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AI is revolutionizing marketing, but simply automating tasks isn’t enough. Amanda Cole, Chief Marketing Officer at Bloomreach, joins us to share how businesses can build an AI-first strategy by creating an internal “AI brain” that powers marketing, sales, and customer interactions. If you’re looking to move beyond AI-generated content and harness AI for true business intelligence, this episode is for you.
Building an AI Brain for Your Business: Moving Beyond Basic AI Tools
We’ve all been there. You sit down with ChatGPT for the first time, ask it to write something, and watch in amazement as it spits out a passable blog post in seconds. It feels like magic—like you’ve just discovered a superpower that’s going to transform your marketing overnight.
But here’s the thing about magic tricks: once the initial wow factor wears off, you start to see the limitations. That generic blog post? It sounds like everyone else’s AI-generated content. Those automated emails? They’re missing your brand’s personality. The AI sales outreach? It’s generating leads that don’t convert.
So what’s missing? According to Amanda Cole, CMO at Bloomreach, most businesses are approaching AI all wrong. On a recent episode of the Agents of Change podcast, Amanda explained that the key isn’t just automating workflows with AI tools—it’s building an AI “brain” for your entire business.
The Problem with AI Task Automation
“Most businesses are focused on automating workflow tasks,” Amanda explained during our conversation. “But when you think about a salesperson in your company, they don’t just optimize for workflow. They go to company meetings. They have training. They meet product people. They connect with marketing people. They go to events.”
This is where most AI implementations fall short. They’re designed to automate specific tasks without understanding the broader context of your business.
Amanda shared a perfect example: AI-powered sales development representatives (SDRs). “So many CMOs that I know have tried them, and it has not worked,” she said. “What we learned in our internal attempts was that it wasn’t connected enough to the rest of the business for AI to function very well.”
Think about it—you wouldn’t hire a salesperson, hand them a script, and expect them to succeed without understanding your company’s products, values, target customers, and unique selling propositions. Yet that’s essentially what we’re doing when we implement AI tools without building the knowledge foundation first.
Building Your Company’s AI Brain
Over the past eight months, Amanda and her team at Bloomreach have been working on what they call their “go-to-market brain”—a central intelligence hub that powers everything from marketing to sales to customer success.
“We’re extending it significantly beyond the role of a sales development or a salesperson,” Amanda explained, “because what we found is the data and information that you need for a sales role is the same data you’ll need for a marketing role or a customer role or a CEO role.”
So what exactly goes into this brain? Amanda breaks it down into four key components:
- Your Company – Training AI on your business, brand voice, mission, values, and what makes you different
- Your Customers – Understanding who your ideal customers are and why they work with you
- Your People – Connecting with the actual human beings at customer companies who make purchasing decisions
- Your Process – The unique workflows and procedures that make your business tick
This isn’t as simple as uploading your company handbook to ChatGPT. It requires building a robust database that can ingest and understand information from multiple sources—including CRM data, customer conversations, LinkedIn profiles, website analytics, and more.
At Bloomreach, they’re using a combination of tools to build their brain, including Character Quilt as the foundation. They’ve also integrated tools like Dedoose for customer interviews and GONG for call recording, which feed data back into their central brain.
From Generic AI to Personalized Intelligence
One of the most powerful aspects of this approach is the ability to understand customers as individuals, not just personas.
“Until you get all of that data together into your brain,” Amanda said, “you are not going to be able to execute with AI tooling in a way that can exponentially make your teams more efficient.”
Imagine an AI that doesn’t just know your target market is “small business owners” but actually knows that Rich Brooks from flyte new media recently visited your pricing page, last changed jobs three years ago, and previously engaged with your content about SEO strategies.
That level of personalization is what makes human marketers effective, and it’s what your AI brain needs to truly transform your business.
The Balancing Act: AI Efficiency vs. Human Connection
Of course, this raises an important question: As AI becomes more capable, what happens to the human element of marketing?
Amanda believes we’re heading back to our roots: “AI will replace the majority of what we look at today as digital marketing, and will force us back to our storytelling and brand roots.”
This makes sense when you think about it. An AI optimization platform will eventually outperform humans at technical tasks like ad bidding and targeting—and it will do it in milliseconds, not days or weeks.
But as Amanda points out, “There are soft goals…we know as humans that brand affinity is decreasing because of a focus in driving additional revenue. So brands actually building relationships and creating content that connects with people is super important.”
She shared a sobering example: “I saw an example from a brand last week…they forgot to turn off their automation and it sent out an email that said, ‘See what we spotted in L.A.’ And there’s a lot of just human devastation occurring in L.A. at the moment, but AI is optimized for a revenue, for a click moment.”
This is where human marketers will continue to shine—bringing empathy, creativity, and emotional intelligence to the table.
Getting Started: Building Your Own AI Brain
If you’re feeling overwhelmed at this point, you’re not alone. Building a comprehensive AI brain is no small undertaking, especially for small businesses without enterprise resources.
When I asked Amanda for advice on getting started, she emphasized the importance of first understanding the technology: “If you’re not already using an AI tool every day, start. And as overwhelming as the information can be, you have to invest in this as though you’re getting a PhD in this.”
For small businesses, the most practical first step might be focusing on deeply understanding your customers at an individual level. This means going beyond basic firmographic data and investing in tools that help you collect and organize detailed information about your customers and prospects.
As Amanda puts it, “Make sure that your understanding of your customer is really, really strong…that you’re investing in the tooling and the data collection at a very specific level, so that you understand your customer, or you could train an AI tool to understand your customer in a very intimate and individualistic way.”
The Future of Marketing in an AI-Powered World
Perhaps the most eye-opening part of my conversation with Amanda was her bold prediction about the future of marketing leadership.
“I posted on LinkedIn a bit ago that I do not believe that…I think it will be possible by the end of this year for a company to do all of the things they need to do in marketing without having a CMO,” she said. “On LinkedIn, I said, ‘I’ll be out of a job in a year.’ And I do think that’s a reality.”
That’s a pretty striking statement from someone who’s currently the CMO of a successful company! But Amanda’s perspective isn’t driven by fear—it’s driven by a clear-eyed assessment of where technology is heading.
“I’ve been in technology for over 20 years. I’ve been integrating marketing technology platforms. I believe that data and technology was my unique differentiator,” she said. “I don’t think it will be a unique differentiator for much longer because AI can just do all of that so much better.”
The Takeaway for Small Businesses
So what does all this mean for small business owners and marketers? A few key lessons stand out:
- Go beyond task automation. Don’t just focus on AI tools that automate specific workflows—think about how to build a central brain that understands your business holistically.
- Invest in customer intelligence. The more detailed information you have about your customers as individuals, the more effective your AI implementation will be.
- Embrace the human elements. As AI takes over technical execution, double down on the aspects of marketing that require human empathy, creativity, and connection.
- Stay curious about AI. Technology is evolving rapidly, and the businesses that adapt the fastest will have a significant advantage.
As Amanda told the graduating college seniors in her life, including her own kids: “Be super curious and be really good at technology.” That’s sound advice for all of us navigating this rapidly changing marketing landscape.
The AI revolution in marketing isn’t just about automating tasks—it’s about rethinking how we approach customer intelligence and business strategy. By building a comprehensive AI brain rather than implementing disconnected tools, businesses of all sizes can harness the true power of artificial intelligence while preserving the human connections that drive lasting brand loyalty.
And that’s something even an AI can’t replicate…at least not yet.
Building an AI Brain for Your Business Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Bloomreach, leading the execution of the company’s marketing strategy to drive further business demand and brand awareness.
She is a passionate marketing professional with more than 15 years of experience in helping SaaS companies build impactful brands, communicate differentiated value, and grow high performing marketing teams. She also serves on the MACH Alliance executive board, helping the Alliance remain true to its vision, mission, and values by providing strategic direction.
And she’s going to be here today talking about how we can create an AI-first approach to marketing. I’m very excited to be having a conversation with Amanda Cole. Amanda, welcome to the podcast.
Amanda: Thanks for having me, Rich.
Rich: So most businesses and marketers, at least the ones who listen to this podcast, are interested in using AI to grow their business, but they may not know where to start. Tell me a little bit about your framework for thinking about AI implementation when it comes to marketing.
Amanda: Yeah, I think that that’s the number one conversation that I have with, with people. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you’ll see that I post passionately about AI and marketing.
And the reality is, it’s very difficult to think about how to get started. Because what you end up doing is you try various set of tools. AI SDRs, for example, we’re in the B2B marketing space, AI SDRs are all the rage, and so many CMOs that I know have tried them and it has not worked. And what we learned in our internal attempts to try an AI SDR was that it wasn’t connected enough to the rest of the business for AI to function very well. Because the AI agents that were created by these technology companies were really built to automate the workflow of the SDR.
But when you think about a salesperson that you have in your company, they don’t just optimize for a workflow. They go to company meetings. They have training. They meet product people. They connect with marketing people. They go to events. They actually interface and have conversations with customers on a regular basis. So there’s this significant amount of information that makes up the knowledge base of a sales rep that then gets translated into workflows that we now know as SaaS technology.
And that’s where AI really misses the boat. Today, it’s super focused on automating workflow tasks. And especially when you think about it from a marketing perspective, there’s not enough implementation or building of the brain of the AI that’s actually going to power that automation.
So this is where we have now really backed up and started. About eight months ago, we started building our brain, and I highly recommend that it starts absolutely with building out what we are now calling these libraries or these books of account data to really help us understand our customers, how to message them, how to interact with them. And from there, you can invest in AI tooling.
Rich: All right, so a few questions. And one is going to be showing my ignorance, but what does SDR stand for?
Amanda: Oh, sure. Sales Development Rep is the term in B2B, but that’s essentially the people that call you, send you emails, try to get you on the hook to meet with a technology company.
Rich: Sounds good. All right. Awesome. So, as you’re talking, like, this sounds fairly complex. Like, you guys have really started to put in the work here. Before we dive into a few of my questions, just on, on the forefront that you’re on right now, what are some of the tools that you’re using to start developing out this SDR brain that you’re working on?
Amanda: Yeah, and the reality is we’re actually calling it our go to market brain So we’re extending it significantly beyond the role of a sales development or a salesperson because what we found is the data and information that you need for a sales role is the same data you’ll need for a marketing role or a customer role or a CEO role really. So this brain is essentially at the core of our business.
But we tried a lot of tools, and I actually can provide a list of the tools that we tried, but you’ve maybe heard of clay.com if you’re in the space there. I obviously can’t think of them off the top of my head now, which is embarrassing, but we tested about 50 or 60 different tools. And again, what we found was that these tools are really focused on automate. Adcreative.ai is another really good one that we loved.
It was very focused on testing and optimization for ad creative, but when you wanted to use it to scale the creation of additional versions of ads, it really couldn’t get the branding right. And that’s, again, I think this is the other funny part about AI. It was all the rage for creative with Adobe Firefly, and then as people started engaging and interacting and using it, they were like, oh, it’s actually not as good as we need it to be. And the tooling and training is almost more effort than just getting the human to do the design work to begin with. And that’s the battle that we’re dealing with every day. How much time do we invest in the training of the AI, because eventually it’ll scale. Versus just getting humans to be great at what they do today.
Rich: And that is the challenge, I think, of all business owners ever. Especially when it comes to hiring a sales rep. Like, when does this sales rep start to pay for themselves? And sometimes it is that long-term investment.
I think many of us, the first time we sat down with ChatGPT or a similar tool, were so blown away by the magic of it that it seemed like, oh, here’s the answer to all of our prayers. And then we realize, okay, but to get past that first ‘wow’ moment, there’s an investment if we want to be better than other people, rather than just having the same generic content that anybody could get from a single prompt.
Amanda: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And it’s even beyond the generic content. It’s when it’s in the business context, it’s like actually helpful content. So how do I actually… and so Bloomreach, we’re also an AI company. And one of the things that we do is help people find products when you go to a website.
If you think about that in the ChatGPT world, we’re seeing to our own website, a significant increase in the amount of visits that are coming from ChatGPT, Claude, or some of these tools that actually help you search for. But what they do not do is actually help guide you down a process. So you get the initial set of results, but you don’t really get this experience that you can envision with like a ChatGPT. It’d be so great if it would come back. Help me along the way, decide, do some comparison charts and all these things. It will eventually, but it’s certainly not there yet.
And when you think about buying a product as a consumer, comparing vacation destinations, how do I understand which hotel is going to be right for me? Today, the regular way of searching is still better than your engagements with a ChatGPT and Perplexity, but it won’t always be. I mean, they’re definitely going to get better.
Rich: All right. You talk about having an AI-first approach to marketing. You’ve kind of talked a little bit about your own experience with this. How do you describe what that looks like, and how is it different from just somebody who’s listening right now using a tool like Cor Claude in their everyday marketing work?
Amanda: Yeah, so I think that what the big change is in thinking about utilizing AI to grow your business, I maybe can just broadly say it that way, is to get out of the functions. Because as I mentioned a bit ago, the brain that we’ve created powers every area of our business sales, customer success, even finance, our executive team. That’s the vision for it, I should say. Because the data set is the same.
In a B2B world, we need to understand the accounts that we’re going after, the people who exist in those accounts, the org structures, what their pain points and their key priorities are. And all of that exists in, let’s call it this account research book. And that data, again, is the same data that marketing needs to write messaging and website copy and paid ads. It’s the same data the sales reps need to interact and engage with them, that the customer success team needs to serve them.
And so when you think about how do you make your business more efficient with AI, it really comes back to essentially a really great training program for what will be the ultimate executor of all of the activities in your company.
Rich: So that’s very interesting. Because just by chance over this weekend, I was sitting down and creating my first Claude project ever. And one of the things that I really wanted to do is create an entity, for lack of a better phrase, that I could talk to called, ‘Flyte New Media’, the name of my digital agency.
Just somebody, something, that you’d be like, hey, here’s something we’re thinking about, or this is the kind of person that we want to hire, or these are the kind of projects we’re thinking about, what makes sense to you? So it sounds like accidentally I might’ve been on the right track that you need to create some sort of knowledge base and train up your, whatever your AI tool is, to really understand your company, which means understanding your market, which means understanding your ideal clients, which means understanding your competition.
Would you say that that’s correct? Or are there some nuances in there that you would like to expand upon?
Amanda: Yeah, that’s 100 percent correct. And it even goes further than that. You’ve got to train it on the latest and greatest conversations that are happening in your space. You’ve got to train it on the last event that you went to. You’ve got to train it on news articles. You’ve got to train it on job changes and LinkedIn and those kinds of things. And so it’s this massive amount of data that historically, we were not able to actually leverage and understand.
We can now with LLMs, that’s really the unlock is that they’ve allowed us to create these huge databases of information that can be interrelated and connected in a way that we never were able to do before. And when you build that database and you’re able to interact with that database. Which again, is another big thing in LLMs is actually a conversational interaction.
Rich: My favorite part.
Amanda: Now you can actually execute with it. And again, another huge development with these LLMs is that integration code can be written by the AI.
It doesn’t have to be a predefined set of integrations. You can actually say, “create the script that I need to integrate X with Y”, and it will write it for you. And so then you could theoretically immediately send those emails. Or you could immediately post that customer service email question into your address change customer service tool. Or you could write a board deck with the insights that you’ve gotten from your customer data.
Rich: Interesting. Do you find, and maybe the tools you’re using have bigger memories than some of the ones that are available like ChatGPT or Claude, I have started to see coming up against kind of like limits. And both platforms have different limits. And it seems like every 3rd day there’s a new platform that comes out that promises even bigger limits and stuff like that.
Do you find any challenges when it comes to training up these AIs to know about your business that you run out of space or that they start to forget things because you keep on feeding it new information about the latest news stories or the latest sales calls you had or whatever it might be?
Amanda: Yeah. I mean, it is costly at the moment, and the big guys are all working on how do they make it more affordable. So the vendor that we’re actually working with, or the company that we’re actually working with to build our AI database is called, Character Quilt. And then we’re connecting a bunch of other services on top of that.
So for example, a tool that we use that we love, called Dedoose actually interviews our customers for us and then uses AI to write a case study and gets approval from that customer. We’ve seen our case studies go from taking up to 12 weeks to like 24 hours. And we feed that data back into our brain. So it knows and understands the reviews and what our customers are saying.
GONG is a call recording tool. We actually take that data, we augment it into our brain, and then we’re able to use terminology and trends and pain points that real customers are experiencing to train our essentially database, for lack of a better word, which is built on Character Quilt. But then that Character Quilt database connects to the tools that we use to execute.
So for example, we still use a tool called Sales Loft to send emails, which our sales development team would have used, but now instead of humans writing those emails, the research and functionality that we built with Character Quilt will draft the emails and push them into the Sales Loft tool.
Rich: So, maybe this is all taken care of for you, but we’ve all seen examples of generative content that feels very artificial, overusing the word ‘delve’ or whatever it may be, ‘unleashing your potential’. How do you balance all this automation that you’ve already put in place with authentic human connections that often drive marketing and sales forward?
Amanda: Yeah, I think that the reality is marketing has been very digital, sales has been very digital for a very long time, and that the moments of human connection that are not internal. So there’s certainly moments where there’s handoffs between humans, because I’m moving from a marketing function into a sales function, and so there needs to be an internal handoff. That’s where we see a lot of slow down and where I think is actually going to have the biggest efficiency impact.
But where I, as a business, need to interact with my customer in a human way, that is going to become even more important. I don’t think that that will be as important on the digital interaction side. I mean, at the end of the day, the beauty of Google, the beauty of internet searches, the beauty of being able to have all of this information at my fingertips is the ease of access and my self-education. And I think AI will empower people to do more of that. And businesses, to have greater reach.
But again, when it comes time for me as a customer to believe that the people I’m working with are good people and people that I want to work with and that I want to buy from, that’s still super important.
Rich: What has been the buy in like at your company and the companies you’ve seen when it comes to AI? Because one concern that I’ve heard from experienced marketers and developers and designers as well, is that if newer people with less experience are just trained up on these AI tools, learn how to use to do something with AI, that they miss the basic underpinnings of whatever it is, whether it’s marketing, design, development. Is this a legitimate concern? And what is your response if you hear somebody on your own team say this to you?
Amanda: Yeah, it’s absolutely a legitimate response. If you go back to the earlier example of you need to train, you need to think of the AI brain as a new hire that you’re onboarding and all of the training that you would need to give a new hire.
There are very rare circumstances in which you would have another new hire train a new hire. You know, they’re just, that would not happen. You want the people who are SMEs in your business training your new hires. And you also have SMEs from all different areas of your business from product, from marketing, from merchandising, who would train, who would have a different part of training your new hire. And that is where we are with AI today.
I don’t think we will always be there. I think AI will absolutely, as a new hire would, get good enough to where it doesn’t consistently need that subject matter training. But I think that especially as we think about creating, if you want to again use that terminology, these AI brains for every business, that’s going to take time for us to get there at scale.
Rich: And when it comes to creating these brains, how open do we make them to our team? Does everybody get access to the brain? Is it different people get different pieces of the brain? Like, how do you see that within your own company working out? Is there kind of a hierarchy of reaching to it, or do you just make it available for anybody whether they’re in marketing, sales, HR, operations, and so on?
Amanda: Yeah, I think I’m the long-term vision for me is certainly that everyone at our company has access to the brain. Now that still needs to be limited. It shouldn’t be everyone in our company has access to send customers a bunch of emails or to get all the data in our database and do something with it.
So you will have to create, and this is really what we see happening right now, startups are able to move really fast because they don’t have things like SOC 2 compliance that they need to worry about. Or in Bloom Reaches case, GDPR compliance. And big enterprise organizations, maybe not even big ones, but enterprise organizations have to build in those user permissions and those data privacy layers.
And that’s super important, even in user permission access to complex data systems in which actions can be performed. But I do think ultimately that the processing information that’s available in this brain should be available and make every employee better at their job as a result.
Rich: What are some of the common pitfalls that you’ve come across when companies are trying to implement AI into their marketing?
Amanda: I think a lot of it really stems from stopping short of the intelligence. So I want to automate the creation of campaign workflows, but I haven’t actually done enough of the development on my story and my brand in order to make the creation of that workflow super effective. So I get a very kind of junior high-level execution of a campaign, which creates a mess for me, especially if I’ve asked it to create multiple iterations based on various segments, because now I’ve got 25 campaigns that I have to go edit every step, every email, every SMS message or whatever.
So jumping onto the execution of AI before you’ve done the training of AI is absolutely where a lot of people are seeing challenges and lack the results. Where that’s difficult for businesses, is training AI does not impact your business positively.
I was talking to a friend of mine over the weekend who said she’s concerned to bring AI into the business because the expectation will be that she replaces humans with it. But she knows AI isn’t good enough yet to actually replace the humans that she has on her team. So how do you balance that? And I think that is a bit of the challenge.
And you said earlier, this is businesses everywhere. How do we meet the demands of a really fast changing technology ecosystem that we believe in the promise of making us more efficient, but yet can’t deliver yet. And that’s where we’ve got to make those tough investment decisions. I think that’s the current thought.
Rich: Amanda, you’re talking about developing this brain, this resource. I called it an ‘entity’, you call it a ‘brain’, for each business. How about businesses, I mean all businesses work with a wide variety of people or businesses, but on the agency side, where you have to understand the brand of 10, 20, 100 different companies, would you recommend that we create a brain for each one? Or is it something that’s maybe a little bit too nuanced and that’s on the client themselves to create that brain?
Amanda: I do think the companies themselves are going to have to create that brain. They’re going to need agency support to do it. So I definitely think there is a model for both of those things to be true. The brain cannot be the company property of the agency. It has to be owned by the organization for whom the data set is built.
But where I see agencies really being able to layer on top of that is, once having the brain doesn’t allow you to do anything, you still need to come up with the use cases to actually activate that data. And all of that is also an activation of LLMs. This is where you go back to the original ask, which is that workflow automation. Now you have a data center to build from, and that’s where it’s unlimited.
You see things like Ninja Cat as an example. They’re doing a ton of workflow automation on the marketing side, but it’s not connecting to a central intelligence center, and I don’t think those things can be successful without really investing the time and building that brain. I’ve got to think of a word other than ‘brain’.
Rich: No, brain is great. So as we’re talking through this, it seems like the LLMs that we’re more comfortable with or cognizant of, things like ChatGPT, things like Claude, they are really good at some basic tasks. Like creating an email sales funnel, or whatever marketing tasks that’s in any type of marketing books or online, they’ve been trained up. What’s missing here, and what you’re working on right now, is creating that brain or that entity, the actuality of the business, its mission, vision, values, all that sort of things that’s handbook and all these other documentation, so that you can take those basics and really customize it in a way that’s meaningful for the business. And that’s what I’m hearing from you. Would you say that that’s accurate?
Amanda: Yeah, that’s right. And that’s just one component. There’s training it on my business and why I’m different and who we are and our brand voice and all those things. Then there’s our customers, which we all, you know, we identify a unique set of customers and there’s a reason why those customers work for us.
So it’s my company, my customers. Then it’s the people that I interact with, the actual human beings at the customers that I need. Because again, we’re B2B, so we’re focused on businesses. I need to connect that to humans. Because again, humans are who are going to sign the check. I joke with our CFO that he’ll always have a job because someone needs to go to jail.
But the fourth piece of this is the process. Our process internally is going to be very unique to us as a company. And so until you get all of that data together into your brain, you are not going to be able to execute with AI tooling in a way that can exponentially make your teams more efficient.
Rich: And Amanda, when you’re talking about one of the pieces of the puzzle here is that the brain knows our clients. You’re not talking about that it knows our target audiences or buyer personas. You’re literally saying it needs to know that Rich Brooks from flyte new media is a good prospect or a good client or a past client, whatever it is, so it really understands the nuances of the individuals, not just the type of individuals you want to work with. Is that correct?
Amanda: That’s right. I mean, exactly the individual. What their LinkedIn profile is, when they changed jobs last, the last conversation we had with them, the marketing activity that when, when they visited our website. Which is all data that we’ve collected as marketers for a really long time. But being able to pull it into a database that actually understands Rich at an individual level, and then can with all of the other context, build an email specific to Rich that only can come from Bloomreach and engage with you in a very personal way with our context. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
Rich: All right. That sounds both interesting and a little bit scary, because we always worry a little bit about job loss. But so as we’re thinking about this whole process, a lot of it sounds like you guys are pretty far along. You mentioned, I think it was eight months or something, you’ve been training up the brain and everything like this.
If somebody is listening to this podcast right now and they have not started this process at all, and maybe they don’t have the resources that are at your disposal, what would you say the first few steps should be in creating their own company brain? What are some of the documents that they might want to think about to start creating that base? And then what might be the process to continually feeding this engine so that it can become ultimately a really powerful tool, not just for marketing, but for all aspects of the business?
Amanda: Yeah, I mean, this is definitely not easy. And again, I mentioned Character Quilt as a great partner for actually building that brain, but they are also a startup. So this is a very new space, and it is very scary. I don’t take away from that at all. And what I say is it’s okay to be scared and do it anyway.
Because the reality is, we’re very much creating this future for ourselves. And I, for one, want to be part of it. I believe that I can and will do it in a responsible way. And I don’t know that I could say the same about everybody else who might take the mantle of developing this future. So part of it is really finding a data partner that has strength in AI and LLMs and actually understands how to build those structured databases.
I think another even easier way is just to make sure that your understanding of your customer is really, really strong. That it’s not, as you just said, it’s not limited to ICP, it’s not limited to some high-level firmographic data, but that you’re investing in the tooling and the data collection at a very specific level, so that you understand your customer, or you could train an AI tool to understand your customer in a very intimate and individualistic way.
Rich: As you look into your crystal ball or layout your tarot cards or whatever it may be, read the tea leaves and there’s all these emerging AI capabilities. As you get your brain to where you want, your company brain to where you want it to be, what are some of the capabilities or tools that AI can bring to the table that you think are going to be most valuable?
Amanda: Yeah, I do think that So I again, posted on, on LinkedIn a bit ago that I do not believe that I, I think it will be possible by the end of this year for a company to do all of the things they need to do in marketing without having a CMO. So on LinkedIn, I said. “I’ll be out of a job in a year.” And I do think that’s a reality.
I think if you build the right data set, you build the right intelligence. The connecting it to tools and building out automations is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve been in technology for over 20 years. I’ve been integrating marketing technology platforms. I believe that data and technology was my unique differentiator. I don’t think it will be a unique differentiator for much longer because AI can just do all of that so much better because it’s process.
It’s the same thing over and over again, with the same data set, creating a function that we have systematized in software, which really takes us back to our roots of brand marketers, which I am not, but connects us back to storytelling and differentiation through human connection.
So I really do believe that AI will replace the majority of what we look at today as digital marketing, and will force us back to our storytelling and brand roots.
Rich: It’s very interesting. Because we’ve had internal conversations similar as Meta has rolled out more and more AI tools to manage the ads on the background to like the targeting, the bidding, all that side of things to the point that almost all of them are turned on. And the very first thing we have to do as Facebook advertisers is go in and shut them all off, because we still believe we’re better than it.
But it also may come to the point where either we’re not better than it anymore, or they don’t give us the choice and we just have to use their tools and that part of it is locked off. And at that point, it is going to come back to branding creatives and everything else kind of like more traditional marketing. Something that many of us have gotten away from in the last decade or so.
Amanda: Yeah, I definitely think it will. And I very firmly believe that especially an ad optimization platform will out optimize humans and it will do it in milliseconds, so there wouldn’t even be an opportunity for review at some point because it will just happen so much faster.
But there are soft goals. Like right now, optimization is very much based on revenue or growth or those kinds of things. And at some point, consumers are going to be like, the only thing I ever get is a sale or something optimized for a revenue moment. And we know as humans that brand affinity is decreasing because of a focus in driving additional revenue. And so brands actually building relationships and creating content that connects with people is super important.
I saw an example from a brand that I won’t mention last week, but they forgot to turn off their automation and it sent out an email that said, “See what we spotted in L.A.” And there’s a lot of just human devastation occurring in L.A. at the moment, but AI is optimized for a revenue, for a click moment. And so I do think optimization will be done by AI, but that uniquely human element of empathy and care and relationship building will be where more marketers will focus.
Rich: Alright Amanda, I’m going to put you in front of a bunch of graduating college seniors right now who are all interested in marketing. What is the advice that you’re going to give them as they enter into this AI dominated world so that they can stay in marketing?
Amanda: So funny enough, I have three kids in college. And one is in marketing, and one is in engineering, and the other one’s a park ranger, so it doesn’t matter. But what I tell them consistently is just be super curious and be really good at technology. And I think that will be true. Even if you’re interested in marketing, you’re going into marketing, be really good at technology.
And I tell my own team, we have a content team that has gotten super invested in AI. They’re killing it. They’re coming up with all kinds of great and creative ways. And then we have this really human newsletter that they write every word of, which is so funny and it’s great, but the rest of it we’re trying to automate.
We have event marketers. You cannot yet replace event marketers who build these great experiences, these booze, these swag elements, these cocktail parties, that yet cannot be done by robots in AI. And so there are definitely opportunities, but no matter what you do, get really good at tech.
Rich: Get really good at tech and/or get really good at explaining tech to people who don’t get tech. I think that’s also a superpower as well.
What is one piece of actual advice that you would give to the audience today, like one thing to get them started on this process of creating their own AI brain for their company?
Amanda: Yeah, I would definitely say if you’re not already using an AI tool every day, start. And as overwhelming as the information can be, you have to invest in this as though you’re getting a PhD in this. And it changes so fast. I mean, we saw a bunch of announcements from OpenAI, and then another Chinese-based technology company doing a bunch of announcements around what’s happening in AI. It is changing every week.
And until you can, as you just said, deeply understand technology and LLMs and SLMs and what’s actually happening in the space, it’s going to be difficult for you to build a vision because you don’t have an inherent understanding of the applications.
Rich: Awesome. Amanda, this is fantastic. If people want to learn more about you or Bloom Reach, where can we send them online?
Amanda: You can go to bloomreach.com. That’s bloom like a flower and reach like I’m grabbing you, bloomreach.com. And then I’m on LinkedIn, you can find, find me there. I think if you search Amanda Cole, I should pop up.
Rich: Awesome. And of course we’ll have links to both of those in the show notes. Amanda, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
Amanda: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Show Notes:
Amanda Cole leads the marketing strategy at Bloomreach, an AI-powered digital experience platform that helps businesses drive personalized customer journeys. Be sure to connect with her on LinkedIn, and check out their website to see how they’re helping businesses transform their marketing strategies.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.