Blog: Marketing
How to be a better marketer in the AI era
AI does not automatically create better marketing. It gives good marketers more leverage.
That was the thread running through a conversation I had with Mattia Santin — CMO at Hotjar, SVP Marketing at Contentsquare, and someone I worked alongside during my years there. He kept pushing on the same question: everyone says AI changes marketing, but what actually changes on a Tuesday, inside a real team, with real targets? He wrote the conversation up afterwards.
What follows is my side of it — my advice for marketers, in the words I used with him. Seven things I genuinely do differently running an AI-native marketing team at PointFive.
Each comes with a filter: the question I actually ask myself to know whether we're living up to it, rather than just nodding along to it.
1. Hire for curiosity, not just technical depth
AI can bridge most technical gaps now. What it cannot do is keep asking better questions. I hire for inquisitiveness and creativity, for the people who finish a project and immediately ask what else it makes possible.
The filter: Would this person keep experimenting without being told to?
2. Start with a clear business objective
AI makes it easy to do too many things at once. Start with the outcome and work backwards. AI is not the goal. Growth is. My current test is simple: does this generate sourced demos, or just vanity metrics?
The filter: Which business number does this move?
3. Experiment constantly
My team can build pages, test SEO ideas, spin up demos and produce content without waiting on specialist queues. AI should not just make the old workflow cheaper. It should multiply the experiments you run, and the learning that comes with them.
The filter: Are we running more experiments than we did last quarter?
4. Speed is a competitive advantage
Just do it. Ship, make mistakes, learn, keep moving. An 80 percent solution live today teaches you more than a perfect one shipped in three weeks. Learning velocity beats polish.
The filter: Ship. Learn. Adjust. Repeat.
5. Enable everyone, then share what works
When someone on the team discovers a useful AI workflow, we teach it to everyone immediately. AI knowledge should never live with one designated “AI person”. The compounding happens when the whole team applies the same capability to different problems.
The filter: Who else needs to know this by Friday?
6. Connect AI to the data that makes you different
Generic models have generic knowledge. The step change came from connecting AI to product data, customer questions, CRM records and real sales conversations. Proprietary knowledge creates better marketing. Messy data just creates messy answers faster.
The filter: Is our actual advantage connected, and can we trust it?
7. Culture is the prerequisite for everything above
The first six only work when people have permission to experiment, connect tools, publish quickly and learn from mistakes. Without access and trust, AI just makes existing processes slightly faster. Autonomy is what turns it into an advantage.
The filter: Do people have permission to actually ship?
The takeaway
AI does not automatically create better marketing. It gives good marketers more leverage. The teams that win will combine:
- Curious people
- Clear business goals
- Fast, constant experimentation
- Proprietary data, connected and trusted
- A culture with permission to ship
Which of the seven is your team missing? Tell me — the pushback is usually more useful than the agreement. That is roughly how the conversation with Mattia went, which is why it was worth writing down.
More on marketing, AI and the humans in between on Tech Seeking Human.