Marketers of Technology
00:07:56 · Timo Pelz
[00:07:56] S0: Yeah. So look, I think I wanna bring it back to this this phrase that I used before AI is this like undefined blob. Right. That's not the most eloquent way to say it, but I want to stick with this image specifically because what you need to do is you need to make it digestible. Right. So that was my approach to make it digestible and then think about it more as a journey than a mandate. I think a lot of companies are now reverting into this, we have a mandate, you got to do this, it's part of the future. And I don't think that's actually 100% helpful in most of the cases. Because you need to make sure that it fits into a mindset that you ideally have already established with your team. That was my approach, right? So taking a step back, I try to have a theme on my team that lasts six months or maybe even a year that kind of has the backdrop for everything that we do. And for us on the marketing team at Clever, this was evolution by choice. Right? We decided that we wanted to evolve deliberately rather than drift by default or seize agency because when you wait too long to change and to evolve, someone else is gonna force you to do it. Your competitor, your c suite, the industry. And what happens is that you rob yourself of agency. You rob yourself of time, of flexibility, of creativity. And so I already had established this mindset of evolution by choice, which helped me bring up this AI topic. Right? And then the other piece that I did was I used an existing drumbeat that I already had. I have a monthly meeting where the entire marketing team gets together. And so I use that as the drumbeat rather than launching a giant AI transformation program or yet another tiger team. So because when you do that, when you create this like an offshoot team, what I think you do is you create these like easy mental outs for people to say, this is someone else's problem. Let the tiger team deal with this. Right? But I wanted everyone on the team to understand that this is not something that they can mentally offload. Right? And so the key piece then is just to round this off real quick is I ended up giving people context. Right? So I told them that we're at the beginning of this structural shift. Yeah. And you've heard this before, but you need to actually drill into this. I clarified AI is not AI. Right?
00:10:09 · Timo Pelz
There's AI, there's generative AI, there's a lot of demystification that you have to do. You can't kind of put the pieces on the table. I ran some live trivia with the team and asked them like, how long did it take different technologies to reach a 100,000,000 users? And you could tell that was very eye opening. Like, oh, wow. This is... Like AI is really growing fast. Right? And so the first thing was to... The context pieces help people understand why this matters for marketing, but also for them, right, before telling them what to do. And then the key message I landed was, look, we're not looking for you to become an AI wizard. Wizardry is not what we need here. Fluency beats wizardry. And so the expectation was very explicitly not that people become AI experts. I wanted them just to become progressively more fluent. And so you make this digestible for them and once that clicks, that's okay. Now I have a structure that is helping them.
00:11:03 · Andres Figuera
[00:11:03] S1: Okay. No. And when I'm listening to you and how you speak about how you inserted AI into the team and how you shifted the view they had of it, it's so much better when somebody embraces something instead of feeling they have it imposed to them as a mandate. When you mentioned the mandate word, I was like, oh my goodness, this is so true. And being able to really just take that pressure off of the team and allow them to experiment it in a safe space, it really then provides the opportunity for everybody to become fluent as you're mentioning. And how long was it that this took, Timo? Was it a year you mentioned that it was like this whole process?
00:11:36 · Timo Pelz
[00:11:36] S0: So at this point, we're probably we're probably a couple of months in. Right? This is a beginning, like, q one of this year 2026. Right? Because that's then when we make the shift. Right? This is when you turn this from being something that is instructional. I approached it very explicitly as something I am giving you a lot of instruction and context. I am leading you towards this to something that becomes actually a lot more cultural to the team. And that led to, because it's rooted in this identity and mindset that we already have established, we've demystified it. I've taken the pressure off of it. You don't have to become an AI wizard. And then we have people lean into it. Right? So we had a couple people start to actually do work that was more aligned to, oh, let's figure out a workflow that I'm already going through and how can I make that easier? Right? So we had the first actual work that proved it, like competitive intelligence, for example. Right? We went from manually tracking our competitors to a recurring AI assisted competitive pulse. Look at newsletters. We had two to three hours of manual assembly for specific newsletters to an automated pipeline, which eventually led to about 75% less build time. Right? And we learned an important lesson here, and that is the humans still matter. So agents can give you help with a lot of consistency, but the human helps with the interpretation. And so that I think was a pivotal moment for us because then the really important thing happened. We had early adopters on the team leaning in. And so I could actually take a step back at this point and I could give the stage to them. We continue with the monthly all marketing meeting. And when people started to talk about the work that they've done and the results that they've seen, there was a big moment, Andres, because you could literally see on Zoom how things changed. Cameras flipping on. People are leaning in. Right? Because now it's not their VP telling them my eye is important. It was their colleagues telling them, here's what I built. Here's how I'm using it. And by the way, it saved me twenty hours of time. And you could tell, like, people were thinking, oh, wait. Now we're talking. Alright. That's when, like, your peers become your teachers. Right?
00:13:41 · Timo Pelz, Andres Figuera
And so the adoption model actually then becomes, you create the context, you lower the barrier, you experiment, and you surface to early adopters. And then you take a step back, you give them the stage, the peers, teach the peers, and then you see adoption starting to compound. Right? So the barrier of entry actually is lower. And so that's... I wanna bring it back to what you said about the mandate. Right? It's not a mandate that was dropped on people overnight. At this point, we're like months into this. Right? As marketers, know. Reach and frequency of message. Really important. Right? So I had like a a set thing going. And so at this point, we're on a journey as a team that we're taking together. [00:14:19] S1: Okay. Wow. I love how in the end, or at least at this point of the story, the team is really fueling themselves with just the practical showcase of how it's working for my colleague. And it's like, I also want to save time and I want to do and focus on what matters the most instead of all the manual work. And then how many people compose your team, Timo, or at least marketing? [00:14:41] S0: So it's a team of about 25 people. Okay. [00:14:44] S1: And how is the adoption between the 25 now? Is everybody just using AI and being fluent with it?
00:14:44 · Andres Figuera, Timo Pelz
[00:14:44] S1: And how is the adoption between the 25 now? Is everybody just using AI and being fluent with it? [00:14:50] S0: Well, look, we got to a point then where we got real adoption, right? That was great. But the adoption, and it will be so great if I could say, and that's the end of the story, Andres. And like, we lived heavily ever after. That's not how it is. But because once you get to the adoption, you expose a next set of problems. Right? So by August of this year, we had a little bit more than 30 workflows that were in continuous use. We had more than two thirds of the team working on live projects, actively iterating. Right? And this is across all of the marketing functions. So that I think is great success. And so we had great examples of save time and efficiency gains. And so at this point, this wasn't Timo's AI initiative. It was actually becoming a distributed capability across the marketing team. Right. But then I want to make sure I don't sanitize this too much because what you need to control for then is there's the proliferation of work, which creates a lot of duplication. Right? So we put all of a sudden we had four takes on competitors for like vendors and evaluation that had overlapping services. We had two audience libraries. Right? And so we had solved one problem and kind of created another one. Right? And so we had to evolve again. [00:16:03] S1: You needed too much info now.