Welcome to the Marketing AI SparkCast, where AI meets modern marketing. Hosted by Aby Varma, a global leader in marketing, AI, and innovation, each episode brings you real conversations with leaders putting AI to work in strategy and execution. This episode is brought to you by Spark Novus and the Marketing AI Pulse community. Here's your host, Aby Varma. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Marketing AI SparkCast. You guys are in for a treat today. So we are talking to Chloe Tambe, who is the Director of AI Transformation at HubSpot. And we are going to be getting into how marketing leaders can drive AI transformation enablement within their team, within their organization, because that's exactly what Chloe's doing. Chloe, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Aby. Great to see you. Thank you for having me. Our pleasure. And for those of you who were at the seventh Marketing AI Pulse event, Chloe was a speaker at that event, and we ended that event on such a high. We got some fantastic review and feedback. So Chloe, thank you very much for the continued collaboration. Could you just introduce yourself a little bit and walk us through your journey into the world of AI and what led you to your current role? Absolutely. So as Aby said, I'm Chloe Tambe, the director of AI transformation at HubSpot, which this is not a role that I was, hey. I wanna be a director of AI transformation when I grow up. This didn't even exist. So it's been a very interesting path to my current role. So I had the pleasure of attending the University of Georgia. Go dogs. I'm a proud alumni. And I actually majored in fashion merchandising. I always knew I wanted to be in marketing of some sort. Wanted to work for a high end designer in corporate, all that good stuff. Reality hit when I graduated college and the economy tanked, so I'm aging myself, but it was not a good year when I graduated for what I wanted to do. I knew I loved computers. I knew I loved software, all that good stuff, and I knew I was highly organized. So I went into project management. I'm PMP certified, and it has... Was a great career path, which led me into sales operations. I was director of sales ops for a while back into program management. Fast forward to the past four and a half years at HubSpot, HubSpot, I was the chief of staff to the CMO. So bringing all of the skills into one, being strategic, executing, marketing that I always knew that I wanted. And then our CMO is very AI first, gave me a a second job. Hey. Enable the marketing team. Get us the tools that we need, all of that. And I was like, I don't know anything about AI. So I learned very quickly. It made me fall in love with AI when I stopped being scared of it and running from it and figuring out how to use it to my advantage and to the advantage of the team. I enjoy, like I said, project and program management enabling and helping bring others along. So I actually wrote my job description for the role that I wanted to do and here we are today a few months into the role. Long Wow. Journey. That is a phenomenal trajectory and definitely not a common one. So let me ask you, what was the spark that convinced you that you need to be driving AI at the heart of a modern marketing organization? Right. Absolutely. So when I was asked and this kind of became part of my role to enable the marketing team, I was... I won't say I was avoiding AI, but I was like, well, if I need to figure out how to enable it for 600, 700 marketers, our team is very large. I've gotta figure out how to do this for myself. And that's what sparked my love for AI and understanding and figuring out how to use it as a partner. And to help me, it's not replacing my job. It's taking the parts of my job that I don't love and allowing me to do the things that I do love. And when that clicked for me, it gave me the spark to want to enable our marketing team and to even friends and family when I tell people what my role is, helping them to understand it practically and how it can help you. It's not an additional thing you need to learn or do. It's figuring out how to incorporate AI into your role, and that's how I've approached it with the marketing team. So once I figured out how it could work for me, was like, I want to do this full time. Like, this is... I've been doing this other stuff. And, that's great. And I'm thankful for the experience, but I want to do this 100% of the time. So I figured, why not me? You kind of have to get over that impostor syndrome or whatever the buzzword for that thing is of, oh, can I do this? You absolutely can do this. And having the drive to do it and having that figure it out mindset, no matter what it is, AI or anything else, but AI is the name of the game right now, and saying, hey, I want to do this, approaching my boss about it, helping... Having AI help me to craft the job description. What is needed, my current skill set, and how that converges together. So it's it's been a really cool past several months. That's awesome, man. I guess it's great that you work for a boss and for for a team that is AI forward. I'm sure that helped. Helped. And doing this, it wasn't just about what Chloe wants, what's Chloe's career. It's what's the business pace for this? How is this going to help our marketing team to excel even further? So I approached it with facts, not feelings. Like, yes, I want to do this, but how can I actually help to drive the business forward, help us with our KPIs, help us with internal and external metrics to to do better and to continue to be that top world class marketing team in that company that we are? So that's really how I approached it. That's awesome. So you said you've been in the role just a few months at this point. When you think about success with AI for your team, for the marketing team, and for your organization, what outcomes feel truly meaningful to you? Like, obviously, you crafted a job description, and you... Surely, you have some sort of an endgame So in it sounds counterintuitive, but bear with me. I have a human centered AI approach. And that... And when I think about those transferable skills and chief of staff, program project management, all of that, I like to lead with humans first, meeting people kind of where they are, figuring out why people are against things. In all of my roles, there's been resistance because I'm the change management person that's gonna come to you and ask you to do something that you're very comfortable with and do it in a different way. And that's no different with AI. Right? It's probably even more so in an extreme case with AI. Of course, we have early adopters. We have people who are trying to really figure out what this means to them. How is this going to affect my role? What does this mean for my own career? So really giving people the practical pieces of AI, but success answer your question, success looks like people talking about it organically with each other, without me even involved. Everyone's we use Slack. Everyone's in a million Slack channels. Seeing people's person A talk to person B in a channel that I'm in about how they used AI to save time or to do their role differently or to think about AI differently, that is a success to me. Obviously, I have metrics, I need to drive usage and adoption and workflows, metrics, KPIs, all those words. But what feels like success to me is the human piece of it and having people... That moment for humans and for the team to be sharing great use cases with each other. Love it. Love it. I mean, that's some... Sometimes for a lot of people in similar sort of roles, that tends to get lost. Right? So I think the fact that you have that recognition is amazing. But at the end of the day, you are a team of one when it comes to driving AI transformation from our free podcast conversation. And a team of one and an organization with 700 marketers, woah. Where's your cake, Chloe? I mean, that feels like superhuman capabilities, but surely you have systems and processes and rituals and ways that you are approaching this and staying effective without burning out because that's just a It is a lot. It's a good challenge. I have to... I take it one day at a time. I do a combination of high-tech and AI and low tech. So I start each morning and I go... Well, I have work... Automated workflows in Asana. I'm using Asana. I'm... Anytime something enters my brain, I'm putting it in. I have my own little project, my Chloe project in Asana. And I have that tied into Claude, obviously. There's there's AI on the back end of it. But I make sure to keep my calendar up to date, blocking those focus time pieces in my calendar. So there's manual piece of that. But also talking to Claude. Hey. Look at my calendar for this week. Hey. Here's my strategy deck, strategy and execution that I had to present to our CMO. Help me find gaps in what's going on. Help me think about this. Am I meeting my KPIs for this month, for this quarter? I use Claude especially. Claude is my LLM of choice, but I use... I I dip into all of them to help me see my own blind spots. So that makes me feel like I'm not a team of one. I got another teammate helping me and managing up and showing me where where I need to be better. But also, like I said, getting all of the things out of my head that I want to do and make sure that they're not forgotten, but maybe they're not a today thing. Maybe that's a next week or next month thing. What two to three things can I do today to drive value and to add value to the team? So drive value in my role and make sure I'm doing what I need to get done, but driving value to the marketing team. How can I approach them each week and each month without overwhelming them, but making sure we're moving the ball forward? Awesome. Here you are backing up a little bit, chief of staff. You think that AI is gonna change the world. You craft a role for yourself, and you start in that new role. And it's day one, and you're like, okay. What do I do? How do I go about it? So did you sort of craft a a grand plan, a strategy behind it? Sounded like you referred to that. Just tell us a little bit about that. I started from not scratch. Like, we know what our internal initiatives are. We know what our strategic goals for the year, all of that. I was so used to the planning season and running... Planning as a chief of staff and partnering cross functionally with our company plans, our our marketing team plans, our sub marketing team plans. So kinda taking that approach and that skill set from being chief of staff and putting that into what does the marketing team need in order to do this x times as quickly or to be enabled because we're always gonna have budget constraints. That's every company in the world. That's before AI. We're always gonna have people constraints. We're not hiring another 600 marketers. How can we move very quickly, very nimbly, and how can I empower and enable the team to do this? But going back to that human centered approach, change management can't just be throwing every tool out there at the team. We're very fortunate in the budget that the team has and the budget that I've crafted. We have choose your own adventure but with guardrails. But how can I help the team practically to accomplish the goals each month or each year? How can I how can I train the team without overwhelming them? How can I get them, going back to what I said a moment ago, to teach each other? I can't I can't be everywhere at once, and surely people could not just depend on me to learn everything that they need or to remove barriers for them as they're moving forward. I did. I started with a strategy, overall strategy. Here are my four pillars for what I want to do and move forward. And taking a step back, a survey was sent to them. I was still in the chief of staff role, kind of hoping to move into this role. But we sent a survey to the marketing team late last year and asked them, how do you... And it was anonymous. When it's anonymous, you get all you get all the truth. You know? So I took the facts out of that, not just all the feelings one way or another, to gauge where the marketing team was, what were the barriers to entry for AI adoption, what was stopping them from practically moving forward with this, what was causing them to be resistant to the change. So I kind of... I guess four, maybe four is my favorite number, four feels really good. So pitch the top four barriers to adoption and use that to create a strategic pillar of four things I want, my main strategy, what I'm working toward and then I dissected that strategy. I only wanted to make it four because like you said, it's a team of one. While I do have partners and collaborators and it's all great, what's Chloe accountable for to move that, like, is in my role? Talk about pressure. AI. Not AI move the ball a little bit, AI transformation. So how can I take this strategy based on what the marketers have said, create this strategy, and create an execution plan for this that's doable with one person and partners to really move the team forward this year? And I... Going back to what I was saying about using Claude and Asana, I ask myself, am I spinning out over here? Am I just kinda getting into the AI hype versus the practical things that the marketers need and kinda keeping myself honest on this AI transformation journey for the team and for myself. So you mentioned four pillars. Are you able to share what those pillars are? Yeah. Absolutely. So just the high level. I won't bore you with the the full deck. But providing comprehensive AI enablement for the marketing team. It's not just, hey. Here's ChatGPT. Here's your license. Good luck. What can you practically do within this or Claude or whatever whatever tools you have access to to help you to be a better marketer? Not just all the cool and sexy use cases. How can this work in your day to day? Building a knowledge sharing infrastructure. So peer to peer learning from one person as we talked about with lots of wonderful partners and a lot of AI enthusiasts. How can I create a mechanism for marketers to share their cool learnings, not just with me, but with each other? That way I'm not the bottleneck. It's... Let's make this commonplace for the marketers. So I've done that so far two ways. We've created a unified Slack channel. If you wanna talk AI within marketing, this is the place to do it. And it's really been blowing up and I've been learning so much from what people are doing in their day to day also. My next step is an AI center of excellence, which it's a fancy term for a repository of recordings of live trainings, async learnings, cool AI news, things like that, even pulling from that Slack channel to give people cool use cases, and then setting that pace for AI innovation. And all of that means is communicating with the team. These are the expectations of what you... What is expected of you as a marketer. Here are... I'm gonna start doing piloting of tools, allowing 20, 25 marketers in, hey. Let's test this out for three months and see if it's worth it for the entire team to adopt it. Or if we're... I'm launching a few new AI tools within the next month or so, not just saying, alright. It's in your Okta. Click the tile and go, but here's some enablement. Here's training. Here's best use cases and best practices and making that a consistent rhythm within the team. And then just driving operational efficiency, partnering with our Martech team on figuring out workflows, integrations, the things that we need. Yes. There's things that marketers can do with AI, but how can we enable the marketers with workflows, with agents, all of that to help them to do their job even better. So really taking all of my day to day and focusing on those four pieces, that four pieces of strategy into execution to make sure that I'm staying true to myself and my job description and what's asked of me, but also making sure not to just overwhelm the marketers with AI for the sake of it. Yeah. That is so important. We work with CMOs and marketing organizations to help enable and empower marketing teams towards ad option and scaling. And one of the most common things that we run into, which is what does the team focus on prioritization. Right? Like, when you come up with use cases, we'll do a half day workshop with leadership teams to kinda come up with what our focus areas and priority areas. Not uncommon to leave a half day workshop with 30, 40 use cases. That's a lot. Right? And then each of these has multiple technologies and multiple ways to approach it and that sort of thing. So what words of advice would you have in terms of helping them prioritize things? And would love to know how you were doing it at HubSpot because everything with AI, everything feels urgent. It's coming from a good place. People want to leverage that opportunity, but then how do you make sure that people are not just getting overwhelmed and you have 30, 40 use cases, or however many is overwhelming to your organization is too many. It's not only AI can be overwhelming, full of hype, and changing weekly, if not daily. A former manager always said to me, take it back to the five whys, the five whys framework. Getting back to ask yourself why five times if you're trying to solve something, and you're gonna get back to the root cause of things. So I try not to just focus on the... Obviously, you have to focus on use cases somewhat, but I try and focus on the problem statement. What are we actually trying to solve? What are the four to five things? Like I said, here we go back to number four. But when I think of things in order to make it digestible for myself and for the marketing team, what are the root causes? What am I trying to solve for? There might be 20 use cases related to this one thing. Is there a way for me to solve this root cause? How does this affect and impact the marketing team? Because we have several VPs, media team, brand team. There's there's sub teams within the marketing team. It's not a one size fits all for the marketing team, and I can't practically go into every single team and help them with all of their use cases. But I can empower the team with tools, with learning, and the knowledge to understand what their use cases are and how to solve them. Something that's been really impactful to both me and, hopefully, the team would say the same thing. I've led a... An in person hackathon over the past month and a virtual hackathon to a certain sub. One was to all of our marketing directors, and one was to a subset of our marketing team, a virtual hackathon. And it showed me that there... If given the time and the space and the pressure of having a certain amount of time to do something, they can come up with great solutions to use cases and share with each other and share with me. We can bring that knowledge to other marketers. So that's been a really practical way and an impactful and a quick turnaround way to help some... To help solve some of those use cases and improve workflows. I love it. I mean, so essentially almost empowering your functional leaders depending on what their areas of focus are and their pain points and their use cases would be specific to that. Like, your your branding team may have different use cases than your demand demand gen team, and letting those teams feel empowered enough to sort of identify their own priorities as long as they're laddering up to some sort of an overall strategy, which is tied to your business growth, of course. Yeah. And doing that at the leadership level, like I said, but also the second hackathon, it was more of a show and tell. People were given a, hey. You have two weeks to figure out what you're trying to solve, and then we're gonna come together and kinda show and tell on Zoom. And having the individual contributors, the newer leaders work on that too and understanding their use cases. They're not writing memos for the CMO every week or the CEO. Their their use cases are a bit different. So not just leaning into leadership, you have to lean into the entire team and understand what their use cases are and not just assume, oh, at a leadership level that they know every use case for the team, especially when it's related to AI. Every leader can't know every single thing that their team is working on. They can understand their KPIs, their goals, but generally job descriptions, all of that. But you need to put it in the hands of everyone on your team and not just a few people in order to truly transform AI within your org. Love it. Now that is a lot of change for It is. It is. For the team. And I'm just even curious, like, when you mentioned earlier on about the survey, I'm sure there are teams that emerged and change management is real. Like, I think when we work with our clients, almost every anonymous survey reveals some level of anxiety over people losing jobs and that sort of thing, and that's just one aspect of it. But readiness and governance and these sort of common themes typically tend to emerge. I'm just curious that in your world, what does change management look like and how are you approaching it? Yeah. So change management, just how I was saying my expectations of the marketing team, and I'm actually working on... I'm newer to the role like we talked about. I'm actually going to partner with our CMO to create documentation. Here's what you can expect from us. Here's what we expect from you related to AI to have that all out there. But when I think of change management, this is something that even when I was a project manager I did, I'm very clear and transparent on what I'm working on. I created a whole internal wiki. Here is Chloe's plan for January, for February, for my... People can see what I'm doing. So it's not this secretive what's she doing, what's what's the grand plan, let me see behind the curtain for the Wizard of Oz. It's here's what I'm trying to do and here's how I'm trying to help you. Let's talk about it. Have questions? Let's chat. Being open for one on ones and having that kind of roadshow deck like, oh, you're curious as to what's going on? Here, let me show you what my plan is. Or people have lots of suggestions. People always do. And being clear from my side, yes, we are going to have to move quickly and to adopt it, but I can't... We can't have every AI tool known to man. There's not budget for that. There's not... There's security risks associated with that. So kind of being clear on my stance along in partnership with procurement, with security, with legal, our CMO. So making that conversation common so that the change management doesn't feel so much like whiplash. Sounds like we're moving along and moving along as a team. So not to say people are probably not overwhelmed because if you surveyed the team, someone would be like, what's going on here? This is moving too fast. But I tried to, especially with live learnings, those that are not the early adopters, those are kind of wondering like, if I adopt AI, am I adopting myself out of a job? Bring them where they are with practical use cases for their job. This is a Chloe view, not a HubSpot view. I wanna be very very clear what I'm saying with this. But you're not working yourself out of a job. You're working yourself into a new job. You're working yourself into the things that you love about your current job. You're working like... You had asked me a year ago. I did... I I joked earlier about, oh, as a kid, oh, I wanna be the director of AI transformation. I didn't know about this role three or sixty five days ago. So look how the world did so fast. You have to keep that open mindset and not be so, adverse to change. Like that would be like coming to, you know, you start a new job at any type of SaaS company and they give you your new laptop and you're like, I'm gonna bring my pen and paper and my typewriter. You can't do that. When you break it down very practically in that way, it kind of makes more sense. Like, AI is a a tool for you to use just as we're using our laptops, just as we're using Zoom. You know, how we adapted and pivoted in the pandemic. This is another way for us to adapt and pivot, and you have to think of it like that. Not to say the whiplash isn't there, but you have to kind of think of it in a different lens with change management. Love it. Now you touched upon something where you have a typical organization, especially the size of your marketing team. I'm sure there are... It follows the typical sort of bell curve of an option where you have the the beginners who are the early end of the spectrum and the advanced users and the majority in the middle somewhat. With with your role, it's so interesting where it's focused on literacy and empowerment and inspiration and all those things. I can't imagine it not being challenging in the sense that you wanna make sure that that learning and that environment that you're trying to create would feel safe for people who are beginners in their AI journey, but then also challenging enough for advanced users so they stay engaged. Exactly. Wow. That in itself is, for an organization that size, has gotta be something that you have been thinking about. Like, if if your team was five people, very different approach, but with 700 people, that's and that sort of is a question we'd love for you to share tips for enterprise transformation from... For listeners who are in enterprise organizations dealing with bigger teams and how to deal with that people early part of the journey and advance users and make sure both are engaged. Yes. And this is... I would say I kinda fell flat on my face about a month ago with this. So the very first proof of concept that I did with a subset of marketers... And I think the thing I like about my role is that quote, unquote failing is okay because we're all trying to figure it out. So I ran a four week proof of concept with about the team is a subset of marketers under one of our VPs about a 160 people and I did for four Fridays in a row between Thanksgiving and Christmas learning with partner an AI partner because I I'm not gonna teach every class people are gonna get tired hearing from me and there's plenty that I need to learn. I'm listening in these classes that I partner with too. I did everyone I didn't ask what I asked what level each person was at and I kinda knew just based on what I know about the team, but everyone was in each of these four classes. And after week one, was building agents, foundational, something for everyone in that class. Scored great, everyone felt empowered. Week two, three, and four, the survey every week was 50% of... 50%, was too easy. Percent, was too hard. I'm like, got it. Okay. So I thought that might be a fluke week two. Or it happened the same way too. So it was a proof of concept. Therefore, it was not a failure. It was a learning. So I'm actually taking my learnings, adding a few other small subset pilots that I've done and moving our learning even beginning next month into a one zero one and a two zero one just based on specific topics. But I'm opting... Allowing marketers to opt into the course. I'm being very clear in the description of the course. One is very foundational. Here are the... Like, you're scared of it and don't know what buttons to push and don't know how it works for your day to day, you need to attend this class. But obviously, not in a way of, oh, you don't know anything, attend this class. Right. To attending and learning things that I don't yet know. And I think more advanced users will be great for this class as well. The second class is, hey, if you're a power user, this class is for you. And allowing people to opt in because some people love live learning, some people feel put on the spot, but also offering the recordings after so that people can watch at their leisure and get their learning in an environment that they feel comfortable and enabled in. This way, I'm meeting people where they are from the very beginning, you know, learning how to click the buttons to do half my job for me. Like, there's definitely a wide range. But then being able to allow the advanced users to brush up on skills with the foundational course and vice versa. So I'll I'll report back on how that goes. Maybe you'll have it again later in the year. But I think that you ask people what they need, and they will tell you if you truly listen. So that allows me and change management for myself in my role to to, hard and to, very quickly into how I'm enabling the marketers. So we'll see. Fingers crossed. Awesome. No. I'm I'm... I mean, that's amazing. The approach is very sound, you know, where they are, and then make sure that there is sort of a differentiated level of enablement for, you know, audiences. So I'm sure it's gonna go well. And, yes, I would I would... I'm gonna hit you up in six months to see how that how that goes. So let's talk a little bit about mention center... AI center of excellence. You know? Within marketing teams, I hear this all the time. You know, they're different things. There's AI resource center, center of excellence, group, working team, that sort of thing, different nomenclature depending on the size and maturity of the organization. But at the end of the day, it's essentially a way to empower, enable, and bring the marketing team along on this AI journey. So if I was to ask you for our listeners who are contemplating something like that, what would your top three tips be for that? Make it inviting and appealing and not overwhelming. Excellence, and I say center of excellence, I think of it as a repository. So that's the way that I'm thinking of it right now when I say center of excellence. Make it something that people want to actually see and look and that appeals to them. Going back to those use cases, think of two to three use cases. So right now, mine are new to the... New to HubSpot marketing, just joined the company. Here are the things you need to know about AI, how we use it how we use it within marketing, and maybe you need to up level on some of the tools that we're using. Marketers that have been here for a while and have been AI resistant or are just really on their journey, and then the power users, breaking that into three different sections. Then moving on to, as I mentioned a moment ago, here's the recordings of all of our live learnings, and here's what's upcoming. Here are, AI articles, AI related news, like things to keep you up to date on AI. Here are use cases from our marketing team. Something that's very important to me when I think of a center of excellence is not hearing from external AI experts. That's great. Yes. We're going to do that. But here, see created this Loom about how she's using AI in demand generation or email outreach right now. Here's her three minute Loom on how she does that. Those are the things that are going to kind of give the moment for marketers when they see their coworkers, faces that they know, people that they work with and can reach out to on Slack, showing how they're using AI. I think that makes it... That brings it back to center, and it's excellent. So that's what I think of have an AI center of excellence. Love it. Now, I mean, you mentioned early in this podcast that you guys are an AI forward organization. Your CMO is, you know, of yeah, an option in the organization. How important of the factor? I think the the level of enthusiasm and enablement that, you know, marketing leaders expect from their leadership may not be there. So you are in a fortunate situation where that is happening, but do you feel that's a critical factor in getting teams along this AI journey? That makes it much easier. Our CMO, our entire c suite, our CEO, Yamini, everyone is focused on AI, their... How they're using it, not just telling people do it and move forward or saying, oh, we're resistant to this. Don't use this. I mean, any tool that you use right now, you refresh any tool. You get a pop up modal. New AI features. That's the buzzword. So in companies that are Oh, yeah. You have leaders that are more hesitant to adopt, meet people where they are, start where they are, the tools that you have... Surely, there's software... You use software in any company in the world right now. Like, no one's just on pencil and paper. So there have to be practical AI use cases within your current work and within the tools that you're using that you can show. And this is where you're gonna have to manage up. If you're at a company where your leader is is not quite AI forward or doesn't know where to start and you're looking to move into a role like mine or just kind of stand out in the role that you are in, show those use cases, quick recordings, quick descriptions of, hey. This is how this saved me time and allowed me to do this other thing. Leaders, if there is a leader of a company, they understand metrics whether they understand AI or not. They understand if you're moving the ball forward or you're not. So I would say begin your conversations with the use cases that your leader likes and makes sense to them. It doesn't have to be an AI conversation. It can be a KPI conversation, and here's how I used AI to do that. I think showing them practical steps and what you're doing within your organization can open the door for you to, oh, we'll set a little budget aside to try this out or, oh, let's, you know, AI champions network, for lack of a better term, to people and to collaborate in that way. It's going to take humans in order to transform AI in organizations of any size and no matter what their leader is... How... You know, as their leader is within AI. It's in everything. Very cool. Deal with skeptics not at a leadership level, but I meant, like, even within the organization, we've come across a a fair share of skeptics within our, you know, communities that we work with. And the reason for skepticism is... Varies. In some instances, they're, you know, they're ardent believers in, you know, of humans and humanity. And in other instances, it's more operational and tactical about the quality of AI and that sort of thing. How do you deal with that? Right. Well, you know, the ones that hallucinates and you're over it and you're, I'm not really using this again. You know, you... That a bit. That's where I lean into the one on ones. Hey, I've seen... Or do you wanna talk and have a conversation? And going back to what I was saying about the five whys, well, why are you resistant? Truth and I feel fortunate enough to have built relationships where people are frank and honest with me and understanding what, you know, high enough but not c suite where people will kind of be more, you know, you're c middle where people are more honest with you. Feel good about that and just kind of understanding what people's true pain points are. And then taking it, hey, can I solve that? Like in my role and with the kind of influence, can I actually solve this? Or is this something that I need to aggregate data... Aggregate the data? Is this... Do we need another survey so that people feel comfortable anonymously telling the truth and telling their truth? And then taking that data and partnering whether it be with leadership, like I said, having hard conversations with myself, and understanding how to move forward. The reality is that some people you're you're not going to win over, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try in your organization to help those people along. I've seen some people that are skeptics turn into the people that are in, like I mentioned, that AI channel. They're, oh, this has worked for me after a thirty minute conversation or maybe a couple of thirty minute conversations. So making sure not to necessarily call those people out. It's more carrot versus stick to get get people to give you that all the feedback. And it also helps me to check myself. Is there something... Do I have a blind spot? Am I not thinking of this change management in a holistic way? Am I focusing on the early adopters only and not bringing everyone along? So it's not always the success. That's just the harsh reality of it, but there's a lot that you can learn from those people. Now when it comes to AI, marketing teams are often on the front lines, right, like AI use cases. And in organizations, typically, there's governance that comes from, you know, IT or compliance or legal or how do you balance it in terms of guardrails and governance within the marketing function? We, the collective we, are fortunate enough to have cross functional partners in procurement that is doing due diligence and reading every contract line by line and partnership with legal and with security. And that goes back to also us testing out things, pilots, understanding really what what we're giving and getting when we think about AI and when we think about which tools we're gonna bring into the organization. So they are overall guardrails. I'm very fortunate that, you know, a lawyer. So I'm thankful to have those people that could read like, no. This is giving up all your data. We're not gonna, you know, implement that. That helps a lot. But also leaders, putting it on the leaders, not only within marketing, but within HubSpot of here's what's expected of you when we think of those guardrails. If I'm asking you for a memo and your point of view on something and you type it into ChatGPT and hit copy paste that full of EmDashes. Now look, I'm not an EmDash hater, but there are certain things where you can figure out if it looks like AI. Right? Right. Exactly. Every time I say this, I get such hate. I'm like, there's nothing wrong with an Emdash. But if it's someone who's never used one in their writing previous to AI, you can kind of tell someone's writing style and their vibe versus I've copied and pasted this and haven't read a word of this and just put it in a Google Doc. So having those AI expectations and that governance of where we can put our data, what... Like, where you can, oh, you want to build this agent for something that is not customer sensitive data or you wanna go try and figure out a prompt over here fine. You're not putting our customer data. You're not putting internal data in here by all means please play around if you're putting sensitive data into something people know it's very clear there there's instructions on what you can and can't do within HubSpot. And it's ever evolving. I mean, new tools are coming out very quickly. New use cases are coming out very quickly. So telling the team to use a little bit of common sense Yeah. But also having that form to ask questions, like, where the team is able to ask me or reach out directly to our security team. That team is very proactive. Like, hey. I noticed that this was going on. Can you tell me why you need this? Or, oh, let's not use this tool. Let's... Actually, this one has better security, or this one has more offerings. So it's really a team effort with that, but it is... It's hard to keep up with. There's still... Again, being new in this role, being all of this new in existence, trying to figure out... Not only trying to figure out what to document, but making sure it's up to date because next week it's probably out of date. So And, you know, so I think the standards change. You know, all these AI notetakers started popping In early days, people were like, oh my gosh, I got to announce it and take permission. Now it's just there in all the meetings and no one cares, right? So that line is constantly moving. We've worked with CEOs and CMOs where they're completely okay with creating a digital avatar themselves, obviously with permission, leveraging it for content, and in other instances, they're absolutely not. If every time I'm on screen, it's gotta be real. And so one of that is almost tied to your, you know, cultural fabric of the values of your brand and your organization. Nothing wrong with one way or the other. But I think certainly feels like marketing specific governance is, to your point, you know, ultimately, something that marketing team should focus on. Yes. Absolutely. And going back to those avatars, do have to... Like, I know and feel confident that there won't be a Chloe avatar coming out of HubSpot that I don't know about. We're we're very... Like, you have to opt in to those things. We have those conversations. I'm working through a centralized notetaker for the marketing team now. Is auto record on or off by default? Does it show... You know, a bot show up in the window? How do you... Like, we are very clear and we're actively working on that governance because we don't... You know, oh, it feels like big brother. It's... It is amazing. I love my meetings being recorded. I can grab those transcript. I can integrate it with... You know, all that. It's great. But we have to come back to common sense and to humans. You need to tell someone if you're recording the conversation. Like, there is still ethics involved, and that is conversations that we are having internally as we evaluate notetakers. Is it crystal clear that someone is being recorded? If not, that's probably not what it is for now. Obviously, with cell phones or other... Like, it does get hard. But having those conversations and having those conversations at a broad level, having that collaboration with people and helping them to understand, like, no. You shouldn't bring the recorder just to the meeting and not tell anybody. Like, that's not... Common sense go out the window there or for people to lose that trust with each other. So you're absolutely right. Writing all of the... Capturing every use case and writing everything down and making sure everyone knows about it is incredibly difficult but necessary, at least to attempt. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. There is a lot of talk in 2025 and in this year about agentic AI and agent workflows and agentic workflows. I'm curious about how are you guys thinking about agents and workflows. Yeah. For sure. So there's something that I can't share. Obviously, some things I can't share, but it's definitely a topic. It's a hot topic. It's a topic of conversation not only for us internally but for our our customers as well. I think that people are overwhelmed by what it can do and and creating it and all of that. Something that I have done in my conversations with marketers and using it internally, I actually led in partnership with an external vendor. Won't say I led. I brought that person in to talk about agents to the marketing team. When you think about agents, whether you're you're a customer, whether you're thinking about it internally, people need to break down agents. It sounds like something very, like, back to the future, Terminator, like very like, oh my gosh, this agent. Is this the Jetsons? It's the future. What's going on? We... Like I said, I led a a session with a partner and they had everyone build an agent but with nothing to do with work. You were not... That was the one thing. We broke out into virtual groups in Zoom and you were not allowed to make it about work. When I tell you the agents that... Because people were scared. I was nervous to build my first agent. What does this mean? How... Will I break it? Yeah. People built recommendations agent where you could pick whether you want a movie or a series, and do you want a rom com, do you want a thriller, all of that. People like Love it. Breaks it down and makes it not so scary. I think that if we can approach it in that way of how we talk about it internally, how our customers, how anyone thinks about agents, like, yes, it sounds really cool, really sexy, but an agent is something that's working for you while you're working on something else. So when we think about starting very simple with an agent, for personally, like, I'm trying to build agents for personal life and things too. I'm breaking it down very simply into simple ways and thinking about small wins. Like when someone was sharing after and they build that, was like, wait, we're about to be on holiday break. Can you send that link to that agent that you built? I really... And I I would like to do that course again with a larger set of marketers because it really was an moment for me. Or one was a finder for in laws, and you could put in a little bit of information and it would scour the internet for you and help you come up with your Christmas list. That's the way that I wanna think about agents and workflows because it makes it more practical and it makes it less scary. And if we can translate that into business use cases and build agents and workflows, not for the sake of just building it, but actually going back to those five whys, going back to our KPIs, our metrics. What are we doing this for? Yeah. Yeah. I can't I can't imagine... I mean, especially in the context of the governance discussion that we just had where, you know, start getting agent builders and agents where, you know, 700 marketers, everybody had at least one agent. I mean, that's a lot of agents running around. And I and I don't mean any sort of malfeasance or whatever, but just, you know, actually making sure that the infrastructure and rules around how people use governance are in place. So it feels like a super exciting world, but also comes with a little bit of... It does. It comes with... Yeah. There's a lot to think about when you think of, like, going to ethics, governance, creating... What is... What's the term AI slop? Like, you know? And then just for the sake of creating things. I want to be very intentional with the work that we're doing and I feel like I'm very fortunate to work with marketers that feel that same way also and aren't just, hey, let me build five agents today just because. So if we can keep that mindset just as a society, that would be wonderful. Well, Chloe, I feel like I could talk to you forever, but like all the things, this must come to an end. Oh, a question for you. There are a lot of AI marketing professionals tuning in to this podcast. And what are your words of advice for them? They may not have a formal role in a title, but a lot of them are playing that part within their organization. So what are your sort of main principles that you would advise as they embark on that journey? Definitely. Well, thank you for having me. This has been wonderful. We could talk about this for hours for sure, so I'm sure we'll get more opportunities. But I think that when you're evaluating your team internally whether you're in this is your formal title or not going back to what I was saying about meeting people where they are think about the team you have not the team you want. So think about where you are in this moment and where you want to be not what you wish your team was already. You're not going to succeed in AI enablement, AI transformation, whatever you're trying to do within your org if you're just pushing people and throwing tools at them. That's not a recipe for success. Help them to practically adopt and advance. Think about steps. Just as you would write a strategic plan for your business, write that for your team, and put the people back into it and helping them on their journey. It's okay to feel whiplash and to feel overwhelmed. You're going to feel that way. Your team is going to feel that way. As long as everyone acknowledges that they feel that way, you can kind of, alright, and then move forward. AI is changing by the week. Do not do what I did when I first started in my role and I subscribed to like every AI newsletter I could find. Yeah, that just overwhelmed me and put me in a state of paralysis. So think about how open rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Think about that when you're trying to implement change in your organization. Find those champions, Find those early adopters. Find those people that are really driving it, and bring them in. Collaborate with them. Don't avoid those skeptics. Talk to them and try to understand why they're skeptics or what you can do to help them on their way and on their journey. And taking it day by day, write yourself a plan for the next month, for the next quarter, and try to do a little bit each day. That is the only way to survive this transformation and this crazy but amazing time. Awesome, Chloe. Thank you very much. We appreciate your time and insights. And to our listeners, when you get a chance, please follow Chloe and me on LinkedIn, and see you on the next episode. Thank you so much, Aby. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening. Big thanks to Spark Novus and the Marketing AI Pulse community. You can join the community at marketingaipulse.com.
