Participants

Hosted by Isaac Sacolick, CEO of StarCIO

Special Guests

• Adrianna Hosford
• Elena Putilina

Digital Trailblazers

• Joanne Friedman
• Liz Martinez
• Joseph Puglisi
• Martin Davis
• John Patrick Luethe
• Derrick Butts
• Heather May

Summary

Today’s panel explored AI’s role in driving revenue and growth through the collaboration between CIOs and CMOs, with discussions centered on customer education, data security, and cross-departmental partnerships. Participants shared their experiences and perspectives on AI implementation in marketing and IT, including the use of synthetic audiences, data analytics, and personalization strategies. The group emphasized the importance of forming cross-functional councils, establishing joint KPIs, and addressing security considerations while exploring future opportunities in areas like health tech and synthetic data.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.

[00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to this week’s Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.

Welcome back from the Thanksgiving weekend where we took Friday off and give everybody a break to be with family and to do your shopping and just to to veg out and watch some sports, maybe do some reading. And we are back here this week with a super special episode that I’m very excited about.

We’ll be talking about the CIO and CMO relationship and more broadly the relationship between IT leaders and digital marketers and the digital trailblazing leaders in those groups. And how do we partner on AI not just to get more efficiencies or improve our workflow. How are we actually driving growth around this?

And I think this is a very important episode. Thank you for joining this week. Part of the reason I’ve been excited about this episode is that we’ve been talking and I’ve been doing a lot of writing about how using AI only for productivity improvements, only for employee experiences and only for workflow gets translated to cost savings. Eventually the CFO catches up with that and gets and calls in the cards and says how are we going to actually realize the cost savings? And most of that ends up coming from headcount. And we’ve seen this rodeo before. For those of you who have led digital transformation efforts, you can’t modernize, you can’t transform by just becoming more efficient or just by improving productivity. You need to transform by using technology and now AI to a competitive advantage. And part of that is looking for ways to drive customer experiences and improve customer experiences. Part of it is to look for growth and revenue opportunities. And part of it is to look for ways to enhance your product and service offerings with the newest capabilities that are coming to market.

Now. We did an episode around this a number of months ago around AI for growth and I will just admit we struggled with this. There aren’t that many shiny examples out there of companies really focused on the customer experience and growth just yet.

We’re more focused on how we’re deploying copilots and language models and code generators. And now with hundreds of companies putting out AI agents, using AI agents in our CRMs and in our HR management systems and in our ERPs.

If you go to drive star cio.com, i have a couple of articles around AI agents from large companies, from large SaaS companies. And then this week’s I talk about AI agents coming from growth and startups. And there’s many, many, many companies putting out AI agents out there. So today we’re going to be focused on growth and we’re going to be focused on customer experience and we’re going to be starting with a question about how CIOs and CMOs and again that by extension IT leaders and digital marketers can partner so they can find these opportunities together.

I have almost everybody from my normal speaking list. Thank you for joining. And I have two special guests. We got two people who are from marketing backgrounds who have been in executive roles in different capacities at different types of companies throughout their careers.

And I wanted to make sure many of us here on our standing panel have IT backgrounds. And so I want to welcome Adriana and Elena to our panels this week. They are going to be representing the CMO side and Adriana, I want to start with you. Adriana, welcome to the to the show. Welcome to the copy with digital trailblazers. Please say hello to the group and just share some of your insights on how you look to partner between marketing and and the IT side of the house and with your customers. Hello Adriana.

[00:04:24] Speaker C: Hi.

[00:04:24] Speaker D: Thank you so much for having me today.

What a great conversation.

I lead communications and marketing at a B2B vertical SaaS company in healthcare. So a lot of my examples are going to be very health tech, very kind of healthcare specific for this group.

When it comes to AI, it really is so important to have the CIO or in my case at a, at a kind of a growth stage startup, the cto to have the CIO or CTO and the CMO working together because it’s not just about the technology when it comes to AI. To your point, Isaac, it’s about product innovation, it’s about the go to market motion and it’s also about issues and reputation and issues. Mitigation is another way we often think about it, of course in health care where we care deeply about patient data, keeping all our information safe.

I think it’s really important.

There’s so many ways that our CTO and myself have partnered from the very beginning. We created an AI empowered workforce which is a whole committee that included other key stakeholders like Infosec and people team and legal and customer education so that we could uplevel all of our internal team members to help customers. On the external standpoint, we have a variety of customer education and summits and webinars and a lot of different content we’re offering to our customers so that they can better understand how to use agents, how to buy AI agents, questions they should ask whether they’re purchasing ours or somebody else’s. We just really want them to be able to Be educated and, and fix patient communications. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve.

And then of course, we have AI in our product and we very much have this belief that we have to meet our health systems where they are. And not everybody is ready for a fully autonomous AI agent. We have that.

But we also really want to meet our health systems where they are in their journey. And sometimes they’re going to use a copilot, sometimes they’re going to use something that’s called a flows agent, which is more of a, a deterministic agent. And then sometimes they’re ready to really use and deploy and unleash a fully autonomous agent. So I would say our CTO and myself are working together hand in hand, whether it’s internally, whether it’s focused on the product, or whether it’s educating customers.

[00:07:00] Speaker B: Adriana, what do you see as some of the growth opportunities when you’re working with customers? I mean, I’m trying to get some better examples to illustrate to all of our listeners. We have a good, good group here. What do you, what are some of the things that you look for that represents a growth opportunity?

[00:07:20] Speaker D: It’s such a broad term, so I will tell you.

So one of the ways that we’re, and I don’t know if this is exactly what we’re thinking for, for growth opportunities in this context, but one of the things that I’m doing on my team for marketing in terms of using AI to help us better understand customers is right now we are using synthetic audiences. And I’m not sure if everyone’s.

That’s sort of a word that a lot of people now are starting to use, but where we’re training an agent to act and think and feel like our icp and then we’re using that agent or synthetic audience to do a lot of message testing, to interview it, to talk about, you know, what do you think about this product or this messaging. This is more from a marketing standpoint versus running full focus groups. So we found that to be kind of an interesting growth opportunity from more of a strategic standpoint is using AI not just to up level our team, but to give us potential intelligence on what our customers might be thinking when we can’t reach the customer live the way that we want to because they’re so busy or because you have a time constraint or a budget constraint.

I would say the other way that we’re using AI and you can guide me. Isaac, if this is too basic and you’re looking for something different, is that we record all of our sales calls in gong. And so we often are using just even the AI functions within GONG to help us better understand in our calls where we had closed one opportunities, where we, the customer, the prospect turned into a customer and said, yes, I’m buying this product. We really mine those calls to say what were their main pain points, what were their objections and then what language did we use that helped answer a lot of their questions?

So I would say we’re at least internally on my marketing team. We’re also using AI that way to get what I kind of consider market intelligence or customer insights.

So that’s really helping our team and then that’s fueling new ideas for us of how to go to market.

[00:09:33] Speaker B: I think this is brilliant, Adriana. I mean, I think this idea of going beyond like a data version of your customers360 and a PowerPoint version of your customer Persona and actually playing it out with an agent so that you can get in their heads a little bit. I think it’s really, really interesting use case and that is definitely a growth opportunity, right? Helping marketers have a, have better intelligence, helping sales refine their approaches to, to do, to perform sales calls and what language you’re using. I think those are really brilliant opportunities. And Adriana, thank you for sharing them with us. Elena, welcome to the floor.

Thank you for being here with the copy with digital trailblazers. I’d love to hear a little bit about your background and then where do you see growth opportunities from using gen AI capabilities?

[00:10:26] Speaker E: Thank you, Isaac. Thank you everybody for having me. So I have a very interesting background for this group because it combines my career history in marketing and then I moved over to analytics delivery and data side, including data operations. So I kind of see this from both sides, from both perspectives, which is awesome.

And I guess I will speak very briefly on the importance of the relationship between the CIO and the cmo. Just a sentence because, you know, as marketers, we look at things very commercially and we look at our targets and our customers, but we don’t necessarily think about how this data kind of gets together and what AI. And you know, our dream project needs operations wise to function in its best and that’s where the cio, in my case, it’s also cto, CTO comes in and explains this is what we’ve got, this is what we don’t, and this is what we could do to stitch it together. So for the marketer, it gives a great perspective in understanding what truly, you know, the underpinning of AI are. And how they work.

So I think this is very important. And we stay in a. My company. My company is a startup.

I work at this company both in marketing and data capacity.

And we do have a CTO and we also have a chief creative officer. And we all are on a lookout for what’s new.

Just like Adriana was saying, what’s new, what’s available, what we can incorporate in our work streams. We do have AI in product, so we talk to our customers about AI.

My startup does patient communication practice automation for smaller offices, so for doctors, individual practices and like midsize practices.

So our customer base is not as knowledgeable about AI. They are somewhat more conservative.

So they ask us a lot of questions. And one of the things we do is we educate them.

We educate them about what they can do to grow their practices. Right, so you were talking about growth opportunities. Well, for customers, we tell them probably one of the lowest hanging fruits is to incorporate AI into their patient communication because it can allow them to craft their communication faster and nicer and do it more often.

So that’s one of those things. We also talk to them a lot about how search changes because a lot of practices in our, our customer base rely on search. And we talk to them about how search changes now that the AI is here and what they need to do to kind of make sure they don’t, you know, stay behind.

[00:13:33] Speaker D: Right.

[00:13:34] Speaker E: So these are two important kind of parts we highlight for customers.

Another one which is innovation. We don’t do it ourselves, but we talk to customers about it is AI routing. For instance, when custom, when patient calls a practice, right. Instead of being put on hold, there is an AI voice system that can pick up a call and route them. Sort of like when we call our bank, right? And we’re so used to dealing with it when we call our banks, but when we call our doctor, we get put on like endless call, right? So there is a great, great feature available in various different testing for, for small practices. And we do talk about it. And then you also ask, well, how do we do it and use for ourselves commercially Personas. So that is, that is a big kind of work stream for us in where we use AI to understand.

We have, we work with multi specialty, we work with human and veterinary. So for us, synthetic Persona is a huge deal that helps commercially.

Wow, sorry, that was a mouthful.

[00:14:49] Speaker B: No, it was great. I mean, because, you know, we lose sight on the IT side, on the data side, on the security side, we lose sight of how all these basic capabilities, whether it’s communications Whether it’s routing of issues, we look at it from an inside the house perspective. How do we route a service ticket or how do we resolve a security issue faster? And both you and Adriana are bringing the customer lens to this. Customers have these same issues and the.

And our customers have to be educated around AI and what their benefits are.

It’s an opportunity, but I love where you’re starting from. I’m going to move this over to one of our first steps on AI opportunities. Educating the customer, I think is really important before you start chasing after growth opportunities. I got a full list of people here raising their hands, ready to either contribute or ask a question.

Joe, it’s good to see you.

We had dinner earlier this week. I’m in Tucson later this week.

What do you have you for us on growth opportunities around AI?

[00:15:56] Speaker F: I’m excited this week to talk about 10x NewCo, my own consulting group that I’m a part of. We have leveraged AI because we are a small group and without AI, it would be nearly impossible to qualify leads to prepare materials much like Adriana’s brilliant use.

If you mine public data, pitchbook, Zoom info, public filings, you can find information about startup companies, the business they’re in, the needs they may have, and you can start to fill the opportunity funnel, the sales funnel, with truly qualified leads and beyond that, know enough about their needs to be able to present an opportunity, a.

A viable opportunity for helping them to grow their company.

So we, we have been using this fairly effectively to identify companies that would really benefit from our services. And on the flip side, our services involved leveraging AI to mine the data the companies have to create new and innovative products or services.

So we’re sort of on both sides, finding the clients that would benefit from us and then benefiting the client through creative use of their data.

This is the first time in two years I’ve been able to talk about what I’m doing for a change.

[00:17:36] Speaker B: It’s awesome. Joe, are you using specific. You said ZoomInfo is the platform you’re using for this?

[00:17:41] Speaker F: We, we have used PitchBook, we have used Zoom info. We, we’ve used a number of. I mean, just, you know, there’s so much data publicly available on the web that you can scan it and you can use the, the. The AI tools without, without being concerned for, you know, exposing somebody else’s data. It’s already on the Internet.

[00:18:01] Speaker B: Very cool.

I have Derek raising his hand. Derek, I’m going to jump you right into a. What you want to talk about. But I love that Adriana brought up the data issues and information safety issues. It’s a great place to collaborate with CIOs and CISOs and CMOs who all, you know, the CIO is probably caring about data being used the right way. The CISO is worried about data security issues and the CMO is worried about brand. It’s a great place to collaborate on.

[00:18:31] Speaker G: Absolutely. And I think the things they brought up are spot on and things that everybody needs to be thinking about. And I love the fact with the synthetic audience that Adriana brought up, I think that’s pretty cool. As far as using it as a training model for working with the Gen AI tool, but also looking at just the CIOs work with the CMOs to create that personalized experience.

So as they’re working with these campaigns and stuff, how are you going to protect the data that’s being sent out there and secure the pipelines that they’re using to actually present that data? But more so when you mentioned about the brand and protection. So using AI powered threat intelligence types tools to make sure the brand’s not being impersonated, it’s not being phished or putting misinformation campaigns out there. These are also things that help protect the organization and the brand identity so it’s not being diluted by some other adversary or nefarious type acts. When you also look at the, you know, again, the predictive analysis, I think that’s cool. And even Joe mentioned in his use case of being able to query different leads and things of that nature much quicker than you could doing it manually and using the tool to be more productive, to help you with a smaller group, to, to get more impact.

These are all key things that really come out for. And also, you know, it can also keep you, depending on your business model and the type of organization you work for, to follow the governance guidelines, making sure intellectual property is protected, mitigate any risk, but also make sure that you follow whatever governance model you have, you’re staying in line with that and you can automate that process using a Gen AI tool.

[00:19:55] Speaker B: I love the notion of bringing the CMO into, to partner and protecting the brand. I mean, when you walk into InfoSec and the SoC and network operations, it’s like a broad palette of everything that you’re trying to protect against. And some of it is, you know, a customer oriented, some of it is revenue oriented and a big part of it is brand oriented. And how do you translate brand to what is a higher priority? What is a bigger Risk is a conversation and a piece of governance that the two groups can collaborate on. I think it’s really smart. I want to bring Martin in. Hey, Martin, thanks for joining. I want to hear your growth opportunities before we talk about relationships.

[00:20:37] Speaker H: Well, I think the first thing I’m going to say is that some form of shared growth mandate which the CIO and the CMO are jointly aligned on, rather than separate IT projects and marketing projects or whatever, the CIO and CMO getting together on a set of maybe three to five flagship AI initiatives, what they are jointly owning, that’s jointly pushing forward. And I think that you’re getting away from.

Yeah, he said, she said, I want, you want. You know, it says we should go this way, marketing wants to go that way. So actually, yes, starting from the top and actually going forward together, I think is absolutely crucial.

And I think the. There’s a lot of opportunities out there, especially when you look at, you know, obviously digital transformations, got a bit overused and everything else, but you look at the digital journey of a customer and you look at how that can be improved. So, for example, you know, it was mentioned a little bit earlier the, the AI. AI bot that can be. Yeah, dealing with the customer and things like that. And actually, just as a side comment, I was talking to a major Canadian bank that I deal with earlier today, and their AI bot, which you have to talk to first, is appalling.

Just as a side comment and along the lines of it doesn’t understand what you ask it, even if it’s quite reasonable and you’re using language that they actually have on their own website, it just repeats the question.

Finally, it kind of lets you talk to an agent when you get so frustrated with it. So I think my comment in this is, yeah, when you’re dealing with customers and customer experience with AI, make sure you’re making it so it’s actually customer friendly, otherwise all you’re going to do is actually annoy and frustrate the customers.

[00:22:33] Speaker B: I love the idea of defining a growth mandate. Some of us call that AI strategy.

Some folks call AI strategy a strategy about how we implement AI.

[00:22:43] Speaker H: But I think I deliberately use the word growth mandate because otherwise it’s AI for AI sake. Why are you doing it? Look at the title of the question you rose as well.

So I think it’s. You’re targeting a way forward to grow the company, so making sure that your initiatives you’re choosing are very targeted and understand which metrics they’re going to impact.

[00:23:08] Speaker B: And how and guess what, you know in doing so, that will trickle down. Right. Our IT folks, our AI folks, our data science folks generally don’t know enough about market and customer needs and where there’s growth opportunity. It’s going to require partnering with those on product, on sales and marketing to be able to do that and so forth. Let’s bring John in. John, your thoughts on growth opportunities and the CMO CIO relationships. Welcome, John.

[00:23:38] Speaker A: Hi Isaac. Thank you so much for having me on. I think that there’s just so much shadow AI going on in the marketing space and if you’re at a smaller company like I am, it is so nice to have some of these tools available.

I’ve seen, well, if anyone can just go use what’s publicly available. But one kind of low hanging fruit that can really, really help out is if you take a bunch of your marketing language and the way that you view customers and what you do, you can build a customized version of one of the publicly available tools using their reg augmentation tools and you can come up with something that with very low effort can be very helpful at providing copyright and other stuff back in words that you would use for your company and understand any of your product and your customers and things like that.

The other thing that I’ve seen small companies do is use it to create marketing campaigns. I’ve seen people get all sorts of help on the settings for the advertisements, especially Facebook and Google and just walking people through, setting up the campaigns, feeding that stuff back in to see how things are. And if you’re at a small company, this can be really, really helpful. As you’re at larger companies, there’s, you know, there’s whole teams available for this and they have a lot more money for consultants. But I just, it’s, I think that actually marketing is one of the areas that has kind of more AI going on kind of in the shadows than even probably any other parts of the company.

[00:25:08] Speaker B: Thank you, John.

I do think there’s a lot of rogue AI out there and shadow AI out there. And so my comment on the whiteboard is this is an area that collaboration is required because yes, the way you turn around rogue and shadow AI is understand what problem it was solving for. Probably that person in marketing was just trying to do their job and maybe all the governance is out there and maybe all the protections out there and they went around the network and figured out a way to get their job done.

[00:25:39] Speaker A: Yeah, just to add to this and so forth, a little bit of effort from the IT team and a little bit of money that People can switch to paid models of things. People can have the IT team really help on the augmentation of the data into, you know, so you can do full reg and with a little bit of help from the IT team and actually buying licenses stuff, your data will be so much more protected and basically the models you have will be so much more tuned for the work that you’re doing. And so yeah, I completely agree. So it’s so important to have collaboration here.

[00:26:11] Speaker B: Thank you, John. Folks, thank you for all the comments on the common stream. I see them all. Unfortunately I am remote today and can’t contribute to the common stream as I normally do. So keep them up. Joe and Martin and others will keep tabs on it. If there’s a question or a comment we should bring up to the floor. But I want to say hello to Joanne. Joanne, we missed you the last few weeks. We’re talking about growth, we’re talking about relationships.

I, I’m thrilled to have you back and hear what you have to say on these topics.

[00:26:41] Speaker C: Good morning and thank you. And I’m sorry that I haven’t been around health issues and other things.

That being said though, you know, one of the things that I’m seeing a huge trend for is what I would call the micro personalization engine.

And I’m seeing it come up in large organizations and small into John’s point. It is extremely helpful. The point that I want to address though is the synthetic audience and sentiment analysis. Because one of the things that causes these projects to fail, and I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer here, is that when the agents are being run and when they’re being created, they don’t necessarily take into account that the synthetic audience is in a good mood and not so good mood, a very stressed under the gun mood. And sentiment analysis is something that needs to be added to these things. So when you define your Personas of the individual, you have to think about the fact that when are they going, when did they make this comment or when are they going to speak to you? What hours of the day, what days of the week?

If it’s later in the day, they might be harried and looking to stop working, go pick up children or go grocery shopping or whatever. And so what I’m beginning to see a lot of is the integration of sentiment analysis and sort of more sociological kind of questions being asked for the agent to, to really fine tune what would be that personalized revenue engine, if you will, for, for companies to use in their marketing. And I think that this is both a very dangerous thing and also a very good thing. Dangerous because you have no way of knowing and you might be on the verge of violating privacy without actually knowing that you’re doing that. And the other part of it is synthetic audiences generally tend to be running through simulators that don’t necessarily hone in on they may hone in on the natural, natural language process, but they don’t actually convey the mood. And you have to be a little careful about that. So what I, what I suggest to a lot of people is when you run that simulated audience, run it for different times of the day, Right. If you can, in your tooling, run it for different days of the week and run it for a Persona where you start to take in their personal lives, like a married mom with three kids or two kids or whatever, someone who’s got a long commute.

All of these sort of variables figure into the sentiment analysis that’s used to create that synthetic audience.

And that’s one of my biggest things when I talk to CMOs that are now joined at the hip with their CIOs, CISO and other cohorts.

[00:29:51] Speaker B: Thank you, Joanne. You could see I’m already starting to fill in some of the first steps on exploring and partnering on AI growth opportunities. We’re going to come right back to Adriana after this very quick break. Folks, thank you for joining this week’s coffee with digital trailblazers. We try to meet every single week with episodes around AI and digital transformation. And it’s been a fun year doing all the episodes. Our 152nd episode is today.

Next week we’ll be talking about the digital transformation playbook strategies for 2026.

I will be fielding information from my CIO.com article from that conversation. Because we can’t explore everything all the time. We have to set some priorities and there’s some things that are in the playbook for next year and there’s some things that we probably need to down get out of and complete this year before we move on. So that will be next week, the 19th. I wanted to define what AI literate organizations mean, what that term means, how do we set up our learning objectives for 2026? So that will be on the 19th and then the 26. We will take a week off for the holidays. I was considering having an episode that week, but I bowed to my speakers and listened to my AUD and they said let’s not have one during the holiday week. So that’s what’s coming up. I left one comment I’m sorry I can’t be on the comments stream too much today because I am remote, but I am offering a Cyber Monday deal. It was in my newsletter earlier this week. For those of you who want to join the Star CIO Digital Trailblazer community, there is a coupon code in the LinkedIn common stream.

It is expiring tomorrow.

I extended it one day. For everybody who’s listening here, we’ll give you 50% off to join the Star CIO Digital Trailblazer community.

If you have any questions about that, please do reach out to me. Let’s get back to our program. We’re talking about CIO and CMO partnering on AI to drive growth. Hello, Adriana, welcome back.

I’d love to hear more about growth opportunities, your insights on relationships and where to start looking for growth opportunities in some of the companies that you work with.

[00:32:12] Speaker D: Yeah, thank you.

I just wanted to also comment quickly on what Joanne shared. I love that, the sentiment, and I was just taking notes and thinking about how the time, the day, and then I thought, wow, we could do it seasonally.

Are we more stressed during the holidays and use that as part of the synthetic audiences?

[00:32:35] Speaker E: Or.

[00:32:35] Speaker D: Or maybe during times of year where we think folks have more budget, it might be more open. Anyway, I love that. Joanne, thank you for sharing that. I think that’s a really important ad to synthetic audiences.

So, Isaac, I think one of the areas I wanted to mention, and this is a little on your question, but maybe goes to what folks were discussing before was safety and security is not one department’s job.

And it’s really important for the CMO and the leadership team to know that and believe that, you know, security is everyone’s job.

And I just sort of wanted to put that out there because sometimes I think where relationships go wrong or can go wrong is there’s a dialogue that, like, the CMO wants a different thing than the cio. But truly, if everyone is here to grow the business and do what’s best for the business, we actually have a lot of shared gold or goals. Excuse me. And obviously at our company, security is one of those.

I try to take it so seriously and it really should be a part of your culture. And so we talk a lot about security, even down to some basics of tone, even when folks say, oh, gosh, I have to run this through the vendor onboarding process.

I know this is very tactical, but I try to make sure that that never comes off as a negative thing. You know, I try to tell my folks, absolutely, we do like we have a very efficient vendor management onboarding process. The goal is that they’re making sure that what we do is safe and compliant and we can use these tools. And the faster and more efficiently we work with that group, the quicker we can get to actually than doing what we want to do.

So I just wanted to throw that out there.

I just think it’s really important that marketers really embrace it, because selfishly, at the end of the day, if there is a security breach or a reputational issue or a major crisis, guess who’s dealing with it? You, marketer. You’re dealing with it from a brand perspective, you’re dealing it with from a PR perspective, from a reputation perspective. So it’s even personally in your best interest to make sure that safety and security and that you have a culture of that across your whole company.

[00:34:55] Speaker B: Wow. So we’re here talking about growth, and our partnership starts with doing things safely, with security in mind, with data concerns up front, and then recognizing that when security is a problem, it’s everybody’s crisis to manage. I love this. I’m doing an AI governance panel next week at a conference, and I might have to quote you on Adriana. It’s just too good not to include in a conversation mostly with CISOs that I’m doing next week about how to really elicit help from your marketers. Martin, what have you for us?

[00:35:33] Speaker H: Well, I thought you might be going to Heather next, actually.

I think.

[00:35:39] Speaker B: Oh, I missed Heather. Heather, go ahead.

[00:35:41] Speaker H: Thank you.

[00:35:42] Speaker I: It’s a little going back to what we were talking about before, but I was talking to some people in the. In the marketing business, particularly in hospitality, and the whole notion of personalization is very critical. And then I’ve been reading about how the CIOs and CMOs are working together on that. One holds the data, one holds the marketing, and getting it together makes a lot of sense. And then there’s the whole scaling from what can be used and repurposing of one item versus another. For example, you can take a video that was before just used for YouTube or just used for social media.

Now, through AI and through scaling, it can be used quickly and altered for a number of omnichannel opportunities. So there is that efficiency, not on, you know, with. Not with people.

Or there’s ways of quickly opportunistically using different. Through AI, using different tools, and making your.

Your marketing efforts go a long way.

[00:36:50] Speaker B: Thank you. Heather, welcome to the floor. Heather, I want to bring Martin, before you go, I want to bring Elena back. I know she has a hard stop coming up.

Elena, jump the line and share your comments on relationships and where teams should start first when exploring their AI opportunities.

[00:37:08] Speaker E: Thank you. So I just want to build on something that Martin and Adriana were talking about in creating joint responsibilities and joint growth related projects. And I want to add one more to it. KPIs.

Let’s make sure that both sides, the marketing side and the tech side, are measured against joint KPIs. Because if we bring in the KPIs conversation, then we can also bring the CFO in a conversation. Right. And then it becomes even more organizational, then we can think enterprise because we are not running test projects, we are measuring what we are doing across functions. So this is my 2 cents. I do got to run. Thank you so much for having me and somebody else pick up on KPIs because I saw a lot of reactions. So people have a lot to say about this one.

[00:38:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I captured that for you, Elena, and I’m glad you brought that up because there’s been so much write ups about AI POCs not making it into production. And this is a good insight, right? Have joint KPI’s bring your CFO on board and these no longer look like test projects. Hey Martin, thank you for letting Elena jump the line here.

[00:38:28] Speaker H: All right.

KPI’s was one of the ones I was going to bring up right now actually.

But I was going to start with, I talked about earlier about a joint mandate between CIO and cmo and I think forming, just talking about steps forwards.

So forming a cross functional AI council of some form that is going to actually drive it. Yeah, it’s chaired by cio, cmo. It’s going to drive what initiatives we’re going to do. Yeah, prioritizing use cases, looking at the risk management, the upskilling of people needed, all of these types of aspects and looking at the business outcomes, looking at revenue and customer experience for example, and then obviously anchoring that in shared KPIs and the roadmaps. So you know, what are the KPIs? Is there a marketing return on investment?

Is there a net promoter score or conversion rate?

[00:39:25] Speaker F: Yeah.

[00:39:26] Speaker H: Which of these kind of metrics are you going to try and influence and how does that influence then the growth of the company? So trying to actually agree on those shared KPIs and if possible linking it then to the top of the house corporate growth initiatives and growth KPIs as well. So I’m just trying to think of all of those ways to unify how you go about that. And it kind of starts beneath that almost with unifying data and the technology in the marketing space.

So the more you can unify that. So you’ve got one set of data, one version of the truth that everybody is using to build on top of that. So Joanne, I’m sure dive in next with how the data impacts on this as well, because a lot of this foundationally, you need that common set of data to build on that with the AI.

[00:40:19] Speaker B: Thank you, Martin. I’ve done this with Joe and Joanne before and prompted them when they had a big idea coming off the coffee hour to go write it on their blog. I think you should write the blog post around defining a growth mandate for AI and putting your tips in here. It’s just, they’re just too good and I haven’t seen it. You know, I do a lot of writing and reading.

So I’m going to prompt you to write that blog post and we’ll share it here with the community if you follow up.

Joanne, you got the softball tossed to you around data.

[00:40:54] Speaker C: Okay, so one of the things that I am sure that the audience is picking up on is from Martin’s points and Joe’s points and everybody’s points is that this is a much more aligned holistic approach.

And in order to get it to work, you do have to have correlation between data sets, not just in manufacturing, but literally in every industry. And as I’m listening to this and to Martin softball, you don’t necessarily have to do big integration to do this. You can actually pull using agentic AI anyway. You can read data and then use it to contextualize and rag for your agents. So you can now combine your customer relationship management data with your production data, with your manufacturing data, with your transportation data. If you’re a retailer with your inventory. I mean, think about the idea of the micro personalization or the engine that you’re going to build agentically to do this. The more data pieces that you put together, the broader and more holistic the approach becomes. And that’s where you really make a dent in enterprise initiatives.

So think about the customer’s journey or the sales motions and how those two things come together using CRM and other data like my inventory, I replenish my inventory much faster for particular products because people buy more of them. Why did I never put this data together before? That’s one of the premises of what we’re building, but also to the point that you can get very granular with that data without having to do a big, oh, I Need a new data lake to mine. You can read. You can read the data and use it for contextualization purposes and create this holistic view of the customer you’re trying to approach, how to approach them, meeting the sales motions, what’s really important to them to what Joe was talking about, using Zoom and sorry, using Zoom info and other publicly available data and you can become very precise and then you apply the audience comments that I mentioned previously to that. Now you’re really honing in on what does my customer want, how when is the best time to approach them, what is their lingua franca. And I would suggest to you that multilingual is a very good way to go here. We’ve had great success with that.

And then from that point forward you can start to build this more holistic approach that ultimately addresses at the very top of the stack what are the outcomes this corporation is trying to achieve and how are they doing it. So now we have the opportunity, instead of necessarily reverse engineering from the outcome you want to achieve, achieve all the way back to the tactics, we can build it from the tactic all the way up to cost savings and revenue generation and really help organizations push those two agenda items forward.

[00:44:20] Speaker B: Thank you. Joanne. I think you mentioned customer journey. I forget who else mentioned it earlier that I put it on the CMO and CIO relationship. Here’s the wake up call.

Every customer journey is changing because of Gen AI. Okay. Right. I do my travel itineraries different because of Gen AI. I do my recipe development different because cooking recipe developed different because of Gen AI. I’m researching my ailments around how I’m not feeling well yesterday using Gen AI tools. Every customer journey has been disrupted because I can get information from an agent or from a language model. And I’m no longer doing search or coming directly to a website and going through 15 clicks to figure out something.

Right. That that’s the mandate for the CMO and the CMIO is how are we changing our customer model to reflect that?

[00:45:20] Speaker C: Actually it’s the mandate for the CEO, Isaac and the board because if they, if you don’t get the buy in at the top of the food chain, you’re not going to be able to instantiate the very specific process changes that are going to be required.

AI is a mindset change just as much as digital transformation was. In fact, I think even more so because when you start to look at the stacks, the, the trick that I’m telling a lot of people to use use AI to do something very simple. What are my Dependencies, my codependencies and my cross dependencies between functional units in an organization. When you start to understand that mapping, the whole picture changes, but you get it right away because that gives you the tool that you need to see. Oh well, I never realized that this was codependent on that and so forth and so on. And it’s not, not, not creating spaghetti, it’s giving you a very detailed mapping of where these journeys, if you will, a vendor journey, a buyer journey, a supplier journey, all of these things start to coalesce. And that’s really the trick that has to be conveyed to upper management to make sure that they understand what they’re approving, where these opportunities are going to pay off faster than not, and how to prioritize them.

[00:46:51] Speaker B: Thank you, Joanne. Before you go, your one suggestion to getting down to our last 12 minutes, your one suggestion, what should be on our first steps in partnering on finding growth AI opportunities.

[00:47:05] Speaker C: Group Think we need to get alignment across. No, we really need to get alignment across the organization from its leadership. But then you also need to bring the workforce in as early as possible.

[00:47:21] Speaker B: Thank you for that, John. You have your hand raised. We’re down to our last 12 minutes.

[00:47:26] Speaker A: Your thoughts? Yeah. One thing I was going to say is people used to build websites. Humans would, you know, be using the websites. The search engines like Google would crawl the websites and when people would search for something, it would direct people to the website. And one of the things that that’s been really changing this is how much people are actually going to search engines and it actually has given them zero click results. Right. And so I think what I’m starting to see is that the creative agencies are actually building websites specifically for the AI crawlers. So that when it’s providing the zero click results, it’s kind of like in a way poisoning the results to really give the information for the company, the phone numbers, the emails.

And so I’m just, I think it’s a new world out there with search results and like, you know, are people going to click the things or are they just going to get the information straight from the search engine? And so one of the things I’m starting to see is people actually building shadow websites just for the AI crawlers. That’s one of the real changes on the collaboration. My favorite question from the IT team to ask the marketing team is if you only had one piece of data, like what would make your life easier? And collaboratively working to make sure we get the marketing, just the information that they need. And then I did have a friend that was privacy law engineer for one of the large social companies and, and they, he had to really work hard to make sure that his team was, and all the teams at that, that social company were, were really following all the laws and what they could do analytics on for the marketing team. And it just, I, I know the law with all how you use the data is going to be very, very important in the future. And so if everyone can stay really conscious of what, what’s changing and, and what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do, I think it’s going to keep you guys out of a lot of trouble.

[00:49:02] Speaker B: John, we may have to invite your legal friend to join us for a future episode. So we want to get some more experts here. Thank you John for that. And, and I like that really simple question. Find a piece of data that would make your life easier. Hello Adriana. Last thoughts today?

[00:49:17] Speaker D: Yeah, so Isaac, I have to build here on John and talk for a quick second on SEO and AEO because you brought it up. So SEO, we know search engine optimization. AEO is kind of the new term terms sometimes aeo, sometimes geo on AI Engine optimization and how critical it is that folks are going to LLMs for their searches and not necessarily Google anymore. We’re going to GPT, we’re going to Claude, we’re going to, you know, all the different Gemini and all the different places. And what that means for marketers. What it means is yes, John is correct. The front of the website is written for customers. That’s how we do ours. The back end of our website is written for, for crawlers. We have a lot of different code in different, different languages that we’re putting in the back of our website, kind of the back end. So it’s being crawled by the LLMs. There are some pages we’re setting up just for LLMs to explain the difference between our product and another product, but that’s just sort of one piece of it. The other layers are all these other third parties which some marketers have kind of overlooked are becoming even more important, important.

So your blogs are becoming so important. News media is becoming even more critical despite the fact that it’s actually shrinking. Third party review sites like comments on Reddit, on Wikipedia, analysts like Forrester writing a report about you. All of those third party review sites or third party content is considered more credible to that LLM than your own website.

So all marketers really need to be thinking about this multi channel strategy having a very layered approach because it’s not just your website that is influencing those LLMs at all. The goal is you got to get people to your website and tell them your story, but you really have to rely on all these other third parties and influencers and other sources to be telling your story. Story.

I could go so far on that, but I’ll leave it at that because I think it’s an interesting topic. When you say you’re going to an LLM to book your travel, we need to be thinking really holistically about the entire web and how we’re sharing our story in a lot of different places.

[00:51:30] Speaker B: Adriana, you can see that I put that comment in bold in here for those of us who have spent a lot of our time sharing thought leadership and writing and be able to say, look, your stuff is more important now, even though the clicks to news sites and blogs have dropped dramatically simply because people are just not going to original sources. And we’re going to continue to highlight that topic as one of importance. I’ve got three hands raised. I’ve got seven minutes. Derek, thoughts on how we build growth opportunities between CIOs and CMOs?

[00:52:06] Speaker G: Well, I think the first thing is really helping the teams and the business culture understand, you know, the power and the risk associated with the. The AI engines and look at it from market perspective. The training is going to be huge. I mean, Joanne mentioned it perfectly. You got to change the mindset. And change the mindset is actually making that training more repetitive. Understanding, if you understand the good and the bad associated with the tool that you’re working with, it makes it easier for you to create those growth opportunities and work with those type of building processes. But, you know, it has to start there. If the mindset doesn’t shift, you’re not going to move forward as fast as.

[00:52:37] Speaker B: You think you are.

Thank you, Derek. Thanks for joining this week.

[00:52:41] Speaker F: Joe, I want to build on what Joanne started. She mentioned groupthink.

It’s incumbent on the cio, on the digital trailblazers out there to make sure that they and the CMO understand and share with the entire C Suite that the world has changed. That just changing copy on your material, just changing content on your website.

These tactics are no longer valid in the world as it is today.

And I think that that communication, that education step is really step one on this journey.

[00:53:17] Speaker B: Wow. The world has changed. We’re all fully converted here about AI’s impact. I love it. Thanks, Joe, for that. Martin.

[00:53:27] Speaker H: I’m gonna go to first principles, which says if you’re going to do something.

Be very clear on how it is going to grow the organization.

So first principle is always why are you doing it? And how does it actually impact one of the metrics of growth that the CEO is going to be looking at?

[00:53:57] Speaker B: Love it. I love it. Love it. We’ve got a few blog posts that have come out of here. We’ve got some future topics. If you are listening here, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I think we should do another talk around health, tech and patient experience. I do think we should talk about CMOs and CIOs and CISOs partnering on data governance and security. And I think we should dive a little bit more into synthetic data opportunities. Derek, your hands raised. A final thought here.

Derek has just got his hands right. Adriana, I want to give you the final word here. This has been great having you here joining us as a special guest.

Tell us a little bit more about your company and what you’re doing with patient experience. I think we want to cover this as a future topic.

[00:54:43] Speaker D: Yes, I’d love to.

Our company has been trying to fix patient experience and patient communications for about a decade.

In the last year and a half we’ve really pivoted to embrace AI like many other folks, but we very much believe in combining humans and AI agents, combining those intelligence together to try to fix patient communications problems. So we have AI agents, we have co pilots and we have a staff console that helps manage all the pieces of patient comms from scheduling, rescheduling, verification gap, you know, fixing gaps in care post discharge, a lot of different aspects because we want to get that patient in the door, getting access to the care that they need and that’s who we are. And our goal is to try to make health care number one in customer service. So if you think about customer service in your favorite industry and what that experience is like, we want to help do that. In healthcare.

We are a B2B product. We do not sell directly to patients because we don’t think that makes the world a better place. Our tool is used by the providers and they’re the ones who hold the relationships. They just use our technology to help reach their patients in a more efficient way.

[00:56:08] Speaker B: Adriana, thanks you for joining us and contributing and for sharing your ideas around growth and security and brand and how find opportunities together. I definitely want to have you back when we talk about health, tech and patient experience.

It’s one of those areas that we’re all impacted by and it’s one of those areas that AI has some really interesting, important opportunities around. So we will look to schedule that topic when you can join us. So thank you for joining this week. I want to thank Elena, she had to leave a little earlier today.

Also a health tech background where we will try to have both of you back at the same time for that topic. Thank you for joining us. Thanks to Joanne, Joe, Heather, Derek, John, Martin and Liz for joining as our standing experts of digital trailblazers. Our conversation today about partnering on AI to drive growth.

Our next two episodes on the 12th we’ll be talking about digital transformation playbook strategies for 2026.

For those of you who are still working on your roadmaps or want to confirm your roadmaps for next year, you’ll be getting some ideas at our next session and then on the 19th we’ll be talking about what an AI literate organization is all about and we actually touched on some of those topics here today, so I’m really excited about it. Folks, if you’re on the comment string, do tell me number one, which of these topics you’d like us to follow up on? Health Tech and patient experience, CMOs partnering with CIOs and CC those on data governance and security and synthetic data opportunities. I will look to schedule this based on customer based on listener input. Love to hear from you and if you have ideas for guests on here. Adriana and Elena came from a referral from a good friend of mine and I do take referrals for new people who want to join us as special guests. Folks, everybody have a great weekend. Thank you for joining this week week. I will see you back in New York for next week’s episode. Thank you and have a great weekend.