AI Strategy ≠ 'Automate Everything' | E98 with Fiona Sherwood and Joanna Edwards

Why does every second LinkedIn post promise an “AI system” that will fix your marketing overnight? 🤖✨ If you’ve been told to “just automate everything,” this episode is your antidote.

In this episode, we’re joined by Fiona Sherwood (fractional CMO & AI marketing trainer) and Joanna Edwards (events leader behind a GenAI-for-marketers summit) to get practical about what an AI strategy actually is—and why tools come last, not first. 

We get into:
 ✅ Why “automate everything” isn’t a strategy (and where automation does belong) 
✅ Using real customer insight (CRM + sales-call transcripts) to fuel content that isn’t beige 
✅ Guardrails that matter: GDPR, FCA/regulated industries, brand voice, approvals, and culture 
✅ Tooling sanity: start small, personalize your stack (Copilot, GPT, etc.), and budget for training 
✅ How marketers can lead company-wide AI standards—without shaming or “AI-washing” 
✅ Measuring what matters, spotting hype, and setting expectations with the C-suite 

If you’re tired of guru threads and beige outputs—and you want an AI plan tied to revenue, compliance, and actual customer problems—this one’s for you. 

We’re Ruta and Emma, the marketing consultants behind Blame it on Marketing. 

If you’re in B2B SaaS or professional services and looking to do marketing that actually drives revenue and profit, we’re here for it.

Visit blameitonmarketing.com and let’s get this show on the road.

Transcript

0:00

hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Blame It on Marketing. We are going to be talking about what an actual AI strategy for marketing should be and why just automate everything, isn't it? Today we are joined by the amazing Joanna Edwards and Fiona Sherwood, but I will let them introduce themselves. Fiona, do you want to go first? Yeah, thank you for having me. It's really good to be on the pod. So I'm a fractional CMO working in the FinTech space, but I've also got my own business, which is AI marketing training. And for that, I train marketing teams or individual business owners on how to use AI to market their businesses more effectively. Thanks. Yeah, well, my name is Joanna. And likewise, thank you very much for having me. It's great to be with you today. So I come from the events world. So I'm an event director. And a large part of what I do is thinking about marketing strategy and how we're going to get our events in front of the right people. And actually, in recent months, I've been doing a lot of work specifically around AI. I have a Gen.ai for marketing conference coming up, which I think we might touch on later. So I have Yeah, lots of thoughts on marketing and an AI strategy and it's great to be with you guys. Thank you both for joining us. And also it's worth saying that one of our most popular episodes was, is Ruta and I going through how we in our day jobs use AI. So I think this is a great lead on from that conversation. And it is time to get a more strategic about AI, think, isn't it everyone? So before we get into the conversation, I would love to, we all start every episode with a marketing confession. So I love to hear something that you guys have messed up in your career. So yeah, who wants go first tell us everything! I can go first if you like. was thinking about it and I mean, I don't know about you, I've made so many mistakes. So many. You know, when you think back and you think, I've been working in marketing for over 25 years, so there's a lot of things to choose from, but some really funny ones, I think. When I look back, I'm a bit embarrassed, but. When I was really young, I worked for a tech company and we did a Microsoft stand at a conference and we got to the conference and I'd misspelled Microsoft as Mercosoft. Yeah, just rushed it, didn't prove it properly, put the stand up. no, no. And then it was there for everyone to see, so everyone was walking past me. You know you've spelled Microsoft wrong. Yes, thank you, I know. know. I am acutely I mean, and then I once did some filming. I didn't really know what I was doing with filming. Filmed some interviews on site, came back to the office, started to edit and realized they were all blurry. It was like someone had smeared Vaseline over the screen. So we couldn't use them. We just had to use the voiceover and it was pre AI day. So we had nothing to work with, just a voice. So we had to make a load of visuals and put the voice over. And then more recently, booked a swanky breakfast somewhere the day before, just checking in with the organizers, realized I'd booked it for the wrong day. So everyone was turning up to the swanky breakfast the next day. And I was booked in the day that I was speaking to the organizers. So we had to do a bit of last minute shuffling. And that was like a heart stopper. know where you're, oh, gut punch. Awful. known for flying on the wrong dates. That's special. I've done that a few times. Yeah, dates are spelling. Yeah. Nightmare. There are a few of my shameful secrets. Fiona. Thank you for sharing. I'm sure everyone can relate to that. yes. Yeah, I think likewise, I think I have a stand proofing mistake. I can think of at least one in my in my past, but probably more than one. It's always I think one springs to mind again, quite early on in my career when I was working on quite a big event actually out in the Middle East and we had, you know, one of our big sponsors and we unfortunately had an out of date version of their logo or except that's a new version and we haven't saved it in right place or you know, whatever. And yeah. unloading all the panels on the first day of the conference and said sponsor being rather unhappy that we didn't have the correct version of their logo and trying to sort of paper over it with, you know, printouts and anything that the hotel venue we were in could muster at the time was not a lot of fun. I have another one actually that's related to sort of a proofing error or I should say probably a rushing error. And again, I was working on it. a defense event at the time, I think, and it was actually an event about what they call them now unmanned vehicles back in the drones, you know, back in the day, I think we call them something else. But we signed off the big piece of marketing with what the designer at the time thought looked like a very cool unmanned vehicle on the front of it. The only problem was when we got it back, we realized that it was actually just a stealth aircraft. It wasn't a manned at all. only realized it after we had pressed the button on the launch and print and all of those things. So yeah, I we all have those sort of rushing errors where we think somebody else has checked something and remember the golden rule, always check everything yourself. Yeah. else to it as well. We definitely had one of those with a stand didn't we were? I got the stand designed, router checked it, I checked it, we thought it was fine, printed it off. It was literally like the most insane thing that had gone wrong with the graphics print you'd ever seen. And luckily I went up to the guy, we were at the event, I went up to the guy and went to him, yeah, I need you to help me with this. I don't know what we can do, but I'm going to get sacked. if the CEO sees this. I didn't think I would actually, CEO was lovely. just needed to like, and then anyway, he was like, I've got a plan, we'll just screw a massive fuck off telly over it. And I was like, excellent. And then everybody at the event, obviously they knew the stand design had been messed up, but he was literally like, everyone was like, I'm really glad we've got another screen. was like, Double screened it from then on. So there you go, guys. That is a top tip if you fuck up your graphics on an event stand, just get a really big telly over it. That's a good tip. I'm going to remember that one. So, I'm sure we're not the only people to have noticed this but obviously with the rise of our AI tool friends and Automations and everyone being an NA and expert apparently and everyone on LinkedIn seems like they are an AI Strategist and an expert in this in this space. Why why is that? Why is that happening? Do you guys think it's the new hustle? Yeah, but is the new hustle. You I, and I'm, don't want to be part of that noise being, you know, I'm an AI marketing trainer and I'm trying really hard not to add to that noise, but yeah, even I, I'm getting sucked in by it. You this brilliant system for doing X comment system. And I'll send it to you. And when you actually get what they've done, it's literally just a, you know, custom GPT, or it's just a a small series of steps. It's not, it's all in the marketing. People are just trying to expand what they're doing into something really wowsy. And it isn't really that wowsy. It's quite basic and quite straightforward. And I think people are just hyping it up to make themselves look super important and to justify the cost of what it is that they're going to sell you at the end of it. And honestly, I think if you take it right back to basic steps, using AI, can be really straightforward and quite simple. You don't need to go into for fancy or multi-step automations at this point. I think if you just take it right back to basics, that's just the most sensible way to do it. It's really accessible. They're making it unaccessible just to make themselves feel more expensive, I think. Yeah, I think that's true. think, you know, on LinkedIn, it's probably a bit of an extension of the culture that was sort of, you know, pre existing on LinkedIn as well with sort of, you know, the guru positioning or the expert positioning and of course, people really wanting to Fiona says, you know, sell their products, sell their courses or, whatever, whatever it is. Or their personal brand, you know, that's the, that's the other big one, isn't it? But I think what Fiona said, that's really important, actually. And actually, I think a lot of people I speak to say they feel really overwhelmed by AI and by the idea of, you know, getting started, or they feel like everyone's ahead of them. Everyone else has kind of got it sorted out, you know, they know where they are. And I think it's doing us a real disservice actually that sort of culture of, you know, your prompt should be structured like this. And you know, you should follow this set of steps. Whereas actually, you know, I think the best advice somebody gave me was just, just pick one tool and just start experimenting with that. And then, you know, go from there. And my personal favorite prompt is just whichever tool I'm using at the time, just to say, does my out, you know, does my request make sense? Does this prompt make sense? And then actually, you can get the tool to rewrite your prompt for you. You don't actually need to have these sort of formats and really understand it in that level. You just need to get started. I think that's probably the message. Such a good point. Like making it inaccessible to people so everyone's like overwhelmed online. Or, you know, when like other people shame marketers for the way they use AI as well. Like, I can tell this is AI because of a dash and it's like, so what? One, so what? If an dash is meant to be there, it's meant to be there and two, who cares? Like it doesn't matter. who cares if you're getting a good output, who cares? Who cares what you're doing and how you're doing it? Actually, I just think it's, yeah, it's trying to make it really elitist, which I feel that. I feel that pressure. You know, I go on LinkedIn, sometimes I come away kind of, everyone knows more than me, I'm behind. And then I speak to real people in the real world and I'm like, no, it's okay. People are just dabbling with chat GPT. They're not as advanced as LinkedIn. makes it seem so and you know I'm I've done all my training through Heather Murray AI for non techies and that's her whole premise is making it accessible making it easy making it so that everybody can understand what to do and how to do it and I really think that's you know that we need that. Yeah, and that's the point of tech. That's the point of new technology is that lots of people adopt it. Lots of people use it. And therefore it improves something, whatever the thing is. So to make AI into this elitist thing, because I totally agree with you, there is just this like overwhelming sense of like, you, but you don't get it. And it's like, no, at the base, the basic level, even some of the people things that we see, like, know, where people have screenshotted my least favorite thing that anybody ever does is to screenshot their NA and workflow. very sorry. did do this once back in the day. It was it was to be fair it it made sense because I was building and marketing AI benchmark. Yeah, so it's It makes sense, but I don't have a medicine. So I promise she's not gonna do it And I think that basically it's that whole thing of like yeah holding people on the outside away from something and And then sort of like trying to say that this was like, it's so easy. I can do it. You can do it, but actually the reality that is very different because people do have different levels of comfort when it comes to technology just in general and it's not it shouldn't be used to shame people like you said I think that's the thing that I find a real shame because then it will put off a generation or a group of marketers that are not um to do not feel as comfortable with technology as others Yeah, it, you know, sweeping generalisation here, but it seems to be, you know, young men of a certain age and a certain type who are the ones who are posting these really complicated NA end structures. When I sit in on Heather's office hours, it's like, dare I say, women of a certain age? It's like people like me. And I'm like, this is what we want. And that's what the tech bros one. You know, it's like two different audiences for the same stuff. We're all learning the same technology, but they're doing it in such an inaccessible way. So yeah, it's really interesting. and there's gap, there's going to be gaps if you have that mentality, right? That's the thing where that's where the risk comes in. That's where you've got people who are not thinking about things like the cyber security side of things or GDPR or any of those things that I'm just going to say that the sensible women in the room always think about and want to make sure is right before we go, you know, full in on tech. So as much as I know that group of people are trying to make us sort of feel a bit alienated, I think. Yeah. they're the ones that I would definitely unfollow and mute in this situation. Yeah. yeah, I think there's a place for being aspirational and being, well, what's possible? This could be possible. This whole kind of end start to end process could be automated. But is that practical in the real world? No, because most businesses, and I think we'll get onto this about, you know, when we talk about automation, but most businesses want to approve pretty much every step. You don't want a system going off and doing something and then posting it on your behalf because the output's not going to be very good or it might not be very good and then that's on you. or it's just a cultural thing, sometimes, you know, especially founders, they want to be on top of it and they want to know what's going out and it has to have their mark on it. So, Joanna obviously you're putting on this awesome generative AI event, which we're going to be at, by the way, everyone. It's on at the end of November, remind me of the dates. 24th, 26th of November. There we go. actually, yes, I'd like to say that you're all going to be there with actually with me, Fiona's going to be there as well. Fiona's one of our panelists. So she's going to be with us. And obviously, both of you will be with us as well and you know, helping to lead some of the activities on the day. And I know we've got some fun things planned as well for our attendees. So perhaps we won't tell everybody too much about what you guys are going to be doing. But we want to encourage people to come along and find out as well. But yeah. That's what I've been working on, so happy to... of the common kind of themes that you're really focusing on for this year's event in terms of just, you know, things you're like, my God, we have to cover this. Yeah, I mean, I think it's been really interesting, actually, because we first ran the event actually, back in February of 2024. That was the first edition. And at that stage, you know, it was really pretty soon after chat GPT had exploded into sort of the consciousness and a lot of the discussions there were marketers really saying like, Oh, my goodness, you know, what is this chat GPT thing? What is AI, you know, should we be using it? And a lot of discussions that you've mentioned around, you know, ethics and GDPR. I mean, I think these things are really very close to a lot of marketers, hearts or consciousness a lot of the time, you know, what are the guidelines? What are my responsibilities to my, my organization, my customers and whoever else that might be. So there was a lot of discussion about about that. And I think what's been incredible is just how quickly things have really moved on in that sort of what are we now 18 months, 19 months since that event. So it's really quite a lot of diverse themes. So there are very definitely still people I think who want to come along and get some real hands on experience. So find out, okay, you know, I'm seeing people talking about these things on LinkedIn, but actually, what does it mean in reality? You know, where can I start to really implement some frameworks, you know, into my current marketing workflows and playbooks around content or strategy and starting to think about that. we've got a lot of really practical sessions for people to get some experience and sort of go from A to Z in terms of creating an output or building. I think one of our workshop hosts is gonna build like a mini agent with somebody, with people in sort of like 90 minutes. So it's a real express. opportunity to gain a lot of experience. But I think on the other side, you know, we've got people who are really keen to understand how they can manage some of the disruption of AI. not just now thinking about, where can I implement Gen AI or even now, obviously, some people are starting to think about agentic AI and, you know, going even further. But actually, how do I manage this disruption, the fact that all of these things that I used to do as a marketer are actually being thrown up in the air. So search is obviously a really big one. Metrics and tracking and KPIs are another one. those things where it's not just, I'm going to use AI, but suddenly AI has disrupted everything I knew about marketing and they want to know about, you know, what's everyone else doing about that and really get that kind of peer to peer experience. So it's not really anybody standing up and saying, I have the answers. It's a lot about having these kinds of discussions and people sharing their experiences. figure out. Yeah, exactly. That's it. So when it kind of comes to like companies, and I think I say companies, but I generally am being polite there. I kind of mean like the founders of businesses wanting people to crank out more AI generated content, which in quite a lot of cases, especially when there aren't the sort of like guardrails around, you know, content checking processes can be kind of quite mediocre, I think, and a bit beige. Why do you think that's happening? Like, is it because there's more pressure on marketers? Obviously, that's a leading question, but is that part of it? Is it just like the never ending need for more, more, more? What do you guys think? What do you see? Yeah, Fiona, do you want to go first? Yeah, I definitely think that there are founders who think more of anything is better. And, you know, that is at odds with everything that marketers know. We know that more crap is just more crap. It's not gonna move the needle. It's not gonna make a difference to your brand. In fact, it could even damage your brand if you're just churning out rubbish. And I've seen this happen with clearly... AI generated posts on LinkedIn, you know, bad imagery, bad messaging, not speaking to anybody, just generic beige rubbish. It's the same in the comments section, you know, all these comments, you can tell it's just so tiresome and so boring. And I just would never subscribe to that. And I just think, yeah, some people think that being visible in any way is enough. And we know. Most people know that's not enough. And that's one of the things that I would say to anybody who was trying to use AI for content generation, that you have to base it on real insights. So get your data from wherever you can, get your customer insights, record interviews with founders. I'm talking to a marketing agency, I'll say, get your get your customers on the phone once a month and record the whole thing. Ask them a set of questions every time. What are you seeing in the market? What are your customers doing? How's the business going? What products are you releasing? What news do you have? know, treat that like a monthly check-in and then use that and build that voice and use all those insights to create your content because, you know, if you're basing it on real things, then you will get good outputs. Customer call data, it's like a gold mine, isn't it? You if you can bring in call transcripts, and that's what we do, bring in call transcripts and build an AI assistant that uses call transcripts as its foundational knowledge, and then say, okay, tell me some pain points. Let's build a campaign around pain points. I did one recently where a customer had closed after 50 sales calls. 50. And I was like, hang on. really hope it's a huge contract. Okay, Too small for 50 calls. uh was long isn't it? So I took the call transcripts, luckily we had them and I put them into a machine and I said, okay, how could we speed up this process? Where are the gaps? What are the questions they were asking repeatedly and not getting an answer to? Where could marketing plug the gaps in that sales process to speed it up? I got some really good gold out of that. great insights out of that. They were asking repeatedly about X, you need to put some materials together about that. So it's things like that. That's where you're gonna make real inroads, I think, not just doing more, more, more bland, bland surface level stuff. Like actually dig into customer problems. And that's what I always tell people. Yeah, yeah, we're definitely on the same page. think, you know, it's that stuff that otherwise, you know, previously that would have, we would have tried to do that, wouldn't we, as marketers? You know, like get your spreadsheet app tick every time someone said this thing. But like now we don't have to do that. But that does then mean we've got more time for the like creative stuff, which is taking what we've discovered and doing something meaningful and useful with it. Yeah. the bit that I think a lot of people miss. So yeah, it's a great, it's a great way to use AI to like speed up a process that otherwise would take ages. Yeah. where we're all trying to get to isn't it? It's like trying to speak to real issues that are really happening out in the market and so that's where I think AI can be incredible and produce incredible content. Yeah. And Joe, what about you? I was going to say, absolutely. think that's the ideal use of an AI tool, isn't it, is to really surface those insights that are sort of sitting around in your organizations, but actually, before it would be very time consuming to surface those, to leverage those. And nobody really wanted to sit and kind of read through pages and pages of transcripts, which often don't really make a lot of sense when you're reading them back. But AI can really help you with that. I think to go back to your original point, I think, you know, using AI to sort of churn out bland content, I think it can be a bit of a symptom of, you know, the problem that marketers often ask to just do more with less all the time. So it's always, you know, raising results, but hey, we're going to give you less budget to do that, you know, or, well, can't AI just replace that, you know, marketing intern or, you know, trainee that we wanted to bring into the business, you know, so I think it's, it's a symptom rather than, you know, a sort of a you know, the problem in itself, it's the symptom of that problem, which I think is problematic. But I think, you know, again, to go back to when I was having sort of earlier conversations about where people were using AI, think, you know, think content to a lot of organizations felt safer than some other implementations of, you know, AI. Like maybe you didn't want to let AI loose on your... customer data or, you know, plug in all of your systems and files and all of that sort of thing. But actually, using an AI tool to write an email series or, you know, put together some ideas for ads or something like that. think people felt it was a sort of a fairly safe way to start experimenting. So I think, you know, maybe that's where it started from. And then people have sort of ramped up and carried on running with that. But yeah, I think this just comes back to I think you know, like Fiona was saying, think for me, I feel like AI can, it really can accentuate all the really bad things that we might be tempted into in our organizations anyway. Like I say, like just using it to speed up processes for the sake of it, but actually not using that extra time to make better content, but actually just putting out more bland content or like I say, you know. not hiring that really great creative person to be in your organization. So it's sort of, it can make everything so much worse. And I think we want to fight against that and actually say, no, you know, AI can be brilliant, but we've all, you know, this is the time to really shape how we're going to use it and how we want to be using it. Yeah, I really think like I've said this now for like probably a year straight, like blogs that used to sound like blogs back in the day when it was someone like with their own voice speaking to you about their experience are gonna be coming back so hard. And even so by the way, I still do this with AI, I'll just like talk into it and be like, just continue with my voice, like write it how I said it, just make it readable. And they sound and they read so different to anything that's like. Usually I've CO optimises in it in times of like, but you can do both at the same time. But Joanna, you have perfectly led us into our next question. I think I've had too much caffeine. That's probably why I'm rapping. That's a common problem in my life. Joanna, you've led us perfectly into the next question, which is why are some of the reasons that many businesses are treating AI like this new silver bullet that will magically fix everything that's going to generate pipeline that's going to, I don't know, make people be better salespeople, whatever it is, instead of actually looking at their strategy and looking at how AI fits into that rather than just kind of applying it like a blanket all over everything. Well, I think this is human nature, isn't it? I think at its heart, it comes down to the fact that we love the sound of a silver bullet and we fall for it time and time again. You know, I think this has happened with earlier iterations of automation and tech and, you know, all sorts of things before that as well. think the idea that just do this and it will fix all of your problems is, you know, very tempting for us as people. I think organizations are really prone to that. sort of magical thinking, like to call it. And I think that's what it is a lot of the time. It's kind of easier, right? To think that you can make this one investment in tech rather than upskilling your workforce, thinking about what you really want your business to stand for. What's your mission? What's your purpose? How do you align around that? And how do you get the right team in place to do that? If you think, well, I can just have this one system. and it'll all be great, then I think that's quite tempting. And, you know, coming back to what we said earlier about some of the language that comes out of big tech, you know, some of the conversations around the sort of things like the one billion unicorn company that's going to be run by one person, you know, and a bunch of AI agents, you know, that's great, aspirational, and I'm sure somebody will do that, you know, probably before too long. But like Sheena said, that's not really the real world for me. for most organizations because we have legacy systems, we have processes, we have rules, we have regulation, we have compliance, whatever it might be in our individual industries or our individual set of circumstances. So we can't just rip everything out and implement the perfect AI system. So we've got to work with what we've got and we've got to view AI. I think it's not AI for AI's sake. You wanna sit down and think about what are the... problems that you want to solve in your organization and AI or any sort of tech really is going to be one part of that. It's going to be one part of the solution, but you've got to get all of those other, other pieces, you know, in, in place. And I think one last thing before I let Fiona come in on it is just to say that really, I think, you know, I hear this all the time that actually even, you know, the biggest organizations where they have spent a lot of money so far on AI implementations, the return on investment that they're seeing, is so far pretty small. Now, that's not to say that they're not going to keep investing and that the payoff may not come and that there will be some return on investment. But it is to say that, you know, you've got to really think strategically about where you use AI and you've got to still do all of your other, you know, work that you would be doing anyway, along the way and AI is not just magically going to deliver, you know, 30 % on your bottom line in six months. Yeah, I think like there's AI consultants going in to fix AI setups that people have already made. yeah. I was going to say, and just very quickly, we will come to you. very sorry. I just wanted to say that obviously, Jo, you were talking about, you know, that kind of one billion unicorn company, you know, like someone like Adam Robinson, who is a very po, has a very polarizing voice in the marketing world, you know, has gone and set up this company. But on the same side, don't want to say anything too libelous, but I'm pretty sure he's breaking GDPR compliance and all sorts of things in order to have built that company. that while that's great and that's a fantastic PR stunt and well done, Adam, you you've done your thing, you're making loads of money. I've got no doubt that at some point that guy will be sat in front of a, you know, a government committee meeting, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg did at some point explaining himself and how he, you know, riddled. like, you know, fiddle the internet for all of its data. so, so I think it is just that whole thing. think the point is do it, enjoy it, but also still have some morals and some ethical like stuff set up around it. Right. so Fiona, anyway, sorry. Yeah, no, no, I agree with everything that you've all just said. think the doing the hard work of building a proper marketing strategy is really deeply boring, unsexy, time consuming. It's loads of data. It's loads of customer research. It's, you know, mapping does the product fit the market? It's really not fun work for a lot of people. Some people love that. But a lot of people find that really boring and they just want to leap straight into strategy and tactics. And that's, I'm like that. You I don't like doing all that kind of tedious stuff, but it has to be done. And AI is not going to fix it. If you haven't done all that work, AI is not going to fix it. You know, it's a multiplier. So 10 times nothing is nothing. So if you haven't got a strategy, you can't multiply a strategy to make it better. So, you know, you've got to go back to the fundamentals of of marketing. And that's what I think businesses forget. They haven't done the customer research. They haven't done the messaging workshops and the product market fit. They haven't done all of that pre-work in order to then apply AI and make it better. And that's why it doesn't work. It's not a bullet. A sexy tool is a sexy tool, but it can only do one thing. It's not gonna do all that work for you. Yeah. How many people buy the HubSpot thinking it's going to solve all their problems and then sales are like, nah, still not going to do my admin. Still not going to use it. Yeah. It's so true. It's so true. And also like, you know, one of the limiting factors with AI is us. So like if we, if we don't do things like you were talking about Fiona, like product market fit, mean, you know, feel like I've been on one about that this week. But like, if you're not going to do that upfront work, and you're not going to speak to customers, you're not going to have an ICP, then The AI that you use is already limited by the fact that you haven't put in the work. So it's like, you're not going to get the kind of output that you think you're going to get. You didn't do the upfront work. exactly. I think we've spoken about this on a different podcast. think with, uh, work is weird now, but if you're firing senior marketers or you're not paying for fractional CMOs and you're wanting to do all of this deep marketing automation, you're gonna, you're gonna mess it up at some point because you're you're no longer like understanding the fundamentals, understanding what needs to be in place, etc, etc. don't know, Fiona, if you found that like, for us as well, we're fractional CMOs, like, people are much, much more wary now of actually wanting a strategy. When they hear strategies, they're like, you just want to charge me with stuff. like, no, we just want to know what to do. So it's gonna work. Yeah, because it's really hard to keep a business on track. It's really hard to steer the marketing in the direction that you know it needs to go in as a marketer. You're constantly being pulled off from sales, from the CEO, from everybody else, from the technical team, from even from junior marketing team. You everybody's trying to be off course and it is really hard to keep it on track. And if you haven't got anyone keeping it on track. it will just go to pop because it'll go here and it'll go there and it'll go and everything will get diluted. So it's really difficult and you do need that person, that strategic voice. AI can't be that. can't, you know, there's nothing AI can do to be that guiding captain. stakeholder buy-in, is just a people management problem. Like AI is not gonna manage all of your senior leadership team and tell them about things in ways that they want to hear about. Yeah. So do we. Yeah. excited. I get that little fizz like, I can do this. But I still know that you need to know the fundamentals in order to use it properly. So yeah, if you don't have that. when I went to SAS stock last year, I went to a, one of the only talks I went to was by the, I think he is the CEO of intercom and he was talking about how like, pre AI marketing got really boring. So like the things that we cared about marketing were like dark versions of websites. And he's like, AI came and it's completely reinvigorated us all. And I think that's so true. Yeah, marketing did get a little bit boring, especially B2B, right? In that stage. So I think we can combine the next two into one. So we're not going to talk about how automating everything is not a strategy because it isn't. We know that. So what we will talk about is how we can have a solid AI strategy and automating everything is not it. So ladies, whoever wants to kick us off with your thoughts on this, I'm very excited to do the snippets on this because it's gonna be gold. Yeah, well, I suppose I would echo what Fiona said to start with that I think, you know, the strategy, and this is one of the core pillars of the content that we have at the GenAI Marketing Summit this year. think it does come back to, like Fiona said, your core marketing strategy. So who is your customer? You know, what does your customer want? And, know, and how are you going to reach them? And how do they want you to reach them? You know, having that fundamental understanding of your ICP and what your product is and how you're answering that question for those customers or target customers, that still has to sit at the heart of your marketing strategy. And I think that's probably point number one. And then aligning that with your business outcomes. So whether you are, I don't know, a tech scale up and you're looking to sell or you're looking to raise more funding or you're an enterprise and you're looking to, you drive up revenue or improve your bottom line or your P &L or whatever that might be, right? You've got to think about what are my business goals, but keep in mind that customer. And I think then you can start to think about automating and building that strategy around that. But if you don't do that fundamental work first, and I think that still looks exactly the same as it ever did, really, maybe we can speed up elements of it, but it still looks the same, right? We still have to do that piece of work. So I think for me, that's... that's really fundamental number one, I would say of the strategy that I would say we have to start with. And yeah, I don't think you can automate maybe parts of it. Like we said, like you can use AI tools to look through your customer transcripts. You can surface larger pools of data than we would have been able to easily in the before times, but actually we're still doing the same. We're still doing the same work ultimately. Yeah, agreed, agreed. You know, and if you're, if you're thinking I need to use AI, well, that's not, that's not really the right way to think about it. You need to be thinking about, um, so you've built your strategy, you know who your ICP is. Okay. How, what, where are you struggling right now? What, what, what are your challenges? Where are your bottlenecks? Is it coming up with ideas? Is it creating the content? Is it getting in front of customers? Find the bottlenecks. Yeah, so going strategy first on AI is identifying where your bottlenecks are, where are your blockers, where are you spending a lot of time, where could you potentially bring in AI to help streamline those processes? And I think that would be the first one. And then the second point is looking at your data. So, you know, and it's the same when you're looking at CRM, crap in, crap out. crap into AI, crap out of AI. You're not gonna get good results without good data. So you have to have a really good data store wherever that's from. And typically that's your internal data. So it's your CRM, it's your sales calls, it's your product information, it's your internal subject matter experts. You need to get all of that in. You need to think about personalizing your AI systems. Everything that you use, whatever it is, Whatever you choose to have in your tech stack, have to have it personalized and customized to your business. You need to know what a good output is gonna look like. So you need to know all of this upfront. You can't just expect AI to give good outputs if you don't even know what good looks like. So you need to know and tell it what good and bad looks like. And then you can think about your stack. Your tech stack really is kind of... It's not the first thing, it's kind of the last thing really, because you need to know what all of these processes are, where you're going to be appearing, what sort of content you need to produce, and then work out what tech is going to meet those needs. And also, know, businesses have constraints. They can't just pick and choose any tech stack. Their IT department often will say, you've got Copilot, that's it. So you then have to map. Well, does Co-Pilot meet my needs for these different roles? You know, the things that I want to do, can I do those with Co-Pilot? You might not be allowed to go and buy systems off the shelf because it's breaching security or they don't meet compliance rules. You know, you have to just work with what you've got. If you're lucky enough to be able to go and buy tools off the shelf, don't just buy them willy nilly. have to map out what are they going to do for me? You know, so the tech stack, think you need to keep that really small and tight. There's no point in bloating it up with all different types of tools. Just pick something that's gonna work for you. And also, compliance and ethics is quite a big one. So for me, I work with finance firms or fintechs quite often. They need to be able to check that the outputs are compliant and that they are of a certain standard. So think about that and try and build in. guardrails and compliance into your platform. whether, I mean, that could look like just having an AI assistant that is trained on FCA marketing rules, for example, for finance, run things through that before you go to the real compliance department, know, stuff like that. can build that in, but you do need to make sure that you're using systems in a compliant and ethical way, I think. And then it's about the team, isn't it? It's about the about training the team to do things differently or to think differently and not to see AI as a competitor or as a silver bullet. It's using it as a multiplier, like I said before. So I think there's lots of things to think about when you're trying to build an AI strategy and it doesn't start with tools and tech. doesn't start with it, which LLM you like the best. Yeah. And there is obviously, there's always bias because everybody plays with stuff outside of work as well. And I think that is one of the key things to remember in all of this is that, you know, if your business is like either opposed to it or whatever, like people are playing with it themselves regardless of what you do. get in front of it. think marketers themselves, and I think, so both of your, all of your points about what should go into that marketing strategy and then how you dovetail AI are. Spot on, but I would say that marketers have got a really unique opportunity as people in a business who are generally more tech savvy sometimes than others to be at the forefront of how a business ethically and responsibly uses AI because we have got a viewpoint on how technology impacts our day-to-day work because it does constantly in a way that maybe some of the other maybe like the other comparison I could draw is like the dev team. if you work for a SaaS company, you know, but we, but yeah, we as marketers could be at the forefront of that and be saying, actually, this is not the way to use it. There still needs to be that overarching strategy that is, you know, that is aligned to your business goals. It's about supporting the team, you know, we can be at the front of that and say, yeah, this is the way that we think it should be used. And so therefore we can set that. that standard if you like and I think that is something that is a lot of companies are missing which is that like the there's the what tool you're going to use and then there's the ethical side of it like if your company has a set of behaviors or values or whatever you know your whatever you do with AI should marry up with that so like one of the really this might sound very extreme so bear with me But one of the things that quite a lot of companies are missing out on at the moment is the fact that, you know, like, if you look at what's going on in America and that the tech bros are all sitting side by side by Trump, if your company distances itself from that kind of politics, you don't have to use chat GPT. You can, you can go that far if you want to. So I think, just remembering all of that is important. And as marketers, we can, we can be part of that conversation from the get go rather than and be on the back foot about it. Yeah, I've got exactly. I had, I was just gonna say add on to the early on was somebody was explaining to me that actually marketers are in a really unique position in businesses, because actually, often as marketers, with guardians of a brand's voice, so that can be both internally and externally. So you really have a view on how is the business being perceived externally? And what's the potential financial impact of that if you there's a breach in the way that we're perceived or if our customers don't like the way that we're talking about using AI or whatever it might be. But actually, I think that's a really unique position for marketers actually, because as you say, other departments use the tech, but actually marketers are the ones who are really thinking about how is this business being perceived and guardians of that voice. So it's a great position to be in to sort of, as you say, be able to think about. does this align with our business values? Are we really delivering what our customers want to see? I had a great example, actually somebody that I'd spoken to in the last few months and they were thinking about, they had a sort of a pretty successful business that had done very well out of COVID. was a sort of a subscription-based business. So they'd done well during the COVID times, but they recognized that they had a sort of a demographics problem that a lot of their customers were sort of. they were affluent but of an aging sort of demographic. And so they wanted to sort of really grow out their customer pool. But at the same time, they knew that they didn't want to damage the way that the business is viewed by those existing customers that they have on. So they really thought about, what are the values of our business? Why do people subscribe to our product? Why do they like us? But how can we then add more value. And so for them, the AI they've gone down a like a personalization route. And so they've taken their product and then they you know, they sort of giving people like personalized recommendations about how you can use that product and other things that you might want to buy alongside that. But it's very personalized to the customer and it's it's value adding. So they're not saying to their customers, hey, well, we're just using AI because we want to, you know, I don't know, sell more product or make it cheaper or whatever it might be, right? They're actually saying, this is our business. We value our customers. We want to add value into your lives. And then they're using AI to sort of mirror that. But that came really from the marketing team, you know, really instrumental in thinking what, what's the goal of this business over the next few years and how can we address this issue that we have? And then the AI piece came into that as a sort of a way to tackle that. challenge. So I think that that's one of my favorite examples actually that I've had in recent years. another example of this and this is before AI times but Ruta and I worked in house together at a company and a very large environmental charity said to us we'd love to buy your platform but we can't because you use AWS because we are morally our values say no thank you we don't want to use AWS so the only way we're prepared to buy your platform is if you write to I guess we went to Jeff Bezos at the time and say we would like you to think about these things in regards to the way that you run your company from an environmental point of view. Now, obviously that's an extreme example, but I can see more and more that sort of thing happening. because this is because that is what I mean, generationally, know, millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha really care about some of these issues in a way that maybe previously people did. It's not that people don't care. It's more just that different priorities, right? So for different businesses. So I can see more and more of those things happening. So I think, again, that's just a really it's a real life example where somebody was like, I don't we can't buy your product because you use AWS. And it will happen more and more and more depending on your tech stack, if it doesn't align to your values. Yeah. Can I? Yeah. Can I add? I've got three more things for strategy to add before I forget. One, there has to be a budget line. So I know we spoke about how we bring tech in and obviously that usually goes into the budget, but there has to be a budget for the tech and the learning because you can't just expect people to know how to do stuff on top of the normal job. Then The other thing is being painfully specific about how AI is gonna be replacing the tasks that somebody has done and how that evolves their career and what their job is. you know, I can see people being, well, we know people get upset, unscared, like when their jobs are at risk and you kind of wanna take that away and... and be very painfully clear about what that means. if like, if you're hiring for someone, also want to be clear about what AI you're using and how, and to make sure that they're okay with it, okay, skill-wise. And then the last thing is, I really believe in not, what's the word, in encouraging good behavior when it comes to AI transparency. So yeah. The worst thing that can happen is you say that you can only use this specific co-pilot and someone's going away and putting your company data into chat GPT, a free chat GPT on their laptop. by all means, please encourage good behavior, give people options to what they can use, give training and also do things like hackathons or have like an AI Slack channel where it's like, guys, look at what I did with these things because people will be proud to share what they're doing and then you can actually get a good idea of how people are using AI in your business if you haven't kind of set that out from the front foot and don't shame people for using a tech that you didn't want because they're still gonna use it. Just make it work within your business. That is a really good point. know, you, know, most businesses or a lot of businesses have just rolled out copilot and not given anyone any training, not told them how to use it or what's even included or how to, how to do basic things. And then they wonder why they go off and they still use GPT. You know, if you're going to give someone a tool, it might not be as good as what's what else you can get, but you do need to train them on that tool. You need to have an expert in house or bring someone in to show them what's possible with that tool because otherwise what is the point of even doing it? They're not gonna use it, they're gonna use something else and that's the risk. But also explaining what the risks are, explaining to somebody that if you put a full call transcript into an unsecured, unpaid license, that could potentially go. out into the ether and everybody could see the data. So just making people aware that do you want to format this finance spreadsheet? You need to do it in a secure platform because otherwise, you know, this could happen. You're exposing the company to risks. And I just don't think, I don't think many policies are there yet really in companies. there really aren't. Or they'll just be flat like, well, don't use it. And it's like, who's going to be, yeah, who's going to be doing that? We all have our own phones and laptops. We just do it outside of there. Well, thank you, ladies. So before we wrap up very quickly, just wanted to see if anyone's got any marketing gossip to share for the end of the episode. Anything you love or hate or just can't get out of your head. my goodness. Well, think Fiona sort of mentions one of the things that I thought about on the love side earlier, and that is actually that I think AI has given a lot of people, you know, a real spark and just actually lots of renewed inspiration to look again at strategies, look again at these old playbooks that we have and think about how we can, you know, achieve the results we want. And actually, it's given, I think, you know, a lot of people that inspiration and actually, think our mission. sort of AI forward marketers is to really spread that spread that joy to everybody. But on the hate side, I think, whilst we're still thinking mine is that I hate this AI powered, AI powered, which has appeared before sort of every single, I don't know, tool or idea or whatever it might be in the market. Everything now is just AI powered. It's the new greenwashing, isn't it? It's AI washing. is yeah. Yeah, same. I love AI in as much as it's reignited my passion for marketing and for business. I love it for that. On the hate side, gosh, I would just say that I really hate being presented, particularly on LinkedIn, with people who seem like they've nailed it. They've nailed marketing, they've nailed managing a team, they've nailed life, they're winning I just think those people just can't have lives if that is the reality that they live in if they wake up at 4am every day and work on their agent. No thanks. Yeah. smashing the life out of marketing. They've found the secret key to marketing. No, nobody ever finds the secret key. Yeah, I not exclusive to marketing or to AI, but the 5am hustle trend is definitely a social media hate. uh Yeah. Sleep. You probably need it. Yes. My 5am hustle is letting the dog out. Yeah. that's enough. That's enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Waking up and hoping you'll fall back asleep after. Yeah. Hoping that you'll get some more sleep. Well, thank you so much, ladies. That was awesome. Thank you. obviously we will all be at the GEN.AI conference, the 24th to the 26th of November. Obviously we'll be doing some hosting, Fiona will be talking, we're really excited about that. So we will hopefully see you all there. Thanks everyone.