How to Go From Beginner to Advanced with AI (Fast)

I got the train to London today to meet with one of the top AI people in the world. Who you need to hear from. Kristen is the head of marketing at Gamma, who just hit a $2.1 billion valuation last week and she's going to go through with us the four levels of AI mastery. She's got this amazing framework for how you can succeed with AI. While everyone's obsessed with prompts and chatbots, she's using AI to think, to diagnose million dollar marketing problems in 30 minutes flat. She's trained AI to write like humans, not robots. She can turn a messy brainstorm into a polished presentation in five minutes. And here's the part that actually broke my brain. When I tried to schedule this interview. Her assistant emailed me back. Turns out it wasn't a person, it was an AI agent. Kristin built one that books 40 meetings a week. This is the Next Wave. I'm Maria, coming to you from London, where the future of marketing is being written by humans and AI working together. My conversation with Kristen starts now.

Krista, welcome to the Next Wave. Thanks for coming today.

Thank you for having me.

Of course, for people that don't know who Kristin is, Kristin is the head of marketing at Gamma and she's built and scaled programs that actually convert. In short, she's one of the rare marketers who can speak brand product pipeline and experiment design fluently. I'm just going to start off with the first question. You use AI every single day, like all of us. What's one workflow that you genuinely panic without?

Yeah, so one of the workflows that I have come to rely on, I would consider myself to be a slightly technical person, but not a very technical person. And so data analysis has always been one of those things. That's a weaker area for me. But I have found Claude to be an amazing data analysis partner for sure. So anytime that I am trying to dig through trends and data, I will also pop it into Claude. And of course, you don't want to take anything as truth, but it gives me a lot of good hypotheses to dig into. So, for example, a little while back we saw a drop in our organic traffic and I used to work in SEO and specialize in that field, and it would take me a long time to slice and dice data by country, by keyword, to really diagnose a drop like that. But I just took our Google search console data, our Google Analytics data, popped it into Claude, asked it to identify the hypotheses for why it might have happened. And that gave me five leads to dig into. And so within 30 minutes I had an answer as to what happened. Whereas it may have taken me hours, even days before.

Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. Honestly, Claude is doing amazing these days. So you said you treat Claude plus ChatGPT like a thought Partners is what I heard. What does it look like in your day to day life?

Yeah. So I would say when I'm at work, I have Claude, I have ChatGPT open at all times. I think one thing, when you are using AI tools a lot, you kind of develop preferences, right? You see their quirks, you know, which ones are better at which tasks, which is why it's so important to tinker with them all the time. Because the models are always changing personally. You know, in ChatGPT we have GPT5 now. I always toggle it back to 4.0 at the moment because I have found personally that creates better writing outputs. So I. If I forget to toggle it off, I know, right? Models have different personalities, so they're always there with me. I'm constantly asking questions. One of the things that I do all the time is I use ChatGPT and Claude projects and Claude skills. So Claude skills are probably my new thing. So I have multiple Claude projects with Claude skills trained on all the things that I do all day long. Think about brainstorming for campaigns, think about positioning, think about growth experiments. And so it's not perfect, but I think all of us who use AI now are pretty good at identifying AI written content. Anytime I'm doing a writing project in Claude, it's always pulling from my human copywriter Claude Skill, so that it sounds a little bit less AI.

Before we continue though, a very exciting thing happened in Gamma today. You announced Serious B, which raised a 2.1 billion valuation. Can you tell us more about this? Yes.

So today Gamma announced our Series B. We have a $2.1 billion valuation. Gamma historically has not raised a lot of funding, so this was a big moment for us. We are a profitable company. We're probably one of the few profitable AI startups. We're probably one of the fastest companies ever to get to 100 million ARR profitably. And so it really has been a rocket ship. So super proud to share this milestone with the team.

You talk about levels of AI for marketers. How can someone tell what level they're at and what's an easy step to level up?

Yeah, so it can be really confusing. Everybody's throwing AI advice at you all the time. So a simple way that I Think about it, there's four levels if you're a non technical person. Level one is prompting. So using ChatGPT and claw tools like that to answer questions, get work done faster. Level 2 is what I call prompting with context. So that is using things like Claude projects or ChatGPT projects, Claude skills where you are inserting some underlying system, prompting with data that you have. So for example, we have a project that is trained on our brand voice and tone. And so that involves putting in our brand guidelines, our style guidelines, our marketing playbook, things like that. So anytime that we are prompting in order to figure out something that should go within a particular marketing initiative we're doing, then we use that project. Right. And that will uplevel your results. Level 3 would be vibe coding and prototyping. And so one thing that our creative director does on our team is she never comes to us with just an idea. It's here's what it would look like. I vibe coded this game. So this year, earlier this year in the summer we released this game called Escape the Office, a super fun endless runner game. And in order to pitch it to the team and to get sign off on it, she prototyped it in lovable, I think. So Vibe coding prototyping level 4 would be agents and automation. So creating your own agent to get stuff done, tying together different tools and automation. So basically letting the AI work for you. There's level 5 and level 6 for the more advanced and I'm sure as AI keeps developing they'll be there. But I think you know, for if you're just a general non technical marketer who wants to be AI first trying to get to level 3 or level 4 is where you want to be. Everybody should be beyond level one right now. So at least use cloud projects or ChatGPT projects. That'll engage. Yeah, yeah. All right.

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What's one insight it found like you found that it surprised you when it comes to this function?

Yeah, so we use Claude all the time. I put tons of data into Claude so There's lots of tools that you probably have on Marketer that have robust amounts of very granular data. Google Analytics is one of them. Google search console. And so if we're trying to diagnose an issue with organic traffic or things spiking in certain countries, we can plug that data into Claude. And what I try not to do is be leading with it. I just say, take a look at this data and tell me what you see or something along those lines and then kind of get the trends and then start digging in deeper into hypotheses. And so if we're trying to figure out, or trying to figure out what, you know, something dropped, then we can do that. It's also great for identifying opportunities that you weren't aware of. And so on a weekly basis I'm usually pluggin some data into Claude just to see what it comes up with. And then, oh, maybe I didn't realize that opportunity, oh, something spiked in Japan, what's going on there? Oh, maybe I should look into, you know, some influencer campaigns or like TikTok videos that, that took off. And so even if you're not trying to dig into a problem, just if you have robust sources of data that you can plug in and just ask Claude or you know, chatgpt, I'm sure works as well too. Just what do you see here? Right. It can give you a lot of ideas.

That sounds, that sounds so cool. So let's, let's go back to Gamma right now. Gamma built a prompt guide by studying successful user flows, which is awesome, I think what people want when it comes to their workflow. What's one underrated tip most people don't know about?

Yeah. So Gamma's AI product has been around for two years and one of the most common requests we've gotten over that time is give us a prompt guide. Right? Somebody said, no, Gamma's supposed to be easy. You just put anything in and it'll help you. Which is true to an extent. But because we have so much data and so many active users, we have looked into what the top 800,000 active users are doing with Gamma and we separated them into different, you know, job function Personas, marketers, consultants, to see if they're successful. So it looks different, right? It looks different for each of the prompts. You can look at our site and kind of see how a consultant product, a consultant prompt, looks different than a teacher prompt, for example. But one tip that I would give to anybody that's completely underrated is asking Claude or ChatGPT to write your prompts for you. And so typically I always start by giving a task, right, here's my task. What's the perfect prompt for you? And I want this type of output. I want it in a chart, I want it in a table, I want some graphs. And then say how would you prompt yourself basically? And then you're going to get most a much more robust prompt. It's good enough, it works for now. This is actually something I have got to give a hat tip to Karen at HubSpot for, for teaching me this.

Shout out Karen. Yeah, so if someone's new to Gamma because there are some people that I don't know a travesty by the way, that's bad. What's the easiest five minute win they could try today?

I mean take a document that you have that is a bunch of text or maybe even the transcript from a zoom call and just put it in Gamma and get a beautiful deck. One of the reasons why decks have been the language of business for so long is because we are visual creatures, we're multimodal. So you can process things a lot faster. And so you can take blocks of text, pop them in Gamma immediately, get something that looks way more presentable and more appealing to share. I like to automate this with our API. So my AI NoteTaker app of choice is Granola. We also use Fireflies. We also do zoom calls transcripts. You can connect that to Gamma. And so anytime you have one of those tasks where it's like, okay, after the meeting here's our recap and next steps. Right can do that for you. So with the API and Gamma Notetaker app, prompt it giving my next steps in Gamma. You're going to get an automatic deck after the meeting so you can share the recap with anybody who missed it or next steps. Or if you're talking about an external call, you can immediately impress them with a follow up deck that perfectly curates everything you talked about within five minutes.

That sounds so cool. To finish it off, I want to talk more about women in tech. Can you give me. Let's give a shout out to the women in this, in this work. I really want to talk about that, especially in Gamma. Can we do that?

Yeah, absolutely. But before I do that, a little story. Many years ago when I went to college, I studied aerospace engineering. 18 years old, freshman, I went to a big state school. We're all sitting in the orientation. There's probably 300 kids or something looking to be aerospace engineers. Probably like a handful of women and this professor gets up in front of this entire group, a very impressionable college freshman, and said, most of you girls are going to drop out. And that stuck with me forever. And it stuck with me. At that time. I said, I am not going to drop out. Like, no way I'm getting through this. Well, it turns out I didn't like aerospace engineering as much as I thought I was going to. But, you know, it's really important for women to lift each other up. And so one thing that I take inspiration from. I wish I had the exact count before this interview, but I believe Gamma is about half women. So the head of our AI product is a woman. The head of Core Products, a woman. We have women AI engineers. We have our own, you know, group, our own Slack channel to support each other. And so even though it may look a little skewed in the general industry, really surrounding yourself with a community of supportive women that build your confidence is super important. That's, That's. That sounds so cool. We're so, so happy to hear about that.

I'm so happy to hear about your journey. That was insane. If people want to find out more about you and, like, follow your work, where do they reach you?

You can. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. That's my. My social platform of choice.

Okay, that.

That's perfect. My life is Gamma app right now. So, you know, check out Gamma, please. Cool. Cool option.

Thanks for tuning in to the next wave. We'll see you next time. And don't forget to like and subscribe.