's changing. Another area that I want to showcase, in fact, I believe my team member that built this little tool is on the live session with us today, was analyzing—

Good job, good job. Look at that, he navigated around that, did not say webinar. I caught that little delicate sidestep.

I had to dance a little bit there, Dave, but we got through it. We got through it. So, you know, when we do major announcements or messaging changes, we want to go and make sure that we're adapting our backlog to it, looking for gaps in our backlog of documents. There's hundreds of documents that we have to update. Pulling these and doing this in a chatbot is untenable. There's document limits and caps. Pulling this into NotebookLM, we can create a very simple prompt. He's loaded all the documents in there via URL. Is able to execute the prompt and it gives them a nice mapped out Google Sheet that lays out which documents need updating and gives them the option to automatically update those documents as needed. Again, taking weeks of work and turning that into mere minutes. So there are fantastic opportunities for optimizing, but for us, it really started here in determining where we could get the biggest bang for our buck from an ROI standpoint.

What does all this mean? Your CMO in this world You've seen a bunch of stuff here. Where's marketing going? What does this mean? Your short answer to that question, how are you rethinking things? What does it mean for the future?

Without overstating the platitude, this is one of the biggest changes I've seen in tech, period. And my directive to my team, it's not just like, hey, let's embrace AI for the benefit of Menlo Security. This is a retooling of your, your own personal marketing capabilities. This changes the game for us and how we think about the different disciplines within marketing moving forward. So, you know, one thing I know for sure is this will not eliminate the creativity and the skill that marketers bring to the table, but it does force us to kind of adapt to this. Those that resist these sorts of tools, which I think that's eroding very quickly, are the ones that will get left behind. The ones that embrace it are the ones poised for continued success and greatness in marketing.

Love it. Great job. Great session there. People will get this slide after. All right, let's bring up Kevin.

Yeah, so I am going to be a little bit more of that watching the toddler walk across the room. I joined CompTIA in late 2025 and was managing a much smaller team than I had in the past, but we really needed to produce at a high level, and that's expected by our sponsors. I know everyone's always heard the do more with less really for us has become a forcing function, right? And AI is what we see as being able to kind of make us small but mighty. But as we kind of looked at what we wanted to do, we didn't want to overcomplicate things. We wanted to kind of make one bet and lean in, not just add a bunch of tools, and really focus on kind of changing our culture and the way we work together. And with that, we were kind of in the final stretch of our Optimizely integration. So we sat down with them to look at some of what Opal could actually do on the platform, not the hype and everything you kind of hear in the echo chamber, but like the real stuff, the stuff we could actually use day to day. And so that's where we decided to make our bet. And to do that though, kind of as a culture change, we kind of needed everyone to learn the system together so that they could support one another, hold each other accountable, and really help each other work through issues. We are at the very early stages. Literally, my team ended Opal U like 3 weeks ago. So I don't have any visual examples, which I will admit I felt kind of bad about coming in. But after watching everyone keep their cool heads, which was impressive and amazing, as they shared their visuals, I'm feeling a little bit better about just kind of talking to what we're doing. So like Lily, we were kind of looking at the easy stuff first, the stuff that would really help individuals, help them gain confidence in their skills, and also kind of really show the value that AI can add to each individual. So we get that buy-in in the organization. So there's a number of things that we've been working on around, as you kind of expect, synthesizing content, building campaign briefs. We've audited our AI tags for accessibility and used it to help synthesize our research reports and kind of break that into snackable content that goes out to use on emails and social and help support our sales team. But one of the ones that I found really interesting is I've been pushing really hard on accelerating the pace of A/B testing on our site. And it's really been a struggle for us because as we look at kind of all of the people we need and the resources we need on most of the A/B tests, we find that we end up needing some level of frontend dev on most of the tests that really kind of make a difference for us. And our dev partners are great, but we got to kind of get time in a sprint. And frankly, I just want to move faster than that. So as we were doing this, we said, hey, I wonder if Opal could help us solve that problem.

Is there resistance? Like, did you have to be the one to lead this across the team? Or did you have— like, you got a small team. Was there one person who was like anti-AI and didn't want to do this? How did you make everyone or bring everyone to get here?

Yeah, I think, to be honest, we just made it a bit of a mandate. We're looking to do Opal University. We identified super users on the team. So people that I went to and basically said, hey, you're going to be the lead on the team. You're going to be the person that really helps on each individual functional area to make sure you're up to speed on what's going on. You're the person that people can go to with questions. You're sharing what's working with you and kind of creating that culture of learning. And what we also did is we said it's not just us, right? Even though marketing is leading the, the work that we're doing. I've had RevOps also go in and take training and sit in on this. We've had people on our development team doing the same thing because I need to make sure that as we implement and as we try to get the technology, you know, our tech stack matched up with what we're trying to do, I need buy-in and understanding from each of those people across those other teams as well. So, you know, it's a marketing-led effort, but it's not just marketing. Does that make sense?

Totally.

Okay, look, we have so much action in the chat. I want to bring everybody— Allison, can you throw everybody back up on stage real quick? We're just going to get to Q&A while everyone's here because it's useful. This question in the chat from Akshay: What's resonating more with your counterparts these days, optimizing marketing spend using AI or shipping things faster because of AI? So are you doing more to optimize spend with things like SEO and AEO or more doing more creative stuff and creating net new things? Anybody have an opinion on that?

Yeah, I think that's actually a really good question. On two fronts, I've been careful with my team to not make AI a means of explicit cost savings. That this is about efficiency, this is about agility, this is about expanding into areas that we've been meaning to always get into, but just haven't been able to make the time to do so. And this is opening up doors for us. And that's the approach we've taken. And I think that that's one. Puts people's mind at ease with what's happening at the macro level in the market with, with AI. And two, it is so much more fun to be able to do the things that you've been wanting to do instead of doing the equivalent of long division all day.

You know what I mean?

Like, that's, I think that's really appreciated by the team.

Yeah. I'll jump on to that in terms of like, I've always been a, a big believer in, in intent, right? Data and meeting people where they are in their journey and so forth and account-based marketing. And I've never felt like we've actually had the content operations or to be able to scale content creation to actually do ABM at scale. And now I think AI absolutely changes that game. And I think our expectations as consumers are like, our expectation is that you're going to be super relevant all the time now, or else it's just going to be ignored. So I think it's an exciting time because I think we've never been able to do the things we've actually dreamed of doing. And now I think we'll be able to.

I was on a call yesterday and this person showed me— this was with Claude Code. Doing a full SEO audit, finding keywords to rank for instantly, volume, target cost, whatever, which has taken agencies, you know, weeks in the past, months in the past, and then you just get a spreadsheet with stuff. Not only giving them that, but then also saying, okay, great. Now that we have this keyword analysis, go and create 100 landing pages. This was like to basically create 100 different versions of templates across their site to be used as a lead magnet for search. And he generated 100 variations of these pages in minutes and could have deployed them if we weren't on the call. And those are the things that are like, man, how do you train? You literally have to retrain your brain around solving some of these problems now when they, when they come in, right? It's just like a totally different way of working. Another question that came in is, are you tracking different metrics now because you have AI agents and workflows? Like, have your KPIs and how you talk about marketing changed?

I personally wouldn't say they've necessarily changed. We just have much speedier, quicker access to those same KPIs, and we're now reporting out on them so much more frequently. And then in terms of our actual, we now, well, the one new KPIs we have is Opal adoption and actually, and just AI adoption in general. And that's like a major KPI for us now too.

That's for your, for your product, right? For us, for our marketing team.

Yeah.

Maybe this is a question for Tara, Lily, Paige-ish. Are you making any different marketing budget decisions because of AI and AI tooling?

I'm thinking about budget for AI, and I'm thinking about what tools I don't need anymore. I'm not thinking about changes to, for example, our advertising or events budget. I'm just thinking differently about how we spend our software budget. I want more budget towards credits across platforms and less budget towards traditional tools that feel outdated.

Yeah, I'd echo Lily's sentiment there. We're reevaluating kind of the installed tech stack that we have today against what still holds water given how our workflows are evolving. And we are churning out some of the more dated tools and reapplying that budget towards either tokens or AI-forward applications that are replacing some of the legacy ones. Did I say AI-forward? I meant AI-pilled. AI-pilled.

There we go. That's a good way to put a pin in it. Okay, we're gonna wrap, we're gonna close right on time. Thank you for everybody. Quick shout out to Tara and Julia and Lily and Kevin and Pedj out there at home. We'll send out the recording. We could probably link to everybody's LinkedIn's also. I know a bunch of you wanna connect and maybe ask some follow-up questions. This was great. I got a bunch of ideas and, and notes from this session. We'll see you on the next ExitFive live session. Thank you to the team at Optimizely for presenting this session and being a part of everything we're doing right now at ExitFive. And here's to more AI adoption. And who knows what's going to happen 2 weeks from now when we do the next one of these. But I'll be there. I'll see you soon. Okay.

Bye.

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