Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

AI VP Marketing: Unexpected Challenges & Autonomous Campaigns! #shorts

16 May 2026 · 1 min

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1:28

In this short conversation, Jason M. Lemkin and Amelia discuss the evolution of their custom AI VP of Marketing, nicknamed "10K," after roughly 100 days of deployment. They highlight three unexpected outcomes: (1) the sheer volume of daily ideas and real‑time action items generated by the agent—about three new marketing ideas per day plus roughly ten Hexy‑driven suggestions each login—creating an overwhelming workload; (2) the shift from a static dashboard to a fully‑fledged autonomous agent capable of launching weekend campaigns with only a final human confirmation; and (3) the ongoing, daily maintenance burden required to keep the system functional, with continuous fixes and tweaks. Amelia explains how the agent now autonomously proposes and even runs light campaigns, while Jason emphasizes the need for human approval before execution. The dialogue underscores the practical challenges of scaling an AI‑driven marketing function, including operational overhead, real‑time recommendation fatigue, and the balance between automation and human oversight.

Chapters

Related to that, next topic, Amelia, I want you to lead this one. We're like 100 days into our AIVP Marketing 10K. I want to talk about 3 things we didn't expect from it, and I want to talk about the maintenance burden. Like, you're getting— as we come up on SaaStr Annual, 10K now gives us 3 ideas a day that we have to do. And now that we added a Hexy real-time thing, every time we log into 10K, he's got like 10 things he tells us to do right on the site. It's almost overwhelming. So talk about lessons we didn't expect and this— and we have to like— and the last point, we have to fix it every day. 10K every day we're fixing it, right? So walk us through some of the learnings here of the things we didn't expect and the maintenance on all the maintenance on the agent.
Well, it's funny, once you get a really good agent and one that's custom like our, our AI VP of Marketing, 10K, is— he's better than me, right? So like for years we couldn't— I couldn't hire a human to help me in marketing. So this this was an ongoing issue. Then that, I fold up and you've now helped with some of the code, but I vibecoded our, our AI VP of Marketing first as a dashboard, but then he quickly became an agent with how much we loaded into him and how much we wanted him to do. So, so much so that he ships campaigns over the weekend so he can just— he has some light campaigns he can do autonomously now. Like, we just have to hit confirm, we have to hit send, but like he can start to do some of his own marketing campaigns autonomously that he thinks are a good idea.
The other thing is, in the last week or so, it's gone from a dashboard—
in the last week, yeah—
to all— to running campaigns autonomously. But you approve them?
I approve them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I approve them. But it's funny because to your, to your point, he gives us 3 ideas a day.