How AI Exposes Broken Marketing Teams

Episode Transcript

Andrea: AI just gave marketing a jet engine. And if your team has a real operating system, clear priorities, strong collaboration, and disciplined execution, that's incredible. But if you don't have that, AI doesn't actually create progress. It's just gonna create faster chaos. So today, we're talking about how to think about marketing technology in 2026. What belongs in the factory, the stuff you run with discipline, and what belongs in the lab, the stuff you experiment with on purpose. And I couldn't ask for a better guide than Scott Brinker, MarTech analyst, builder, and creator of that infamous MarTech landscape. So, let's start our exploration together.

Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning Agile theory into real-world marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of Agile Sherpas and your guide on this climb to faster, smarter, outcome-driven marketing. Every week, we unpack the what, who, and how behind Agile marketing, from building high-velocity workflows and slashing waste to measuring what really matters. You'll hear quick-hit strategies you can deploy today, plus candid stories from marketers who have traded chaos for clarity and never looked back. Hit Follow wherever you listen, and let's carve the next switchback together.

All right. So Scott, thank you so much for joining me today. I am really excited about our conversation, but before we dive in, you wanna say hi to everybody and introduce yourself, tell them a little bit about your background?

Scott: Sure. And thank you so much for having me. I've really been looking forward to this chat. So, Scott Brinker. I guess you could say I've been, one way or another, in the MarTech industry for now several decades. I've written the Chief MarTech blog, started the MarTech conference. If you've ever seen that crazy landscape of, like, a billion different MarTech solutions, I apologize. I inflicted that upon you.

Andrea: It's okay.

Scott: You know, but I've also been a builder in the world. I built a SaaS company that had a no-code platform for marketers to do interactive content. I spent eight years actually building the technology partner ecosystem for HubSpot. But now, yeah, I'm full-time focused on just work as an analyst and advisor in all things MarTech.

Andrea: And I'm sure we'll be getting to this, but, you know, the history of MarTech is deeply entangled with the evolution of Agile marketing. Which is how Scott and I have kind of been, you know, knowing each other for a good long while now. We've shared a love of Agile and its love affair with technology, and now AI has come along and sort of rejuvenated both of those topics in a lot of ways. And so I wanted to have this conversation kind of in a formal recorded space because I think there's a lot of interesting stuff that is coming back around with AI that's happened in marketing before. You know, what is old is new again. And I think that there's an opportunity for marketers to learn from the past here and not repeat mistakes that we have made before. Because one thing that I am seeing us do a lot right now, and that I've seen happen with Agile and with technology in the marketing space, is that we have this sense as marketers that finally we have found the answer, like capital T, capital A — The Answer — in Agile, in this new piece of MarTech.

Finally, this is the thing, and we just go all in, and we wanna pour all of our love and all of our budget into this thing. And then we get really kind of jaded and mad when it's not the thing, and I think that's where, you know, you see the hype cycle happen, where you get into kind of the valley of discontent sort of thing. And so I've seen it happen with Agile, right? I'm sure you've seen it happen with different kind of phases of marketing technology, whether it's automation or whether it's, you know, any of the kind of categories of technology. And so maybe we can start with, like, why do we do this as marketers? Like, where does this instinct come from for us as a group? 'Cause I know it's not unique to us, but I think that we as a group have this tendency. Like, what's up with that?

Scott: Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that's always been fascinating about marketing is it is, by its very nature, it is constantly changing, right? I mean, what do we do as marketers? We're not actually chasing technology. What we're actually doing is we're chasing audience. We're chasing growth. We're chasing customers. And the thing that's interesting is, you know, the customers keep evolving. There's this really sort of wry insight that a fellow named Andrew Chen came up with a few years ago. He's, you know, been doing like growth marketing and testing and all that stuff for ages. And he called it — I'm not sure if this is a family show, but he called it the law of shitty click-throughs. Which is basically this idea that, you know, some marketer comes up with some really novel new way to, like, engage people that hasn't been done before, and as a result it actually outperforms tremendously, you know? And then a couple other folks try it, and they're doing pretty well too. And then it all catches on, everybody starts doing it, and it reverts to the mean. And the only thing you can do at that point in time is go and seek, like, okay, well, what's the next way that I actually break through and I engage and I differentiate? Marketing is so much about differentiation. How do I differentiate from what everybody else is doing?

And so that's always put marketers on kind of this treadmill that they can never just be like, "Okay, well, I went to school, I learned accounting, and now I basically run, you know, the accounting system, the accounts payable," and yeah. You know, why are those marketers always chasing, like, new stuff? Why don't they just, like, stick to this one thing and do it? So I guess that's part of why I would say I have empathy for marketers always trying to grasp for like, okay, well, what's the next thing we need to do to stand out? But I think your observation is right. There's a little neurotic element to, like, how that actually plays out.

Andrea: Totally. Jay Acunzo, I remember him pointing something out like this too, where he was like, "Some study will come out that says, like, the best time to tweet or to post on LinkedIn or whatever, right, is Tuesday at 2:03 PM." And then we all read it, and we go post right at 2:03 PM on Tuesday. Well, and then it's not the right time anymore 'cause we're all doing it, right, and flooding the platform at the same time. And so, to your point, now we have to change, and we have to go try and do something different. And now we're all mad at whatever study that was that told us this was the right time to post 'cause it doesn't work anymore. And so it is this continual cycle. I mean, to me, that is the origin story of why Agile methodologies are such a perfect fit for marketers. Because it is the case that there isn't going to be the one spec that we set in stone, and that's just how we're gonna run it from now on. It is this mode where like, okay, we have to keep evolving, we have to keep iterating, we have to keep experimenting.

Now that being said, what we don't wanna do is do that in some sort of random chaotic fashion. You know, we still need an operating system, a thing that can bring cohesion and structure to it. But the thing we're trying to bring that cohesion to isn't about remaining static. It is about, like, we're in a game of can we evolve faster but more effectively and more efficiently than our competitors.

Scott: Yeah.

Andrea: And can we do it based on data, and can we do it in a rigorous, systematic way that builds on learning and is not just based on some crazy idea that Andrea had on her commute in today, but is, you know, a clearly well-defined and articulated and data-driven way that we are doing and documented, right? And it's an ongoing process that's not haphazard. Yeah. And we have to have technology to do that. We can't do that, you know, in a spreadsheet somewhere.

Scott: You know, that was always one of the straw arguments against Agile that used to just annoy me, but then it was just, like, so silly and ridiculous that, yeah, I found it incredibly amusing of like, "Oh, you mean Agile. Like, you're just gonna kinda make it up as you go." And you're like, "Okay, you clearly have no idea, like, how this operating system works." It's actually very much the opposite of that. But anyway, thank you for reminding me of one of my favorite pet peeves of, you know, the anti-Agile crowd.

Andrea: Yeah. And completely. And I think, you know, with MarTech, it's the same thing. Like, you have to have a guiding idea of what you're trying to accomplish. Like, going and buying a whole bunch of, like, random tools that don't have any integration and don't talk to each other, it's the same thing. You've got to have the reason they all work together. Why did you buy this one and not that one? You know, I've heard you talk about, I think, like, point solutions versus, you know, a more, like, holistic approach to things. I'm probably behind on, you know, how I'm thinking about our MarTech solution, so you can correct me on how I should be thinking about this. But, you know, the larger, you know, philosophical way that you're approaching all of these things, and now we've got AI coming into all of these that we've gotta incorporate it into how we're approaching our marketing holistically and Agile, right? You've gotta be able to test and learn. You've gotta be able to... Which tools have started to bring AI in intelligently, and which ones are just kind of bolting it on, and it's not really a good incorporation? Like, I've seen some where I'm just like, "This is not helping." You know? It's just bad.

Scott: Well, it's a mess right now. Yeah. This is, like, killing me, by the way, as, like, someone who, like, does a lot of writing. I've got like 50 stories I need to write all at the same time about this chaos. It's interesting about Agile and AI because I feel like there are two sides to that. So for marketing teams who are already operating using like an Agile operating system, AI is like a huge boon to them. And I know this showed up in some of the research that you've done in your annual State of Agile report, which I eagerly look forward to every year. Because again, like, the very nature of what — it's not because of AI, you know. The marketers who are running an Agile operating system have a really clear way of how do they pursue the objectives that are important to their business, and AI just becomes this incredible accelerant for them to both expand the scope of things they're wanting to do and the speed at which they can do them. It's amazing.

But it's also, on the other side, for all those marketing teams who don't have something like an Agile operating system, this sort of explosion of, you know, speed and possibilities and all that, it's actually working against them, because they aren't harnessing this energy, and it's so easy for it to devolve into chaos if you don't have some sort of structure to, like, okay, you know, instead of doing this casual walk, you know, we're hopping on a motorbike. Boy, we kinda probably have to have a pretty clear idea of how we're steering and where we're going, 'cause we could really hurt ourselves if we don't have some navigational control over this.

Andrea: And so then how are you — like, you said, you know, you're doing MarTech analyst full-time now, and so how are you talking to people, guiding people in this moment of how are we thinking about MarTech in 2026, Agile or not Agile? Like, how should we be thinking about it as marketers bringing technology into our teams? What's the right way for us to be thinking about it as a tool that is probably not a silver bullet, right? It's gotta be something that is not gonna solve all of our problems tomorrow, but something that is meant to support us, you know, get us where we wanna go strategically, but it's not, you know, like I said, it's not gonna be — we're not gonna, you know, plunk down our credit card and buy a bunch of licenses and then everything's okay tomorrow. We've gotta approach this realistically. Like, how are you helping people figure all of this out right now?

Scott: Yeah. Well, I mean, one sort of principle that hasn't really changed, although it's, you know, probably more relevant than ever, is yeah, I mean, technology doesn't actually do any marketing for you. Technology is not the bottleneck.

Andrea: Too bad.

Scott: It's never been the bottleneck to this, you know. The bottleneck to it is the imagination. It is, like, the organizational discipline, and structure to then execute upon that imagination. And it turns out that that's really hard. You know, for all the talk that's happening in the industry right now about like, "Oh, how do we get agents to coordinate with each other?" I'm like, you know, actually if we could get humans to coordinate with each other — you know, that's probably where you're gonna get, like, a greater return on your investment at this point. So for years I always, yeah, 'cause I'm known perhaps infamously for that crazy landscape, right, of the now 15,000-some-odd MarTech solutions. And people would come to me and like, "Okay, well, you know, what do we do with this?" I'm like, "Well, rip it up." You know, if you have a match, if you wanna light it on fire, I mean, choose your thing. And then sit down and ask yourself like, "What are the actual use cases? What are the things you are trying to do? Why are you trying to do them? What do you expect to see as the return out of that?" You know, because if you have sort of a clear framing of that, and then it's like, okay, well, first of all, once we have a clear framing of that, it turns out, could we actually just do that today? Do we actually need other things to make that happen? And more often than not, you probably don't. But if you do find there's some sort of gap of like, okay, well no, to do this use case, it's not really working with what we have. Now I can go out to the market and I can evaluate possible tools, and the emphasis on the word tool, not solution —

Andrea: Right.

Scott: — it's a tool. You know, you are the creator of the solution with that. You know, then you've got sort of a structure to guide it. Now, I still say that same thing today around AI with one caveat. Because AI is changing so rapidly, and the possibilities it's opening up, I mean, they really are unprecedented. It is just — I continue to be amazed week by week over what's possible — is I've now started to say, "Listen, maybe 80, 90% of what you should be doing should be focused on, yep, I have clear use cases, I have clear needs. I'm gonna find the tool that fits that and does that well. I'm not gonna get distracted." I'm like, "Yeah, but you might actually now wanna carve out 10% of your time to start to just explore and experiment with new things, not because you're expecting those things to be now the engine of your business. No, no, no, no. You're doing this because it helps feed your imagination and your sort of span of what you think the possibilities are."

I have a co-author who does several of these reports with me, Frans Riemersma, and in our last report, he had this really great metaphor that just to me crystallizes. He referred to it as the laboratory versus the factory. You know, where you get yourself in trouble is when you try and like run your MarTech stack universally across both of those use cases. No. You've got the factory, and you really need to run that in a disciplined and operational way, but you probably also need a laboratory where you can experiment and learn. And most of the things you experiment and learn with are never gonna make it out of the lab to the factory, and that's okay. But it's through that laboratory sort of open-ended experimentation that you will find discoveries that then you do wanna kinda do a weird — I don't know, this is probably overextending this metaphor — doing a bit of a tech transfer, you know, from the laboratory to the factory. But I do think that that dual environment is, you know, what you need today.

Andrea: Yeah. I completely agree because you almost have to build that muscle of, of this is weird and scary and new, and we're gonna play around with it, and maybe it doesn't have a purpose other than learning, and that's okay to devote time to that. And especially in marketing when we usually have 30 things to do and only enough time to maybe do 20 at most, it's kind of hard to say we're gonna spend time to just learn and explore and kind of play. That can feel a little bit frivolous sometimes, but I think it's really important right now.

Scott: It's not really play. Like, it's play with a purpose 'cause you are learning and building up that capability. And you know, I talk to a lot of peers who own professional services companies right now who are spending a lot of their time doing these things, and the things they're learning to do and the leaps forward that I'm watching them make are just amazing. And the people who are still kind of heads down, nose to the grindstone doing the things they've always done are just getting further and further behind. It's just, you gotta make the time, but it feels really hard. I mean, one of the phrases that's become very popular that kinda just annoys the hell out of me is, you know, all these folks with AI being like, "Okay, you need to do more with less." Now, all right, at some level, yes. You know, this is one of the benefits we can reap from this stuff is we will get some greater efficiencies, you know, and scale and speed. That's fine. But the problem I have with that mentality is it really does push people into this mode of like basically squeezing out time to think, squeezing out time to sit back and reflect and, you know, ponder a little bit about like, okay, why, why don't we do it... Like, what's the bigger picture here? And I see it all the time. I mean, I talk to a ton of MarTech companies. I'm not gonna name names. You know, but they're all in this mode of like, "Oh my God, we gotta ship more, we gotta ship more, we gotta ship more," you know? And you sit and you talk with them, and you're like, "Okay, well, what's your larger vision here? Like, what's your strategy?" And like, nobody knows because like, "No, I was just told I have to ship 10 times as many features." And then they're like, "And by the way, nobody seems to be using all these new features we're shipping." I'm like, "Have you taken some time to think about why that might be?" "Uh, no, no, no, I gotta ship some more features." And it's like, stop.

This is one of the things... Like, I think we increasingly wanna have this dialogue in a world where just AI is ubiquitous and it's getting so powerful. What is the distinction between what AI is good at and what humans are good at? And I gotta tell you, I don't think us humans are gonna win like, "Well, let's do more of it faster" race. That, AI's gonna take that one for us, you know? What the AI isn't doing, you know, and there's a lot of reasons why it's a long way from ever being able to do this, is that sorta stepping back, you know, and synthesizing and reflecting and bringing the teams together and getting alignment across an organization. That is where there's like so much opportunity for human differentiation, excelling, and most companies, they're nowhere near as good at that as they could be. But rather than focusing on like, "Okay, well now how do we actually get better at that?" 'Cause that's our differentiation in this AI world. They're like, "No, no, I gotta use the AI to do like more and more." I'm like, "Oh." Anyway, my pet peeve. Yeah. My pet peeve of the week, I guess.

Andrea: And, and you know, back to kind of our theme here, like that's a pet peeve of mine with Agile as well is like, let's use Agile to just have everyone go faster and do more with less. Let's use it to squeeze as much productivity out of our current people as possible, and that's the whole point of Agile, when in fact it is not. It is a useful side effect oftentimes, but it is not meant to be the whole reason for using these ways of working. It's meant for better visibility and collaboration and transparency in order to provide customer value, right? And we're supposed to deliver better outcomes to the business. And sure, we might be doing it faster, and that's awesome too, but that's not the real reason that we do these things. And especially in marketing, eventually everyone will have the same AI tools that allow us to all go faster. And so it's the people who are going to be more creative and more collaborative who come up with more creative ways to differentiate themselves in the market and reach those customers better and in more innovative ways that are gonna win, not the people who go faster. So going faster now might feel like a way to differentiate yourself, but pretty soon everyone's gonna do that, and that's not gonna be the way that you win anyway. So find a way to be innovative. Use the spare time to innovate. Exactly what you're saying, like don't use the spare time that AI gave you to just try to do more stuff. Like that's not what the time is for.

Scott: Yeah, no, it's a very narrow arbitrage opportunity at the moment, and the truth is actually, again, it goes back to — even if like we could do more, faster, you know, cheaper, if we aren't taking enough time to think through, okay, what should we be doing more of? What should we be doing faster? Then it's so much energy expended for so little return. Yeah.

Andrea: Yeah, and I think that that is maybe the root commonality to all of this, like, when marketers go chase a thing, catch the thing, and then get really jaded about the thing not helping them, is maybe we didn't ask why are we chasing that thing in the first place. We didn't stop to say, "Okay, what's gonna happen if I catch it?" You know, like the dog chasing the car. Like, what am I gonna do if I catch that thing? Like, what's the point of doing it in the first place? Process improvement, AI, buying a new piece of MarTech, like what is the point of it? What am I expecting to get out of it? And if we have interrogated that properly, then maybe we will actually get what we want instead of just being mad that the thing didn't solve all of our problems.

Scott: Oh, yeah. You know, it's funny, digital marketing, performance marketing, the MarTech that's enabled that, in many ways this is a really terrible side effect of it is, you know — I forget where the origin of this phrase was, but, you know, not everything that can be measured counts, not everything that counts can be measured. You know, MarTech brought us into a world where like, oh, all right, there are all these things we can measure, you know? And therefore, those are the things that count, because this is, you know, the introduction of the phrase revenue marketing. No, no, no, no, no, we're not this some sort of, you know, fuzzy expense thing. No, no, this is like almost a COGS, you know? And here's how we deliver it. You know, again, it's almost one of those things like, well, yeah, there's a piece of that, but the pendulum swung so far like, okay, well, if we can't like tie this to an MQL — John Miller, the co-founder of Marketo, this is one of the things he's been writing about now for the past couple years, like the MQL gumball machine. I'm like, "Dude, you created the MQL gumball machine." He's like, "Yeah. Yeah, I know. Apologies for that." You know, it's —

Andrea: My bad.

Scott: Yeah. But this moment we have to even come to the recognition that, okay, that pendulum swung way too far on that oversight, and in this world of AI, the opportunity to take time and think about the things that aren't able to be driven, you know, with that sort of efficiency of AI. You know, like the actual way we have true relationships with customers. Like how we think about, you know, our brand — and I don't mean just like, okay, well now I'm doing some advertising that isn't directly, you know, resulting in click to sale. No, like thinking about like how people actually perceive your brand. Getting out in the world, talking with more customers, you know, really understanding like, you know, what they value about your company or not and why. I mean, that's such a valuable component of marketing, and it kinda got diminished so much. Again, I'll take the blame as some conduit to the MarTech world. MarTech pushed us away from that because we couldn't measure it as precisely. And I don't know, you're starting to see that pendulum swing a bit, and it's one of the things that actually gives me hope that, eh, actually marketing might become a noble profession again.

Andrea: Yeah. I agree with that completely, and I think that there's a great opportunity. You know, I come from a content marketing background. I think there's a lot of opportunity to lean hard back into authentic value-driving content as a means to create connection to customers again of like, I see you, individual person who has a problem, right? And I can help you solve that problem. But tools, marketing technology, and AI in particular, I think we can leverage to better understand individual people, you know, really explore their problem and, you know, even if it's just, "Hey, I'm gonna scrape your LinkedIn profile and see what you've posted about recently, and then allow me to use that to craft something that's very tailored for you as a human." That is a great use of AI and technology, and then I'm gonna use that to be very authentic in the way I connect with you, not to just like write the horrible email that we all get. Like, "I noticed that you're the CEO of Agile Sherpas." Like, yeah, I'm sure you did. Like anybody can notice that. Like, that's not an authentic way to connect with somebody. So I think there's an opportunity here, but there's also an opportunity to just be awful at this.

Scott: Yeah. Well, all right. So you're inspiring me to like bring forth all my favorite pet peeves. It's like the —

Andrea: That's what I'm here for. The Scott Brinker famous list of pet peeves. That's what I'm here for.

Scott: But like, yeah, the sort of wave we have — it's starting to recede a bit here, thank God — of AI SDRs, particularly outbound AI SDRs of like, "Hey, you know, it was a lot of work to like, you know, cold call and bother these people. Wait a second, we could get this AI, and it can do that a thousand times for like a tenth of the cost. Isn't this awesome?" And you're like, "Wow, you have not thought this through."

Andrea: Why do we do this? Like, we forget when we are developing campaigns what it would be like to be on the receiving end of this campaign. Somehow we forget. I don't know what happens, like our brains turn off somehow. We're like, "It'll be great. We're gonna push this out to 10,000 people," and we don't even think about what it would be like to be the person who received that phone call or received that email, how we would never answer it or never open it. We just forget. And marketers should be the champion of that, 'cause who else is gonna do it? Like, marketers are so well positioned to be like, you know, we're the customer whisperer, and we're gonna take on the hat of the customer, and we're gonna bring that to everything.

Scott: Because, you know, part of it is the AI SDR stuff wasn't even — you know, I'll give marketers a little bit of a pass. In many cases, it was like more of the sales org and the revenue org who said like, "Yeah, we're gonna hit our KPI this month." You know? And you kinda need someone to come in and be like, "Okay, hang on a second. We have a brand here. We have a reputation. We have a set of trust we are trying to create with people in order to be able to have them wanna do business with us. Here's why this idea kinda sucks." You know, but if marketing isn't in the room doing that, you know, I don't know. It's this sort of adolescence period where, you know — this is gonna sound too insulting, but, you know, it's like you sort of have these children, and you've like armed them with, you know, all these weapons. And they're like, "I, yeah, I got this. Isn't this cool?" And you're like, "Oh my God," you know? "Where's an adult? Supervision please somewhere."

Andrea: Yeah. Yeah, it's true. But this is back to kind of what I've heard from some of our clients when we've talked about prioritization and the use of backlogs and kind of saying no to non-high-value work as a means of focusing on, you know, what's really gonna move the needle and things like that. I've heard verbatim from clients, "Well, if we don't do it, if we don't say yes when sales or business unit leaders or whomever comes to us with requests like that, if we don't take it on and manage it, they'll just go off and do things like this, right? And they'll just take the tool and run with it and destroy the brand or do things we can't track or whatever. So we've gotta just, like, make sure the kids don't run with scissors, you know? So we at least have to handle it a little bit." So it's a challenge for marketers to try to keep their arms around this stuff 'cause it's so easy now for people to run off and do all these things unsupervised. The tools are just out there. Anyone can get a hold of them.

Scott: You know, I had to just jot this down because as you were saying this, I'm like, "Wow, the irony of this is amazing," because, you know, with the whole start of MarTech, the big problem at the time was, like, IT was just like, "Oh my God, these marketers, like, they're just going off and they're doing these — you can't do that. Like, you know, haven't you, like, done the security review of... Holy crap." You know, and the marketer's like, "Yeah, so sorry, I've got a job to do." It's fine. You know, and so to now have marketers be in a mode where they're like, "Wait, sales, you can't just go off and start doing your own, like, you know." Instead of shadow IT, it's shadow marketing, and I think you're actually plugged in. It's a legit problem.

Andrea: Yeah. But it's ironic.

Scott: I know, it's fun, the circle. It all comes around.

Andrea: Yeah. And so one of the big things that I always like to do on the podcast whenever we possibly can is to close out with some very practical, tactical action items. And so I think we've touched on a lot of, definitely pet peeves and definitely things that we've pointed out people should not be doing, so that's helpful. But if we're gonna leave our listeners from this episode with maybe one or two things that they ought to do, anything that you can pin down, Scott? Like, go forth and do one or two things. Anything we can direct them toward?

Scott: Wow, yeah. So many. I attempted to make the joke of, like, "Wait, you want practical? I work in MarTech. We don't do that." No, it's... I guess it'd be sorta three things. It sort of depends on, like, where is your gap, you know? And I'm gonna say, okay, just to plug, obviously, if you don't have a clear operating system on, like, how the humans in this — first of, I'm preaching to the choir, then obviously. People who are tuning in, there's a problem, like, "Yeah, yeah, we're already doing Agile marketing." But if you weren't, you might wanna start and actually take a look at it 'cause I absolutely guarantee you that is more of a bottleneck than any technical, you know, component of what's happening.

Andrea: I did not ask Scott to say that.

Scott: No. Unpaid endorsement. But the second thing would be, okay, for your core MarTech stack, you know, what my co-author Frans would call the factory. If you haven't really accurately defined the use cases of what you're trying to apply MarTech for, start there. You don't have to boil the ocean. Like, pick one, pick two, pick, like, you know. But start to get into a mode where, like, you're actually having a set of use cases where use case is like, "What are we trying to do? What is the customer getting out of that? What is the metric we look at to know, like, is this working? Is it not working?" You know? It's amazing how many folks are doing a whole bunch of stuff, but they don't actually have that structure to it. And as we were talking earlier, when you try and now accelerate this with AI, it's just so easy for things to go off the rails if you don't have those structures.

If you do have — you've got your Agile marketing operating system, you've got your use cases and structures for your factory — but for whatever reason, you're like, "Yeah, yeah, we're busy with what we're doing. We're not gonna get distracted with the shiny objects," take some time. Like, pick a shiny object. I mean, it's crazy. Like, I'll give one just for the heck of it. If you haven't started experimenting with something like Claude Cowork, which is sort of the — what software developers have with this thing called Claude Code, you know. Anthropic is now starting to distill into, like, a workspace environment that non-engineers can use called Claude Cowork. Whatever that one is. Cowork, yeah. And it's, again, I'd put it in the bucket of experimentation because I don't think you should, like, go and do it and like, "Okay, and how are we going to deploy this across?" No, just start to experiment with this because this agentic stuff, it's early, but it's real, and it's advancing very, very quickly, and the only way you're actually gonna get your head around, like, "Oh, okay, now I kinda get this, and now I can start to think about, like, what are actual real use cases I might put for it," is you have to get your hands on it.

Andrea: Agreed 100%. Well, those are excellent practical, tactical things for us to close on, so very much appreciate your time, Scott. This has been super fun. Great exploration conversation. And, as you mentioned at some point, our annual State of Agile Marketing report is coming out. I saw preliminary data yesterday, so it's a very exciting time. We did a lot of probing this year on AI and agility and how those things are still very closely aligned and how process does matter when you're trying to integrate these new, exciting tools into the way that we work, and also how marketing is or is not integrated into other departments and how we're working with other parts of the business because collaboration across other parts of the organization is more critical than ever. So depending on when you're listening to this episode, you can go to stateofagilemarketing.com to see the most up-to-date information and register for our release webinar, where we will show you the most up-to-date data, or you can see the report, depending on if it has dropped or not, but that is where you will always find the most up-to-date data.

And of course, if you are interested in how to implement an Agile marketing operating system, agilesherpas.com is the right place to find all of that information. Scott, if people want to find you and learn more about how to pick your brain about marketing technology, where can they find you?

Scott: So I am chiefmartech.com, but it's Chief MarTech without an H at the end. You can, yeah, slap my hand for the poor branding choice 18 years ago. But it's unique.

Andrea: Hey, it stands out.

Scott: Anyways, and I'm SJ Brinker on LinkedIn.

Andrea: Fantastic. Thanks again for joining us, and until next time, I'm your host, Andrea Fryrear. Remember, the struggle is real, but so is Agile marketing.