Huddlers in the News

“We all just completed corporate AI training that told us everything we couldn’t use,” shared a CMO from a $6B conglomerate, who added sarcastically, “and that was fun.”

The huddle shuddered while I pondered the fate of big companies.

To be clear, I’m not anti-governance. Big companies have big risks, big brands, and big legal departments. A wrong email from a rogue agent is not a cute learning moment.

But corporate AI training that only teaches avoidance is not training. It is legal self-protection wearing a learning management system badge.

Congratulations, you now know 47 ways to get fired and zero ways to grow faster.

Why Big Companies Struggle to Move Fast

This is where the Innovator’s Dilemma sails into the harbor. Incumbents often protect the current business, the current process, and the current definition of “safe” until the new thing looks too messy to fund.

Then the new thing becomes the market.

Years ago, my company produced a video game called Carrier: Fortress at Sea, which meant I learned more than expected about aircraft carriers. One fact stuck with me: a carrier needs roughly five miles to come to a complete stop.

That is not a steering problem. That is physics.

Large companies have the same issue. They have scale, data, customers, brand equity, and distribution. They also have inertia, compliance layers, procurement drag, approval loops, and a thousand smart people trained to slow things down before something breaks.

So no, a $6B conglomerate will not turn like a speedboat.

But it can launch one.

Marketing Needs Its Own AI Skunk Works

That is the opportunity for CMOs at large companies right now. Corporate can and should create guardrails, but guardrails are not a go-to-market operating model.

Marketing needs its own AI skunk works.

Not a rogue team hiding from IT. Not a prompt-sharing Slack channel. A real skunk works. Sanctioned. Structured. Business-outcome obsessed.

Give it a mandate: improve pipeline, conversion, retention, customer experience, and cost per opportunity. Give it permission to rebuild workflows, not just add AI sprinkles to broken ones. Give it its own training program because “don’t paste confidential information into ChatGPT” is not a curriculum.

Snowflake offers a useful counterexample. Denise Persson’s team is building AI fluency through training, hackathons, AI goals, and governed agents. She has also cited a 30% reduction in cost per opportunity.

That is the big-company dream: carrier-sized data, speedboat-style learning.

My favorite part of Carrier: Fortress at Sea was trying to land an F-15 on the carrier. If you crashed, the game delivered a brutal little message:

“Congratulations, you just crashed a perfectly good $30 million airplane!”

AI Fluency Requires Some Trial and Error

That is what many corporate AI programs feel designed to prevent. No crashes. No mistakes. No mess.

Fair enough. Nobody wants to crash the plane.

But at some point, someone still has to learn how to land it. You may not be able to stop the ship in under five miles.

But you can launch something from the deck today.

Written by Drew Neisser

“We don’t think AI-generated content is future-proof,” stated a PR expert in response to a question about using AI for GEO-driving content creation.

I fumed.

Not because the speaker was wrong to worry about AI slop. She’s not. There is a lot of lazy, beige, regurgitated “as we navigate the ever-evolving landscape” content polluting the internet right now.

And yes, much of it was made with AI.

But here’s the part that made my penguin feathers ruffle: Not all AI-assisted content is slop. And not all human-only content is good. And there is no evidence that AI-assisted content performs better or worse in GEO.

The tool is not the villain. The lazy thinker is.

Google has already stated it doesn’t care whether content is created by humans or AI, as long as it is helpful, reliable, and valuable to the reader. So what exactly are we arguing about?

Does using AI to organize your notes count? What about using it to pull quotes from the transcripts of the GEO Conference you just attended? What about asking AI to critique the logic of a draft you wrote by hand? What about building a custom GPT trained on hundreds of your own articles, interviews, and rants so the output is unmistakably in your voice?

At what point does “AI-assisted” become a scarlet letter? And who gets to decide?

The Wrong Debate About AI Content

This is where the AI-shaming crowd loses me. The real issue isn’t how the content was made. It’s whether it’s worth reading and worth defending.

If you are not a critical thinker, you can create slop with or without a machine’s assistance. I’ve seen plenty of human-only content that reads like it was assembled by minions allergic to having a point of view.

I’ve also seen (and created) AI-assisted content that was sharp, useful, original, and clearly guided by an experienced human with judgment. That’s the variable. Not the machine. The human.

The Difference Is Judgment

Discernment is the new differentiator.

The editor who can spot a weak argument still matters. The strategist who understands the audience does too. And the CMO who refuses to confuse volume with value matters more than ever.

This is where marketing leaders need to draw the line. Not between human content and AI content, but between thoughtful content and thoughtless content.

Between work you can stand behind and work you’d rather blame on the bot.

Lead with Standards

The CMO’s job is not to ban AI-assisted content. The CMO’s job is to raise the standard for judgment.

Use AI to outline. Use it to summarize. Use it to challenge your assumptions, find holes in your argument, and turn 20 pages of notes into something worth sharing.

Use it to accelerate the work. Just don’t outsource your brain, your taste, or your accountability. And please, for the love of penguins, don’t outsource your point of view.

Because the byline matters and the reader, human or otherwise, matters even more.

If your name is on it, you own it. So let’s retire the AI shaming. The question is not, “Was AI involved?” The question is, “Is this any good?”

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 523: The CMO Job Search Is a Two-Way Street

Some CMO opportunities look promising right up until you stop asking, “Can I land this?” and start asking, “Can I actually win at this company?”

In a market that is warmer than it was a year ago but still unforgiving, Hugh Marshall of Heidrick & Struggles argues that CMOs need to approach the search with two-way diligence. The offer matters, but so does knowing whether the company, CEO, board, investors, and growth expectations are aligned enough to support real success.

With that recruiter ’s-eye view, Hugh joins Drew to get inside today’s CMO search, from PE-backed pressure and growth-stage churn to comp conversations, equity tradeoffs, and the big career bets hiding inside the fine print. Call it a reality check for CMOs who want the next role to be the right one.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to spot risky CMO roles before you’re in too deep
• Why two-way diligence is now non-negotiable
• How AI fluency is reshaping CMO candidacy
• What makes candidates stand out in the interview process

Know what you’re walking into before you say yes. Tune in for Hugh’s candid take on today’s CMO market, the hidden dynamics behind the offer, and the signs of a truly winnable role.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

“Bots are just workflows, so they don’t belong on org charts,” exclaimed a CMO from a $225 million SaaS company. It was a pin-drop moment as the other CMOs considered the thought.

I’m not so sure.

Not because I’m ready to give bots titles, managers, and performance reviews. That feels like org chart theater, perhaps even a way to signal to investors, “See, look how tech-forward we are!”

But if agents are doing real work, influencing real outcomes, and changing how humans spend their time, don’t they need to show up somewhere?

Rethinking the Org Chart

This question has been haunting our FOMO Task Force, short for Future of Marketing Org Design, and it came up again this week in two of our Leader Huddles.

One CMO said, “Before you make any org changes, you need to reimagine the work.” That feels like the right starting point.

Liza Adams made a similar point in her excellent piece (will link to it in comments) on the future of GTM roles: “What’s happening to the work?” Answer that first, and the roles and org follow.

Three Principles for AI Org Design

So here are three guidelines that feel right at this moment:

1. Reimagine the work, not the org chart.

If AI simply makes old work faster, you may get efficiency, but not necessarily growth. The bigger opportunity is to rethink the work itself: what can be automated, what can be augmented, what can be eliminated, and most importantly, what can now be done that was previously impossible?

2. Redesign the operating model, not just the tools.

One leading-edge CMO told us, “A lot of marketing leaders deploy these agents, but the org structure stays the same.” Same collaboration model. Same approval model. Same measurement model. That’s how you end up with AI-powered bureaucracy. Faster handoffs are still handoffs.

3. Make accountability visible.

Whether bots appear on the org chart or not, someone needs to own the outcome. Someone needs to own the guardrails. Someone needs to own quality, judgment, cost, governance, and business impact.

One CMO described the future as “a lead with a cloud of agents wrapped around them.” I like that image because it keeps humans accountable while acknowledging that the work is no longer being done by humans alone.

How CMOs Are Preparing Now

What am I certain about?

Marketing orgs will look very different a year from now. The savviest CMOs are already preparing for that transition, not by blowing everything up, but by mapping workflows, testing new operating models, training their teams, adding AI ops experts, and deciding where human judgment matters most.

We’ll be sharing the FOMO Task Force's findings and guidance at the CMO Super Huddle on October 22-23.

In the meantime, I’d love your take:

• Do you already have bots or agents on your org chart?
• If yes, why did you put them there?
• And if not, where should they show up?

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 522: AI, SDRs, and the New GTM Engine

The go-to-market model most teams are optimizing may be the very thing AI is making obsolete.

Too often, the buyer experience feels like a relay race nobody asked to run. AI is already proving there's a faster, straighter path to answers, value, and outcomes, making the old model a lot harder to defend.

In this episode, Drew talks with Amanda Kahlow, founder of 1mind, about why many of today's go-to-market assumptions deserve a fresh look. Using the rise of AI SDRs as a starting point, they explore human handoffs, pipeline thinking, speed to lead, and why buyer momentum matters more than the internal roles built to manage it.

Best of all, you get to see it play out when Amanda brings in Mindy, 1mind's AI superhuman, for a live demonstration of what an AI-first buying experience can look like in practice.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why first-principles thinking matters in an AI-first world
• When AI should replace parts of the motion, not just support them
• Why revenue may be a better measure of success than lead volume or pipeline
• How smaller pilots can prove the model before broader rollout

If you’re a CMO questioning how much of your current go-to-market motion still makes sense, this one is worth your time.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at INDEX'26 in New York, a conference dedicated to helping brands get discovered in an AI-powered world. One of the highlights was a fireside chat with my friend Lauren Boyman, CMO of KPMG US. The selfie you'll see here was taken moments after our conversation, and if I'm smiling a little extra, it's because it's still a thrill and an honor to stand in front of a room full of smart marketing leaders and wrestle with big ideas together.

Lauren and I talked about AI, naturally.

We discussed KPMG's approach to being "Client Zero," why CMOs are increasingly becoming architects of transformation, and why the real investment isn't just in technology, but in people, training, and change management. The audience was engaged, the questions were thoughtful, and the conversation reinforced something I've been hearing from CMOs all year.

What Made INDEX’26 Memorable

The job is changing fast. But here's what struck me most about the day.

As I walked around INDEX'26, I kept running into Huddlers.

Lauren Wagner Boyman, Julie Kaplan, Lynn Tornabene, Putney Cloos, Guy Yalif, Dan Lowden, Lorie Coulombe, Nicole Silver, and Andy Weiss.

Suddenly, the conference felt a lot smaller. And a lot more personal. There's a certain irony in this.

The primary purpose of the event was to help marketers understand how brands get discovered by LLMs. Yet my favorite part of the day had nothing to do with algorithms, prompts, agents, or search visibility.

It was seeing people.

Shaking hands. Sharing laughs. Comparing notes. Doing the penguin pose. Having the kinds of conversations that simply happen differently when you're standing next to someone instead of staring at them through a screen.

Technology changes. Relationships endure.

The Future Is Already in the Room

The other thing that struck me is that many of the people helping shape the future of marketing are already part of this community. They're experimenting with AI, leading transformation initiatives, managing massive teams, and figuring out what comes next for the profession. Then they turn around and share what they've learned with their peers.

That's flocking awesome.

A final thank you to Anirudh Singla of Pepper and Anjai "AJ" Gandhi and the GTM Society team for creating a terrific event and bringing together such a thoughtful group of leaders. The content was excellent, but for me, the real highlight was the people.

And the penguin poses.

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 521: Chiefs of Marketing

The title is Chief Marketing Officer. The CMOs who earn the most influence put Chief first.

They're not in the room just to deliver a marketing update. They're there to help the executive team make sense of what matters most, navigate tough decisions, and shape where the company goes next.

In this episode, Drew talks with Kathie Johnson (Nintex), Lorie Coulombe (Equity Shift), and Allyson Havener about peer leadership inside the executive team. They explore how CMOs build trust, surface business issues, and strengthen credibility across the C-suite.

In this episode:

• Kathie shares why peer leadership starts when a CMO owns more than the marketing plan and helps surface gaps across the business
• Lorie gets into the trust, EQ, and one-on-one relationship building that make healthy disagreement possible at the executive level
• Allyson breaks down how finance fluency, customer insight, and a clear read on the sales cycle build stronger executive credibility

Plus:

• How peer leadership starts with the issues a CMO is willing to surface
• Why connecting dots across functions comes with the job
• How strong CMOs bring customer context into business decisions

For CMOs ready to lead as true executive peers, this episode shows how to earn trust, surface what matters, and lead first as a business leader.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

“My team was going wild using AI all over the place, and as power users, we were flagged by our AI task force,” shared a CMO from a $250 million tech company. Then he added, almost sheepishly, “A whole entire policy came out of that.”

I laughed. Not because it was ridiculous. Because it felt familiar.

Across our recent huddles, I kept hearing versions of the same story. AI experimentation is spreading rapidly, oversight committees are springing up everywhere, and executives keep asking the same question:

"What’s our AI strategy?"

There's just one problem. I think it's the wrong question.

AI Is Not the Strategy

No one asks about their Salesforce strategy. No one asks about their Zoom strategy. And thankfully, no one asks about their spreadsheet strategy.

These are tools. The strategy comes first. The tools come second.

If your objective is to reduce customer acquisition costs, AI can help. If your objective is to improve customer retention, AI can help. If your objective is to scale revenue without adding proportional headcount, AI can definitely help.

But AI isn't the objective. It's the accelerant.

That's why I worry when organizations spend more time debating AI policies than business outcomes. Governance and security matter. But governance isn't strategy. A policy tells people what they can't do.

A strategy tells people what they should do. Those are very different conversations.

Business Outcomes Come First

One CMO noted that AI is enabling their team to launch more campaigns, content, and workflows than ever before. The problem is that measurement hasn't kept up. Another admitted they can point to individual productivity wins but still struggle to quantify the impact on the overall function.

That's a warning sign. Sooner or later, every CFO asks the same question:

"So what?"

Saving six hours is nice. Growing faster without increasing expense is better.

The most mature AI conversations I heard weren't about prompts, agents, or model selection. They were about pipeline, acquisition costs, sales productivity, customer experience, and operating leverage. In other words, they were talking about business outcomes first and AI second.

Strategy first. AI second.

AI Exposes What’s Already Broken

My favorite observation this month came from Noah Brier (during Scott Stedman's Imaginarium summit), who described AI as "a mirror, not a crystal ball." If your processes are messy, AI exposes them. If your data is fragmented, AI exposes that too. And if your strategic priorities aren't clear, AI will expose that faster than anything.

Maybe that's the real issue. Asking for an AI strategy sounds sophisticated. Clarifying the business strategy is harder.

So here's my question for marketing leaders:

If someone banned the phrase "AI strategy" from your next leadership meeting, would your team still know exactly what business outcomes you're trying to achieve?

Or has the tool become the strategy?

Written by Drew Neisser

“You’ll be reporting to 10K, our AI VP of Marketing,” claimed Jason M. Lemkin to the SaaStr audience. Did jaws drop? Mine certainly did.

Bot meets boss.

A human reporting to an AI agent sounds like the first act of a bad sci-fi comedy. One where the marketing team starts every Monday by asking, “Does the algorithm seem mad at us?”

I hate this idea. And yet, dismissing it would be a mistake.

To his credit, on his podcast after SaaStr, Lemkin also admitted that 10K is “NOT really a VP of marketing yet.” More like a replacement for marketing analysts, ops coordinators, and junior content marketers. The title may be wrong. The direction is not.

What AI Agents Will Actually Replace

Agents are coming for the busywork.

AI agents will change knowledge work. Radically. Permanently. Probably weirdly. They’ll run reports, clean lists, draft emails, personalize follow-ups, monitor campaigns, update systems, summarize meetings, build landing pages, query databases, and replace a shocking amount of “can someone just take care of this?” work.

Have at it, 10K.

Some of this work should be run by bots: low-risk, internal, repetitive, measurable, operational work that doesn’t require a human to read the room or carry the relationship.

Leadership Still Requires a Human

But marketing leadership is different. Great marketing is not just output, testing subject lines, summarizing calls, or generating 47 LinkedIn post options before breakfast.

Marketing still needs a pulse.

Great marketing is about seeing what others miss and connecting the unconnected. It’s walking a trade show floor, overhearing a throwaway comment, and realizing it’s the missing link in your positioning. It’s sitting in a tense executive meeting and noticing that the real objection isn’t in the words being spoken. It’s knowing when the data is technically right and strategically useless.

Bots hear words. Leaders hear meaning.

Can AI help? Of course. AI can accelerate research, challenge assumptions, pressure-test messaging, find patterns, generate options, and expose blind spots. But it can’t build trust, sense hesitation, or know when the team is complying but not believing.

At least, not where it counts.

Redesign the Team Around Judgment

So the question is not whether AI will redesign your team. It will. The question is whether you will redesign your team first. Let agents own more of the execution layer, and let humans own more of the meaning layer. Less grunt work. More judgment.

Humanity is the strategy.

As teams get smaller and agents become more capable, the human traits that remain will matter even more: empathy, listening well, trust-building, and judgment.

Especially judgment: the ability to connect the unconnected, choose the idea worth owning, and know what not to do, even when the machine can do all of it.

Maybe one day a human will technically “report” to a bot. But the marketing leaders who win the agentic era won’t surrender leadership to machines. They’ll use machines to create more room for actual leadership.

Because the most human leaders will win the agentic era.

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 519: The ICP Blueprint

If your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is still built on broad categories, instinct, and a little wishful thinking, it may be more aspirational than operational.

An ICP like that leaves too much room for interpretation. Marketing, sales, and ops start working from different definitions of the right account, and the business keeps chasing customers that look right on paper but don’t behave like winners.

In this episode, Drew talks with Drake Lenhan, Sitecore's Sr. Director, Global Market Intelligence & Portfolio Strategy, about what it takes to turn ICP into a source of focus that the whole business can work from.

Drake walks through the progression from validating where you actually win to building a scoring model, securing cross-functional buy-in, and creating a system that stays steady as the market shifts.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to spot gaps between assumed fit and actual fit
• How to turn raw account traits into a practical ranking system
• Why use case fit matters as much as segment fit
• How to keep ICP from going stale after launch

If you’re a B2B CMO ready to revisit your ICP with win data, sharper focus, and stronger cross-functional alignment, this episode gives you the blueprint.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/