27 Traits of AI-Native Marketers (Adapt or Fall Behind)

Marketing is going to look completely different due to AI, and I'm going to give you all the important traits of an AI-native marketer. This world is going to change completely. Elon Musk himself has even said that superhuman AI will be possible by the end of 2027, and that means that almost all digital work is going to be done by an AI. If you think about that, the cost of tokens are going to come down, and that means the cost of creative is going to come down. And that ultimately means that you are going to have to understand how all this works, learn as quickly as you can while making sure that you are protecting the safety of a brand, that human judgment is going to scale with you. As long as you remain curious. So the first trait is autonomous engine optimization. So we like to talk about SEO. We like to talk about AEO, but in this case, think about this. If you have an agent that's autonomously looking through the content that you are creating, it's looking through all your sales calls, all your customer calls. It has all the data in the world around your business and all the interactions that are happening right now. Think of all the content that can be created from a top of funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of funnel standpoint that can all be done. So what we're looking at right now is my GrokBot. And I actually have this template available. You can access this template. If you stay till the end, we'll talk about how you can get it, or maybe stay till the middle or so. And we'll tell you how you can get this. Every week it's picking 40 topics from the content that I'm putting out. I get to pick 20, right? And so it'll show what's net new content, what's an update piece of content, also what should be skipped, right? So let's just look at this real quick because this is my first time looking at it today. So agent-led growth, Rank and AI. Okay. I do believe agent-led growth is going to be a big thing. So that's middle of the funnel. We should be creating content around that. The Grok Launch Playbook. Okay, everyone likes talking about Grokbot right now, how it's beating Open Claw, how it's beating Hermes right now. Okay, Grokbot Near Publishable SEO, which is kind of what we're talking about with this one over here. Grokbot Cold Start, right? So there's maybe there's a couple here that I really like. How to set up Grokbot, Grokbot Marketing Team, Company Brain Services Page. So you can see it's a nice mix of things over here. And I actually like a couple of these ideas. I can continue to tell it to refine itself, but this is an example of autonomous engine optimization where I have a template and it's combining a handful of different tools that I have. It also combines with our AEO tool, ClickFlow, which helps create content, which helps scale content at a high quality level. And so there's an API for that and it's, it's all wrapped in this, right? And so you can take this template and you can roll with it. And by the way, the way we're going to work is managing agents and sharing these templates with other people, sharing these templates with other agents, letting the other agents talk to each other. So what this is going to mean is that once you have an autonomous engine optimization program running, your SEO is going to improve, your AEO is going to improve, you're going to get more citations, you're going to, you're going to have more answerability, you're going to have more qualified traffic and more importantly, you're going to drive more conversions. Number 2 is landing pages through controlled CRO loops. And CRO means conversion rate optimization. So think about this. In the old days, you had to look at a page and maybe you're running anywhere from one test per week. Maybe if you're lucky, or maybe you're running multiple, just depending on how big your business is and how big your website is. Nowadays, instead of having to dedicate human capital, human resources to it, you can have a CRO loop that's running. And what that means is you can say, hey, the conversion rate on my Homepage is 1% right now. I would like you to raise that to 1.5% in the next 4 weeks or so. I want you to continue to show me what you're improving on. I want you to suggest changes to me and I will approve the changes, disapprove the changes. Or if you want it to be more semi-automated, you can let it do that, right? The whole idea is that this loop learns over time too. It gets better over time. And we're getting to a point where people are actually running real loops in the real world. As of this recording, you know, people would like to talk about loops, but I don't, I didn't think it was quite there yet. I actually think it's getting closer there because Amplitude recently, so they're talking about how they're running a loop, how it's improving people's products for them. It's telling them what they're, they're, they're making changes to, what they're optimizing, why they're optimizing it. And you can run that for anything that you deem an important conversion. And ultimately this is all a game of just trying to raise percentages across the board. And that's what it is. Number 3 is you have creative agents that are testing different hooks, different offers, different audiences, different concepts, different stories ultimately. And that is how you scale. And one thing I want to bring your attention to is this tweet from Ira Bodnar. Any of these AI startups that are fairly popular right now, such as Cursor. So 1,100 ads, 6,400 ads tested. Whisperflow, 820 active ads, 3,300 tested. You have Replit, 110 active ads, 5,500 tested. Let's look at Victor, for example, 620 and then 1,300. Lovable, 300 active, 990, right? And so the way you should be doing B2B marketing is copying what D2C marketers are doing, right? And so D2C marketers tend to be more aggressive, which I love. And when you think about this, you can actually have an agent that's helping you with this to spin up more creative. And that's how you ultimately scale because what's becoming more commoditized is being in the platforms and optimizing because these ad platforms, they're just going to let their AIs optimize for you. You just define the result that you're trying to get. It's just going to go out there and get the result. for you. What is not going to be as easy to automate, at least initially for right now, is the creative portion. So if you have a creative agent running, it's going to help you scale. Number 4 is you have a single brain that is operating within your company. So the single brain has context. It has a gateway that it can call into, an AI gateway, an API gateway, where it has all your connectors in there. And the AI gateway is figuring out how to route things around. It's figuring out the right tokens to be using, the right connectors to be using, and it's helping make decisions for you at a very quick level. And also, you can have the single brain living inside of your Slack. It's helping your team because it has all these connectors. It can help make strategic decisions for you. It can help come up with nice tactics, and it can just help with quick data pulls as well. So ultimately, the exchange of ideas speeds up your company, and it speeds up the clients that are working with your company as well if they're working inside of Slack or Microsoft Teams. So you need to have a type of single brain. This is just what we have. This is our— we call our single brain That's what we have, right? You can call it a company brain, whatever it is exactly, but this is going to be the way of moving forward. You have managed context, you have managed memory, it's secure for you, and it's just an easy way to get things done faster. When it comes to becoming an AI-native marketer, you have to make sure that every workflow that you produce maps to a decision and ideally maps to a commercial result. Otherwise, if it maps to nothing, the workflow isn't going to know where to go. You're not going to know where to point this bazooka to, and it's just going to go all over the place. Number 6, and this relates to connecting into a single brain. So all of the ads, all of your sales calls, all of your analytics, all of your support calls, all of your product usage, any feedback that you've had from other customers or internally, that should live within one single brain layer. That way you have context that can be shared across the board, right? Number 7, you got to make sure any customer research you do, again, the customer calls you have, the prospect calls, all the chats that you have, all the emails that you have, that ultimately feeds into a context window. This will research objections, it'll research triggers, it'll research competitor language, will also surface market language and desires. So ideally you're using something that is recording a lot of the context that's happening. Could be something like a Gong that will record your sales calls, also your customer calls as well. You can build your own or there's cheaper solutions that are out there. We just use Gong right now. It's easy for us to use. By the way, if you want access to our AI marketing skills, just go to skillsdojo.com and you can get access to it. And that's where we're going to put all of our templates as well. When it comes to things like our GrokBot template, such as that autonomous engine optimization thing that I was talking about earlier. Layer, we're going to put that in there. 8, AI-native marketing is going to have campaigns start with evidence. So instead of you starting with a blank slate where you have to prompt everything, it's going to understand what your goals are. And so when you log into the thing, it's going to say, hey, all these things happen over here. What would you like to happen next? We recommend these things, these things based on this data over here. And we think this should be number one priority. What do you think? And oftentimes I will say that the AI actually does a really good job with the recommendation already. Oftentimes I can just say, hey, just show me all your recommendations. Show me all the questions you're going to ask me, use Whisper Flow and just yap to it. Maybe I might have like 2 or 3 corrections out of 50 things that it asked me, and that's pretty good. So number 9, you might think token optimization doesn't apply to you, but it does. So expensive models should handle the heavy lifting work while cheaper tasks, let's say operational tasks that are maybe have been done to death already, you can have cheaper models for that. So you can use something like OpenRouter, or you can use raft.com has a solution that you can use as well to help you route tokens. Ultimately, that's going to save you a lot more money. That's going to save your organization money. By the way, that's, that's a judgment layer too. If you don't have that set up for in terms of how you do marketing, That's ultimately going to fall on you as a marketing leader. So don't think that's something that should be for someone else because you ultimately have the judgment on what should go to a higher thinking model versus a lower thinking model. Number 10, skills are important, especially shared skills. So you want agents to be able to pull from processes that you already have, and that makes it easy. And you want to make sure that you're upgrading these skills over time as well, because they become, they become outdated, right? And so every company should put together a Skills Dojo. So literally, by the way, if you go to skillsdojo.com, That's what we have, right? We put our skills out there, whether it's marketing skills, sales skills, whatever. We try to put it out there. We try to make a community for people to share their skills, to fork their skills, right? I recommend that you do something like this. I don't think it's, it's something that is that bad to build. And I do think it's a very high leverage thing that you can do because the way my company works now is everyone's sharing their skills all the time. Hey, I made this skill over here. Hey, I made this over here. Hey, I made this over here. And people are collaborating all the time and it's super energetic. Number 11. Your sales calls should update your enablement material, your briefs, your pages, your ads. And the way to run this is that it will give you all the suggestions of maybe after 20 sales calls and you're hearing the same objections over and over, you're hearing the same language over and over. Maybe it will suggest these changes to be made on XYZ pages on your website or in your app. And then you could go ahead and review them as a human. And then you can go ahead and approve what changes you like, what you don't like. And by the way, when, whatever you approve, whatever you disapprove, The model will learn over time, the AI will learn over time what your preferences are and what good looks like and what bad looks like over time, right? And so you want it to learn with you. That's why this is so powerful. That's why you have to make your company very queryable. You have to make your company very searchable in terms of making sure that ideally most conversations inside of your Teams chat are happening in public channels where the AI can see it. And so it can learn over time. It knows what your goals are and the more access you can give it, the better, right? Obviously you want to have permissioning around it. You want to make sure that it can't just YOLO and do whatever it wants. And that's why it's important for you to also create a gateway as well. So we have the single SingleBrain Gateway. If you go to gateway.singlebrain.com, you can get access to it. But that's where you can have connectors in there. And then that way, your connectors don't just, you know, go off and do whatever they want, right? Or people just can't connect whatever they want. That part is important. So that's why I think having a SkillsDojo or a gateway, those things are important in terms of how you can actually become a fully AI-native marketer. I'm getting— I'm not saying you need to use our stuff. I'm just saying that is available for you to use. So in terms of making your company queryable, everything in your company becomes ammunition. Right? Ammunition for you to sharpen your language, your sales language, your marketing language, so you can increase your conversions. Or if anybody wants to query anything in your company, let's say they want to learn about how you do certain sales calls, let's say how you handle marketing messaging, they could just ask in channels. So we actually have something like that that lives in our channels called TARS. Actually, you know what, I'll even show you an example of it. You can see an example here. I'm like, hey, like, what's our documentation in terms of how we handle one-on-ones here? Okay, so it's looking through, hey, I have a good picture. Here's how we handle one-on-ones. Um, you know, we use traffic lights over here, we use the 1-3-1 problem solving framework. We, here's our philosophy behind all this. All here, here's, here's other documentation that you can read. You know, what documentation do we have in terms of how we recruit with our job descriptions and MOCs? And so all this stuff is in here, right? And so you can see it's going back and forth with the team members. They're just asking different things in here. Oh, hey, these blogs should go over here. What should we do? Hey, summarize the key takeaways from this. The team can interact with this at any time and this thing lives 24/7. And so you want to have something like this that can live inside of your Slack or your Microsoft Teams. And that is the whole purpose of this, right? Like an AI-native marketer works like this. They work with the AI that lives inside of the channels that where they're communicating with other team members. And there's a whole host of things that you can use. You know, Buzz is open source. You can use Slack. There's a bunch of other tools out there. We personally just use MemoClaw from NVIDIA in here and we use Hermes under it. And that way it's a little more secure for us. And that's what I would say. Number 12, any piece of content that you create needs to be sorted by demand, differentiation, proof, and then each piece of content can then be checklisted to figure out how it can be repurposed to different channels, right? Maybe one YouTube long-form video can go to short-form, it can go to X, it can go to LinkedIn, and it can be converted to native formats. It can be converted to carousels as well. It can be converted to email as well, and it can be converted to retargeting assets. It can be converted to thought leader ads. It can be converted to sales ads. All these things should be possible now, and you're no longer just a marketing specialist. In fact, you have to become more of a marketing generalist, or we'll get to that in a little bit. Number 13, you have to make sure that every asset retains its proof, its source, the changes made over time, because again, you want everything to be queryable, right? And maybe let's say you might have a version 10 of something, but you've decided for your next campaign, version 2 actually is the right fit. And so you want to make sure again that you're building this repository throughout your organization that compounds over time. And obviously decisions that you make in a more, from a more recent standpoint are going to hold more weight, but sometimes it's helpful to have the old stuff that you can call in. Whenever you want. And by the way, that, that's very powerful because that's way more powerful than what you and I can do as humans, because we don't have that recallability. We don't have the same recallability as a machine does. Number 14, let's say you're shipping out new AEO SEO content. You want to make sure that you're constantly reviewing performance, whether it's AEO SEO content, organic content, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, maybe even 60 days out. But you want to make sure that you're gradually improving over time. And the machine can learn from this as well, because if you're not measuring it, you can't manage it. And the machine need some type of verifiable proof to go after in order to scale better results. Your creative agents have to remember performance. They have to remember winners. They have to remember rejections. They have to remember audience insights, visuals. They have to remember brand rules. And that's important because you don't wanna keep repeating yourself over time. But also this is helpful because when you think about creative fatigue and you think about performance decay, you can set up triggers to create new briefs. And when you have memory, when you have your Brand guidelines established, when you have evals, when you have skills, when you have all these things combined, when you have loops combined together, and again, you have to understand these things, you are able to do a lot more than what one person can do. By the way, if you're watching this right now and you're a business owner and you need help putting together revenue-focused company brains that actually drive results that live inside of your Slack, that live inside of your Microsoft Teams, then check out SingleBrain. It's SingleBrain. That's singlebrain.com. SingleBrain, And we'll see you on the other side. Human selection trains taste, at least for right now. Human taste, human judgment, that matters if you want to skate to where the puck is going, if you want to be slightly ahead. Because again, yesterday's amazing is today's average. So you have to make sure that you're constantly curious, you're constantly learning these new things. And if you're able to do that, you're constantly training the AI, you're going to be ahead. Because in marketing, the alpha is actually creating the thing that stands out. Because what happens the next day is everyone copies that. Media agents will adjust media buying, they'll adjust budgets over time, they'll adjust All the things that a human would have typically done in the past that is now commoditized. A machine is going to take that over. AI visibility. So when you think about tracking, you think about tracking share of voice, you think about tracking traffic, you think about tracking citations, you think about tracking qualified pipeline. I would say the last one is arguably the most important. That's where you're going to be looking at. Speaking of AI visibility, you have to also optimize for agents. And that means having the right documentation, having the right APIs, the right MCPs, having your website or your app, making it easy for agents to purchase, make it easy for agents to interact with each other. Making sure that you have the right technical documentation, making sure that you have the right permissions. All these things matter. Agent-led growth is the future. Your lifecycle campaigns, they need to match to intent. They need to be personalized. They need to map to product usage. They need to map to deal stage. They need to map to objections, and they also need to map to inactivity. So if you can map all these things together, you're basically personalizing, but you can probably personalize a little more with like a 1 or 2 liner in the beginning. But instead of just sending generic campaigns and generic lifecycle campaigns, you can go way further. The way you do SMS, the way you do email now, the way you stay in touch. The way if someone visits your website, the way you handle retargeting, all of these things should be able to move in lockstep with each other. If you're trying to work like a future marketer, marketing and sales activities are going to coordinate around one layer. All the things I mentioned earlier, they're all going to coordinate in one layer. And the single brain that you have is going to be able to pull from all of this. And this machine is going to continue to learn over time. And the cool thing is the machine learns over time, people might come and go at your company, but the machine will continue to get better. So the sooner you get going on this, the sooner you start to compound right now, the more of an advantage you're going to have, the more of a head start you're going to have. That's, again, that's why I'm saying everybody has to build something like this. All products will now become lead magnets. All these little features that you are launching, these should all become marketable moments. If you launch a feature, maybe you're creating a Hyperframes video and you're throwing it out there, a Remotion video. Maybe you're having some Suno music coming out from it. You're amplifying, you're double amplifying, and you're driving paid ads behind it. All of your features should become productized in a sense, and they should drive emails, they should drive signups, they should let agents sign up as well. But Products are very much the new lead magnet because lead banks are much easier to make now. I believe over time, the bar for lead magnets keeps getting higher and higher. And I believe products are the new lead magnets, they're going to proliferate even more. Attribution will now combine analytics, CRM outcomes, self-reported discovery, AI referrals, and experiments. So when you have attribution all combining together, it makes your attribution richer, which helps you make better decisions in the long term. It helps your humans make better decisions, it helps your machines make better decisions. So evals, we kind of briefly touched upon, but the evals are your definition of what success looks like. So you have a skill that can be a process, but if you don't have an eval that defines what good looks like, the AI is not going to know and what success looks like, right? And ideally, your definition of what success looks like is verifiable. You want all of your pages on your website to be 50 milliseconds. That is the definition of done. All of your pages on your website, 50 milliseconds, right? Or bringing your conversion rate from 1% to 1.5%. That's easier. That's an easier domain that AI can handle, at least As of right now, you want to make sure that evals are set up correctly so your agents can check accuracy, brand fit, audience relevance, offers, conversion potential, and compliance. Number 27, every single workflow that you have needs to have guardrails. It needs to have spending limits. It needs to have permissioning and stop conditions. Number 28, this is very important. Your agents have to earn autonomy. Trust must be earned over time. So initially they might observe and then they might recommend, then they might act with approval, and then they might act alone with boundaries. So you don't want to just let it YOLO and do whatever it wants to do in the beginning. In fact, most of the things that we do right now, When we work with clients on the single brain and the single grain side is we do have agents that will help in the middle. And then humans are still in the loop at the very end. We'll review the work and then that's how we continue to scale. And then we continue to tweak the workflows. We continue to tweak the agents that we have, and that's how we scale. Last but not least, this one's very important. You have to make sure that the work that you're doing, you're no longer just operating as a specialist. So let's say my background, I started as an SEO initially, but so I, I went very deep in SEO. But I started to learn over time, what is copywriting? How do we do webinars? How do we do email marketing? How do we do paid media? How do you do conversion optimization? How do you think about VSLs and human psychology? There's all these things that you have to learn over time. So you have to become a T-shaped marketer where you are, you're well-rounded, you're deep in one area, but you're well-rounded. And that's the future. In fact, when we think about hiring marketers now, we only hire what I'm calling forward-deployed marketers. These are basically business consultants that can be basically be directors of marketing at other companies, right? And so they're very deep in one area. They might be deep in paid media, they might be deep in creative, but they know how to speak to other areas. So for today, like I just had lunch with someone that's a creative and he's very deep and he understands VSLs. He also understands copywriting. He understands email as well. He's not just a one-trick pony. As an AI generalist, you're going to know how to pilot these other agents. You're going to know how to command these other agents and you have to become a manager of agents. This is the way In terms of how we're going to work in the future, you're going to be just managing a bunch of agents and you're going to be working with other smart humans, but you are going to be focused on doing only human things and you're going to be building these, these agents. You're going to be tweaking these agents over time, and that's going to be the future of work. I'm telling you, it's way more fun working that way. And that being said, let me know what you think I missed in the comments because I'd love to hear from you. And other than that, we'll catch you in the next video.