Making your marketing team “AI-first” - Simple steps you need to take. Now.

Many AI builders (and not just the hype peddlers) and experts agree: the speed of AI progress and its potential are so great that we underestimate both impact and urgency. It’s tough to comprehend and accept such rapid change. The shake up will transform knowledge work faster than what society and our corporate structures may graciously absorb (see the final quote in this email).

I'm seeing first hand at Augment the incredible agility of a team that uses AI all the time.

AI-first marketing teams are transforming how they work across: 1. Research & Strategy 2. Enabling others 3. Creation & Execution 4. Measurement, Analysis & Reporting.

They start with "How can I use AI for this?", from mundane tasks to strategic projects.

They automate their work and that of others.

They move much faster, produce better work, bring more value to customers and… enjoy their work more!

If you are not already doing these four things, please operationalize them ASAP.

1 - Equip, empower your team - even starve it a little

1. Find and elevate your AI champions—they'll pull the team along

2. Create dedicated time for sharing AI techniques and learnings: offsites, afternoon blocks, a “demo my AI workflow” section at every all-hands

3. Unlock significant budgets for AI tools and training. Get them approved by IT & Security. Your team should not fear using them

4. Gradually reduce resources for tasks AI can handle. This creates pressure to adopt new approaches

2: Enable your primary LLM, as you enable Sales

1. Whether ChatGPT, Claude*, or Google Gemini, set one up as the primary tool with your knowledge bases. Create GPTs, gems, on top of it (stupidly easy!)

2. Task Product Marketing with adding and maintaining foundational knowledge as essential context to these models, so the rest of the team benefits and is on message. Include messaging docs, persona cards, ICP, competitor intel, battle cards, case studies, brand voice and tone style guide... The output of the team’s work will be on-brand and relevant to customers.

3. Hire: assess for AI-first skills and mindset. Go deep

Dedicate a whole focus interview to assessing AI skills and mindset. Ask these questions:

1. Innovation: What are three effective ways you have leveraged AI recently?

2. AI leadership: What role did you play in enabling your extended team?

3. Continuous learning: How do you learn and get new ideas about the latest AI tools and best practices? What resources do you recommend I use and why?

If you give an assignment: explicitly encourage using AI. Require that candidates share their process. See if and how they use it.

More in my post, including follow-ups and what good looks like.

4: Inspire, assess, and reward your team

1. Be a broken record: ask “how will you / have you used AI for that?” in every one-on-one (put a sticky note by your/their desk)

2. Make “Acting AI-first” a key chapter of performance reviews

3. Recognize, give more scope to and promote your AI champions. Fast and visibly

4. Lead by example, of course

It's a very exciting time for marketing. Let’s go!

* still my favorite. Will get even better with web search and multimodal (coming soon).

🛠️ A selection of AI tips, news and workflows

My prompt for competitive Deep Research with ChatGPT Pro/Plus

The quality of ChatGPT’s deep research with o3-mini is impressive IF you make it scan the right sources and guide it. Here’s my prompt.

• Reputation: create themes from what customers write on review sites

• Positioning: analyses vendor websites

• Market Mapping: builds a SWOT for each player. Places them on a 2-by-2

• Recommendations: list suggestions for your marketing and product

💡 Remember: 1) guide it for better insights 2) only Grok can scan X in detail. So do something similar with Grok and add it as context to the main search.

This week’s buzz: the life-like quality of Sesame’s conversational AI

Amazon announced Alexa Plus, but Sesame stole the buzz.

Deals well with interruptions, doesn’t talk over you, uses the pace, wit, and hums of humans (and it will only get better). Designed to be a lightweight model embedded on our mobile/portable devices.

A future with seamless and pervasive voice-based computing interactions is near.

1. Try it here (no set up required). Interrupt it. Push it.

2. Consider building interactive voice marketing experiences. Examples:

   1. personalized onboarding for customers, with a personality

   2. Q&A sessions, mini courses, and quizzes for your sellers and partners

💡The direct mail ABM campaign of the near future: Prospect receives your smart Meta-Ray-Ban-like glasses. A card challenges them to ask anything about why and how customers in their vertical use your product. They converse with your brand bot. Packed with easter eggs and industry jokes. You fed it your customer stories, product info, blogs and more and the voice and personality your brand should always have.

An AI use case gallery so good I joined the waitlist

I would have bounced from Manus’ website not knowing how/when to use it, but their use case gallery made me sign up:

• Examples are really good - e.g. research on CRM slogans & brand stories

• Features smooth demos featuring 1) prompt 3) think 3) do 4) get results

💡 When your product is a horizontal play, sweat the use cases! We did at Twilio or Dropzone AI.

Final Words

With appreciation for you reading this. François | LinkedIn