# How to Lead AI Transformation Across an Enterprise Marketing Team

By Aby Varma · Published 2026-03-20 · Updated 2026-11-04 · Professional AV on MarketScale
Canonical: https://www.marketscale.com/industries/pro-av/how-to-lead-ai-transformation-across-an-enterprise-marketing-team
Creator hub: The Marketing AI SparkCast

> Chloe Tambe, Director of AI Transformation for Marketing at HubSpot, tells Aby Varma on The Marketing AI SparkCast how she leads AI adoption across hundreds of marketers: start with the barriers, meet people where they are, and let the team teach each other.

## Key points

- Tambe starts with the marketing problem to solve, not a list of AI use cases.
- An adoption plan has to meet both beginners and power users where they are.
- Transparency, engaging skeptics and clear guardrails help AI become part of daily workflows.

Chloe Tambe did not grow up wanting to be a director of AI transformation. The role didn't exist. Today she holds it at HubSpot, leading AI adoption across the marketing organization, and she wrote the job description herself.

Tambe, Director of AI Transformation for Marketing at HubSpot, joined Aby Varma, host of The Marketing AI SparkCast and Founder of Spark Novus, a strategy, implementation, and training firm that helps marketing teams unlock the impact of AI. On the episode, they dig into how to lead AI adoption across an enterprise marketing team of 600 to 700 marketers: enabling people, addressing resistance, and embedding AI into daily workflows through a human-centered approach.

Her path ran through project management, sales operations and program management before four and a half years at HubSpot as chief of staff to the CMO, whom she describes as "very AI first." When that CMO gave her a second job enabling the marketing team, she admits she didn't know anything about AI. It clicked once she stopped running from it and started using it as a partner. "It's taking the parts of my job that I don't love and allowing me to do the things that I do love," she told Varma. When she pitched the full-time role, she made the business case: "I approached it with facts, not feelings."

## Four barriers, four pillars

Her strategy started with an anonymous survey sent to the marketing team late last year. "When it's anonymous, you get all the truth," she said. She pulled the top four barriers to adoption from the results and built four strategic pillars against them.

- Comprehensive AI enablement: not handing out a license and saying good luck, but showing marketers what they can practically do in their day to day.
- A knowledge-sharing infrastructure: a unified Slack channel for AI in marketing now, an AI center of excellence next, so she is not the bottleneck.
- Setting the pace for AI innovation: clear expectations, three-month pilots of new tools with 20 to 25 marketers, and training alongside every launch.
- Operational efficiency: partnering with the Martech team on workflows, integrations and agents.

The principle underneath all four is restraint. "Change management can't just be throwing every tool out there at the team," Tambe said. The model she described is "choose your own adventure but with guardrails." She tracks usage, adoption and workflow metrics, but the signal she values most is human.

> Success looks like people talking about it organically with each other, without me even involved. — Chloe Tambe, Director of AI Transformation for Marketing, HubSpot, on The Marketing AI SparkCast

## Prioritize problems, not use cases

Varma raised a pattern from his firm's work with CMOs: a half-day leadership workshop can easily produce 30 or 40 use cases. "Everything with AI, everything feels urgent. It's coming from a good place," he said.

Tambe's answer is the five whys framework, a lesson from a former manager. Rather than chase use cases, she starts with the problem statement and the root cause. There might be 20 use cases tied to one problem. Solve the root, and give each sub-team the tools and knowledge to handle its own use cases.

Hackathons have been her fastest route there. She ran an in-person hackathon for marketing directors and a virtual one for a subset of the team, who had two weeks to solve a problem before a show-and-tell on Zoom. Individual contributors aren't writing memos for the CMO every week. Their use cases are different, and no leader can know every one.

> 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. — Chloe Tambe, HubSpot

## Meet beginners and power users where they are

Tambe was candid about a pilot that didn't land. She ran a four-week proof of concept for about 160 marketers under one VP, four Fridays in a row between Thanksgiving and Christmas, co-taught with an AI partner. Week one, a foundational session on building agents, scored well. Weeks two through four split the room every time: half found it too easy, half too hard.

> It was a proof of concept. Therefore, it was not a failure. It was a learning. — Chloe Tambe, HubSpot

The fix is two opt-in courses, a 101 for marketers who don't yet know which buttons to push and a 201 for power users, with recordings for anyone who would rather learn on their own time. "You ask people what they need, and they will tell you if you truly listen," she said.

The same thinking shapes her AI center of excellence, which she treats as a repository. Her advice is to make it inviting, appealing and not overwhelming. Organize it by audience: people new to the company, marketers who are resistant or still early on their journey, and power users. Then add recordings of live sessions, what's coming up, AI news and, most important, use cases from the team itself. A three-minute video from a colleague showing how she uses AI in demand generation lands differently than an outside expert, because marketers see faces they know and can message.

## Transparency, skeptics and guardrails

Tambe runs change management in the open. She keeps an internal wiki with her plan for each month, makes time for one-on-ones, and has a roadshow deck for anyone curious about what's coming. She is equally clear that the team can't have every tool, given budget and security risk, and that those calls are made with procurement, security, legal and the CMO. For marketers worried about automating themselves out of a job, she offered what she called "a Chloe view, not a HubSpot view": "You're not working yourself out of a job. You're working yourself into a new job."

Skeptics get one-on-ones and the five whys. Some people won't come around, she said, but she has watched skeptics become regulars in the AI channel after a thirty-minute conversation or two. It's "more carrot versus stick," and their pushback helps her check her own blind spots. For marketers whose leaders aren't AI-forward, her advice is to manage up with metrics: "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."

Governance stays practical: clear rules on where customer and internal data can and can't go, a proactive security team, and expectations that a memo shouldn't be pasted out of a chatbot unread. As she evaluates a centralized notetaker for marketing, the test is simple. "You need to tell someone if you're recording the conversation."

## Make it practical, one day at a time

Agents came up as a topic that overwhelms people. In a session she brought an outside partner in to lead, marketers broke into groups and built an agent under one rule: it couldn't be about work. Teams built a movie and series recommender and a gift finder for in-laws' holiday lists. The point was to make agents less scary, then translate small wins into business use cases tied to KPIs rather than building agents for their own sake.

> An agent is something that's working for you while you're working on something else. — Chloe Tambe, HubSpot

Her closing advice for anyone leading AI adoption, with the formal title or without it: "Think about the team you have, not the team you want." Don't push people or throw tools at them. Write a plan for your team the way you would for the business. Find your champions and early adopters, talk to the skeptics instead of avoiding them, and skip subscribing to every AI newsletter, which she said put her in "a state of paralysis" early on. Then "try to do a little bit each day."

Watch or listen to the full episode of The Marketing AI SparkCast with Chloe Tambe and Aby Varma to hear the complete conversation.

## Sources

- [How to Lead AI Transformation Across an Enterprise Marketing Team (The Marketing AI SparkCast on Spotify)](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6yZixP3aAoBSaKsd6fsDJ5) (Spotify)
- [The Marketing AI SparkCast: Chloe Tambe episode video and transcript](https://marketscale-4.wistia.com/medias/43vjcduixa) (Wistia)

Tags: Aby Varma, The Marketing AI SparkCast, Spark Novus, Chloe Tambe, HubSpot, AI Transformation

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