If you only check one highlight this week:

• Hiring? » How to hire people ready for the AI era - or how to come across as one of them.

• Working in growth or marketing at an AI-native? Or facing one? » Elena's post about growth in AI.

• Still haven't created a GPT yet? » See the definition and some inspirations.

-François

PS: New section this week: marketing inspirations (I love Pylon’s).

Three must-haves for marketing leaders in this AI era

I interview a lot of marketing leaders for the companies I serve.

I realized that folks I sent to the next round recently ALL display the three attributes below, IN ADDITION to a good (not necessarily great anymore) mastery of their craft and track record as marketing leaders:

1. Intensity, Drive, and Speed

2. Originality, Strong Opinions, and Creativity

3. Super Learners (and teachers)

Why?

• There are many more competitors (many AI-natives moving ultra fast) and much more noise in every vertical

• The playbooks are evolving fast

• The teams are often smaller and nimbler (or at least expected to be)

• Even CMOs need to be hands-on

The three attributes won’t surprise you, but it’s critical to validate all three in a comprehensive hiring process. 

If you are the interviewee:

• How can you demonstrate you possess these attributes?

• Do you have the right examples and stories? 

Here's how to validate them.

1️⃣ Intensity, Drive & Speed

AI natives’ have shrunk product cycles to quarters or even weeks. A marketing leader can't wait for certainty, consensus, or perfect plans and/or execution.

We need leaders with a fast internal clock, who take initiative, own outcomes, and move with and inspire urgency. They need to ship first and iterate fast next.

You should feel their intensity during the conversation. It should leave you excited and energized.

How to validate:

• Interview:

  • "Walk me through a launch or program you scoped and executed in a very short time. Context? Approach? Learnings and fails? Results?"

  • "Another one please?"

• Assignment: Give them a real challenge with a tight deadline (positioning a new feature, competitive response strategy, campaign). Ask them to show you how they used AI to tackle this. Do not ask for slides or anything pretty. Ask to see the thinking in a memo with bullets.

• References: Ask "How quickly did they typically move from concept to execution? Give me examples." and "Who was going faster than them in the company?"

2️⃣ Originality, Strong Opinions and Creativity

If we run the same playbook as every other B2B startup, we saturate our channels and don’t stand out.

The best marketers are opinionated. They don't present you with the traditional menu of activities and let you pick.

They push for new approaches. They invented something that stood out and moved the needle: a novel positioning angle, an unconventional distribution channel, an unexpected way to use your product for marketing purposes, a new workflow using AI and/or automation.

And they provide value to customers with every touch point.

How to validate:

• Interview:

  • "Describe something you built or improved that wasn't in any marketing playbook?"

  • “What are the five most creative things you did in that job that made a difference?”

• Assignment: Present them with your specific market/competitive situation and ask for a plan. It can be a product launch, a campaign, or any other program.
  The best one will offer a well researched strategy (deep research with ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini takes 10 minutes!!), specific tactics - proven and/or original - that will make you think “Oh smart, I wish I'd thought of that myself”.

• Backchannel: Ask "What did [candidate] do that helped you stand out out in the market?" and "How did they challenge the status quo?"

3️⃣ Super Learners (and teachers)

The best leaders and doers are learning machines.

They spend time trying tools themselves, connecting with others, learning (and improving) new playbooks, trying new approaches, and challenging their teams to do the same and report and teach back.

That turns them into valuable teachers, too, who show new ways and challenge others.

How to validate:

• Interview:

  • "Walk me through your most advanced AI workflows. Where and how did you learn them?" and

  • "What are you reading/following that I should follow and why?".

  • “What are your go-to custom GPTs?”. (A CMO I interviewed this week shared 4 podcasts I'd never heard about and sold them with passion and great detail).

  • “If you had to lead three workshops to train our extended team on new playbooks, what would you teach and why?”

• Assignment: Ask them how they tackled the assignments above. The best ones use AI to collect insights, challenge their thinking, and format their documents or prototypes.

• References: Ask "What did they teach you/your team?"

So what gives?

Did I just make your job of finding someone impossible?

Not necessarily!

These days, you can compromise and go with someone without super strong fundamentals or experience, if they display the three attributes above.

If they learn fast, they will compensate for what they don’t know and quickly make up for their gaps.

👉 This AI-era places a premium on standing out and moving fast, not on doing things perfectly.

If you disagree, or if you have other techniques to validate these three things, please chime in.

My selection of tips, news and workflows

🤖 Reminder: what (custom) GPTs are and when to use them

Simple explanation of what a custom GPT is:

“A GPT is like a pre-prompted version of ChatGPT you build for a specific purpose and can use over and over again.

Instead of writing out detailed instructions every time you want ChatGPT to do something, you set up those directions once, and they live inside that GPT.

When you create a GPT, you do it in words (not code).

You just write out the directions you want it to follow whenever you (or someone else) uses it. Those directions sit in the background, so every time you open that GPT, it already “knows” the rules you set and just does it.” - Nicole Leffer

I really hope by now you have created your own GPT. It's as easy as clicking a couple buttons and writing (or dictating) English. If you don't like the output, instead of editing the output, spend time editing the instructions in the GPT itself, you will save time next time.

🤖 Three GPTs that save marketers hours

Exit Five, shares their favorite custom GPTs from their marketing community (scroll half way for details).

1. Is That Event Worth Going To? Attend, sponsor, speak, or skip? A GPT spits out quick bullets with fit score, recommendation, and key deadlines

2. Personalized Welcome Emails That Doubled Click Rates. A system that turns generic welcome emails into personalized business cases.

3. LinkedIn Posts That Actually Sound Like You. Analyzes last LinkedIn posts, identify patterns in your voice, then create new content that matches your tone.

They distill this advice:

“The real opportunity for GPTs is operational. What manual, repetitive work do you do that requires some thinking but follows predictable patterns?

• Conference research.

• Lead qualification.

• Content analysis.

• Competitive intelligence.

• Customer feedback categorization.

These are perfect Custom GPT use cases because they combine pattern recognition (what AI is good at) with domain knowledge (what you bring to the table).”

🚀✨ Growth in the AI era

Sooooo right: Elena (head of growth at Lovable) shares nine differences between doing growth at an AI company vs in “traditional” tech software.

We’ve definitely been experiencing that at Augment Code, so I strongly agree with her.

But… if you're facing AI-native competitors, you too need to operate at this clock-speed with that MO:

“1. PMF is a treadmill
In AI, Product-Market Fit isn’t something you hit once. You re-earn it constantly. Customer expectations, tech, competitors move too fast still.

2. Growth isn't really responsible for activation anymore - Activation happens in the prompt box
The core interaction is often stripped down: a prompt -> response. Activation depends overwhelmingly on product quality, not onboarding flow designs or splashy UX.

3. More big bets, fewer optimizations
Instead of doing endless optimizations, you spend time building new loops and channels.

4. The old growth marketing playbook doesn’t hold
SEO + paid + content is no longer enough. All the attention has shifted to the creator economy. Creators, founders’ voices, and video matter much more than before.

5. Marketing can’t keep up with shipping velocity
Product updates are coming weekly - or even more often. Marketing has to move closer to product teams or risk becoming a dreaded 'blocker'.

6. Brand also becomes a product job
in a crowded market, how do you stand out? Through brand. Brand has to be baked into product interactions. Every touchpoint - UX, design, micro-copy - carries brand.

7. Founder-led social is the most powerful channel
Authentic voices beat polished corporate messaging. When founders & early team members show up, people listen. LinkedIn, X, etc., matter more now than ever for B2B.

8. Product-led loops are more important than ever
Virality, collaboration loops, user-generated content inside the product... These are your strongest channels, because external channels are too cluttered and expensive.

9. Growth ships features now
Growth teams can’t just optimize funnels. They’re building features that are the growth loop.” - Elena Verna

🛠️ Best AI tools for slides, note taking, email, spreadsheets, research, and more?

a16z published a review of some AI tools they tested for weeks. Results summarized in this X/Twitter thread.

Their verdict:

• For slide creation*: Gamma and Genspark come on top (table below)

• For spreadsheets*: Manus or Shortcut*

• For email (they really only tested the integration between email and calendar): Serif, Fixer or Comet (browser by Perplexity)

• For research and analysis: Manus or Comet

• For note-taking: Mem, Granola, or Notion

* that was before Claude rolled out their file editing capabilities.

😍 Marketing and video inspirations

There is so much boring stuff in B2B and AI marketing that it's nice to see some good launch assets or campaigns:

1. Reve - Beautifully captures how fun it can be to edit and play with image gen tools, with a cool “Reimagine reality” tagline and a feel good and fun video. Btw, a ton of effort went in to make it great. Reve spent 12 days in-person in LA.

2. Vanta’s new billboard “Don't SOC-block your best engineer” (see image below) makes a boring category grab your attention (now they need to do the same thing with their podcast ads...)

3. Cofounder - strong launch in a crowded tough space (AI assistants): they picked a name that stands out and got the intro video right (not as inspiring as the first one above, but a much better explainer, and… 2m views on X And 6k bookmarks as I write this 😲)

4. Pylon shows off who they win against with a wicked placement of their customer logos above the fold. 😈 Your website visitors make a decision on whether to stay or bounce in three seconds: listing your competitors right above the fold helps them understand what category you play and win in right away.

Find the agencies who produced 1 and 3 in comments.

🔍 How to win at AIO (yes, again)

Lenny shares takeaways from his discussion with Ethan Smith.

1. “Being mentioned most often beats ranking first

2. LLM traffic converts 6x better than Google search traffic

3. Early-stage startups can win at AEO immediately, unlike with SEO

4. The long tail of AEO is 4x bigger than SEO

5. Reddit is proving to be the kingmaker for AI visibility

6. YouTube videos for "boring" B2B terms are a gold mine for AEO

7. Your help center is now a growth channel” - Lenny Rachitsky

Final Words

Truly 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 former CMO at Twilio, Augment Code, Apollo GraphQL, Decibel, Udacity and Head of Marketing for LinkedIn Talent Solutions.