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Making AI Matter: Best Practices from the CMO Roundtable
If you’ve followed my blogs, you know I love sharing highlights from our quarterly roundtables in Indy and Chicago. Over the last month we dove into a fascinating session on AI—digging into best practices around people, tech, and process. The conversations were packed with energy as we explored six big topics shaping how our community is thinking, experimenting, and innovating as we all transform with AI.
AI Integration in Marketing Processes
When it comes to innovating with AI, the community is rolling up their sleeves and experimenting—testing tools for content creation, script writing, research simulations, and more. The goal? To figure out what actually works, what can scale, and how to make AI feel authentic while keeping processes efficient.
And authenticity came up a lot. At the end of the day, creating true engagement still depends on a human touch—real connection, not just automation.
We also talked about what it takes to create the right environment for AI adoption. What surfaced were setting up steering committees, hosting brown-bag lunches to swap tips and best practices, and nominating internal AI champions who can mentor others and build confidence across the team.
Marketing Automation Tools Exploration
What I love about this community is the passion and willingness to get hands-on––to be the bleeding edge of trying new tools and finding use cases that matter.
What does this include? Everything from managing the prompts to the workflows surrounding those prompts. Here are just a few that we chatted about and were testing or using to enhance marketing processes:
- https://www.genspark.ai – an AI-powered super agent that creates query pages that don’t feel AI-written
- https://getswan.com – an AI agent that identifies and engages anonymous website visitors for follow-up via LinkedIn
- https://www.rb2b.com – identifies website traffic at higher scale that converts
- https://www.characterquilt.com – enriches and builds target account lists based on qualitative data, including pain points
What does the AI lifecycle look like in marketing organizations?
No doubt prompt coding and its best practices are in the nascent stages within organizations. But that doesn’t mean our CMO community isn’t thinking about what comes next––most everyone talked about finding the prompts that work, driving repeatable gains across productivity that streamlines workflows, while also thinking about the next stage of AI workflows – turning workflows into repeatable automated processes using platforms like Zapier or Make. But there’s also an eye on the next stage beyond that – building custom apps that create a more seamless way to scale AI and workflows across the team.
Content Creation Challenges
A big part of the conversation was on how to make AI more human that speaks to a brand’s voice and personality. It’s becoming top of mind with the community as there’s concern with the lack of creativity with AI content, and as a result, doesn’t perform or drive interest like human-written content. To help solve this, we talked about ways to overlay tools that have been trained specifically on who you are as a human, how you talk and converse, so that can be infused in the AI content writing process. Of course, until that’s ready for prime time, a best practice is using AI for ideation, editing while leaving the final draft to the human touch to achieve the right brand tone and emotional engagement. This is proving true with Andy Crestodina’s latest survey on top content marketing use cases.
How has your hiring changed in the AI era?
One of the most interesting parts of the roundtable was hearing how hiring priorities are shifting in marketing during this AI wave. What really stood out wasn’t just the technical skills, but the softer traits—leaders are looking for people who are naturally curious, open to experimenting with new approaches, and comfortable rolling up their sleeves. Whether it’s tweaking prompts, automating old processes, or imagining new use cases, the common thread is finding talent that’s eager to explore and adapt as we all navigate this new AI-driven world.
Product Marketing’s Role in AI Strategy
We wrapped up by talking about how product marketing itself needs to evolve. More than ever, product marketing is the perfect organization to be the hub for AI—shaping go-to-market strategy, guiding how models are built and used, and connecting the dots between internal teams and customers. Because of their deep market knowledge, product marketers are in the best position to steer both the AI workflows and the strategies they fuel. They’re also the ones who can surface new use cases and turn them into real growth opportunities. The sticking point? Most PMM teams are still stretched thin. That’s a big opportunity for CMOs to rethink org design and put product marketing at the center of how AI gets applied across the business.
What an energizing, thought-provoking roundtable! Conversations like this are what make the CMO Community special—real insights, real connections, and real takeaways for what’s next in AI.
