If you only check one highlight this week:

• B2B CMO? Check out the recap of the MKT1 conf

• Everyone else: first section.

Almost year-end! I will send a final edition early next week about skills (Claude and ChatGPT), Granola recipes, + a few more things that caught my eye.

-François

You can learn AI. You can also just ask AI.

Keeping up with all AI capabilities and features has become virtually impossible…

So I find myself simply asking the latest reasoning models (GPT 5.2, Gemini 3 Pro, or Claude Opus 4.5), “Can you do that??” Or “How should I use you for this task?”

I’ve been impressed (ok, not new…).

First, by how many times it shows me exactly how to proceed, but also how I frequently discover new capabilities (and you know I try and keep up…).

For instance, I asked Claude's mobile app (in voice mode while driving) to create a calendar entry for me, hoping it might use the Google Cal connector. To my surprise, Claude started a handshake with my iPhone calendar app (not G Cal). I authorized it. It created the meeting instantly.

Also impressed because these models often start executing the task I am only inquiring about, before I have even finished reading the beginning of the reply (you’ll discover how I created my first Claude skill in the next edition, when I was only inquiring how to do it).

Makes sense: AI Labs and AI-natives ship features so quickly that they sometimes barely promote them. Some tools know their own capabilities and write their own support pages and docs!

I used to recommend:

But now I recommend:

And you've probably noticed that sometimes it even immediately writes custom code to execute your task… Just for you. Like a Christmas gift 🎄.

What a wild time…

🛠️ My selection of resources, tips, and tools

💡 (PLS) Counterintuitive emails that drive pipeline post sign-up

His marketing and sales colleagues may dislike his automated emails, but they work! Hank Taylor (former VP Marketing at Vercel) shares his recipe for follow-up emails after a product sign-up. They keep winning all his A/B tests.

Don't market to developers? You'll still learn something, I guarantee.

Some of his tricks:

• Obvious: super timely, from a real person, all text (no html), not asking for a meeting

• Less obvious: mentioning their peers’ questions, good variety of links, optimizing to get a reply in the second (not the first) email

📝 How to create and publish a recap + infographic. Fast!

Guillaume Dumortier was the first to post a recap of MKT1’s marketing conference (link in next section) that included infographics and text.

He shared his AI workflow for turning notes into rich infographics 👇.

1. Used Granola to take notes and transcribe while attending the virtual conference. Then asked Granola to generate a “detailed summary.”

2. Pasted Granola’s summary into Gemini. Asked Gemini to organize it into strategic clusters in an executive summary format.

3. Prompted Gemini to illustrate each cluster as an infographic, with a style and color palette inspired by two images (an MKT1 diagram and a Lenny diagram).

4. Then created seven images - one for each section.

5. Instructed it to combine the seven images into a single infographic that is insightful, easy to read, and makes people want to share it.

6. Took the full executive summary again and asked it to structure it as an AI Marketing roadmap for 2026, generating a second infographic.

💡 (MKT1’s conf) What's changing in marketing in this AI era

Now that you've understood how Guillaume has done it (see above), here's his AI-generated summary + infographics of the key points from that MKT1’s Gen Marketer summit.

Worth the read. You’ll learn:

• What has AI changed so far for marketing?

• What is a Gen Marketer? i.e. marketing generalist + gen‑AI expert and orchestrator + campaign generator

• What works now (see screenshot below)

• And more

🔥🎙️ Lessons from Vercel’s COO (former Stripe)

Great podcast episode by Lenny who interviewed Jeanne DeWitt a few weeks ago (ex-CBO at Stripe, currently Vercel COO). Even richer than usual in insights

Some AI-relevant insights pulled from Lenny’s summary on X, but I recommend the full listen (YouTube, Apple Podcast):

“1. What failed seven years ago now works with AI. In 2017, Jeanne tried to build a system at Stripe that would automatically personalize outbound emails based on company data. Despite working with world-class data scientists, it failed due to too many errors. Today, that exact same approach works.

2. A single GTM engineer at Vercel reduced a 10-person sales team to 1 (in just 6 weeks). Jeanne’s team at Vercel had an engineer build an AI agent that handles inbound lead qualification, outbound prospecting, and deal loss evaluation. The agent costs $1,000 per year to run versus over $1 million in salaries for the sales team. The nine displaced team members moved to higher-value work rather than being laid off, and the remaining salesperson is 10 times more efficient.

3. Their AI deal-loss bot has become better at understanding what went wrong than humans. When Jeanne analyzed her biggest loss of the quarter, the salesperson blamed pricing. But an AI agent reviewed every email, call transcript, and Slack message and discovered the real reason: they never spoke to the person who controls the budget, and when ROI came up, the customer clearly didn’t believe the value claims. They are now using AI to analyze sales calls in real time and send alerts like “You’re halfway through the sales process and haven’t talked to a budget decision-maker yet.”

(…)

8. Building your own AI sales tools may beat buying off-the-shelf software. Because AI is so new and every company’s sales process is unique, Jeanne finds that building custom internal agents often delivers more value than buying vendor solutions. A single go-to-market engineer built their deal analysis bot in just two days, perfectly tailored to their specific workflow. These engineers shadow top salespeople to understand their workflows, then build automation that would have taken months or been impossible just a few years ago.”

Final Words

Thanks for sharing these highlights with busy marketing execs around you.🙏 

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François | LinkedIn 

I'm a CMO, advisor, and "CMO Wingman". Yes, that's a thing :-). Ask my clients: in this AI era, CMOs need a strategic proactive advisor more than ever. I’m a former CMO at Twilio, Augment Code, Apollo GraphQL, Decibel, Udacity, and Head of Marketing for LinkedIn Talent Solutions.