In this episode
Tom Kaneshige, Chief Content Officer at the CMO Council, explains the Apex Martech Matrix, research built with partner MartechTribe that compares real martech deployments against companies in the top 30% of their industry for revenue per employee. He and host Greg Kihlström cover what makes a stack “overbuilt,” why investing in organizational maturity pays off in some categories and not in others, why consolidation is the wrong default, and why adding AI on top of a misaligned foundation scales the wrong things faster. The through-line: a martech stack creates value when technology capability and operational maturity are matched, and the research gives marketing leaders a benchmark for checking that match at the feature level.
Key takeaways
- An overbuilt stack is a misalignment problem, not a technology problem. Kaneshige defines overbuilt as having more technology capability than your operational maturity can handle. His analogy: buying a Ferrari when all your drivers only know dirt roads. The fault is neither the car nor the driver.
- The Apex Martech Matrix benchmarks against business performance, not features. MartechTribe analyzes public data across 50 martech categories and 1,300 features, then compares stacks against companies in the top 30% of revenue per employee across seven industries.
- The research fills a practitioner blind spot. As a journalist and analyst, Kaneshige says the only view into how companies actually used martech came from those willing to talk, which produced an anecdotal picture. The matrix replaces that with data on what companies run and how well they use it.
- Operational maturity is an investment with an ROI, not an automatic win. Conventional wisdom says maturity investment always pays. Kaneshige says the dollars have to be judged against the business value they return, the same way technology spend is.
- Where to invest depends on the category. In marketing automation the technology does the heavy lifting, so capability differences between platforms matter most. In email marketing the technology is mature and similar across vendors, so the value comes from skill: deliverability, authentication, avoiding blacklists, handling bounces, list hygiene.
- Consolidation is a tactic; alignment is the strategy. By Kaneshige’s recollection of the findings, only around 3% of technologies should be divested, while roughly 12% are quick wins where the capability is already owned and just needs to be turned on.
- Ask three questions of your stack. What can I turn off? What can I turn on? What investments will extract more business value?
- AI amplifies the foundation underneath it. Organizations adding AI as a layer are often adding wholly new capabilities, but without a solid martech foundation “you’re going to accelerate and scale the wrong things very, very quickly.”
- Human judgment becomes more important, not less. Kaneshige expects CMOs to have to redesign workflows so human judgment and AI speed work together, and expects clear winners and losers on this within 12 months.
Chapters
- 00:32 — Intro: best-in-class vs. best-aligned martech
- 02:14 — Tom Kaneshige’s background: CMO Council, Forrester, IDG
- 03:37 — How the Apex Martech Matrix measures 1,300 features against top-performing companies
- 04:55 — Scoring operational maturity from public data
- 07:01 — The Ferrari problem: what “overbuilt” means
- 08:50 — How to benchmark your own stack
- 09:56 — The quadrants: overbuilt, under-built, powerhouse
- 13:16 — Why more maturity isn’t always better: marketing automation vs. email
- 17:03 — Deciding where to invest: technology or people, skills and process
- 18:35 — Why consolidation is the wrong default
- 21:55 — Three questions: turn off, turn on, invest
- 23:44 — AI: enhancing the stack vs. replacing SaaS
- 25:03 — The foundation AI needs: data, integration, redesigned workflows
- 26:58 — AI content generation without governance
- 28:03 — One year out: human judgment working with AI
- 28:58 — Staying agile: adaptability as culture
What the Apex Martech Matrix actually measures
MartechTribe, the CMO Council’s research partner, uses public data to determine what is in a company’s martech stack across 50 categories and down to 1,300 individual features. It focuses on top companies in seven industries, defined as the top 30% by revenue per employee, which serves as the proxy for business performance. A second axis estimates how mature the organization is at using those tools, drawn from self-reported information, press releases, case studies and job vacancies. Plotting technology capability against operational maturity shows where each stack lands and lets investment patterns be compared between and within industries.
What “overbuilt” means, and whose fault it is
A stack is overbuilt when technology capability exceeds what the organization’s operational maturity can handle. Kaneshige extends Greg Kihlström’s Ferrari analogy: the car is excellent, but the drivers have only driven dirt roads. He is explicit that this is not the technology’s fault and not the driver’s fault. It is a misalignment. The matrix’s other quadrants include under-built, where organizational maturity is strong but technology is limited and there is room to do more, and powerhouse, where both capability and maturity are high.
Why investing in maturity doesn’t always pay off
Kaneshige treats organizational maturity as an investment that has to show a return. With marketing automation platforms, the value sits in sophisticated automated flows for segmentation, lead scoring and lead nurture, and capability varies widely by product. Maturity is a baseline there; the technology carries the load. Email marketing is the reverse. The technology is mature with little variance, so results depend on experienced people handling deliverability, authentication, blacklists, bounce-backs and list hygiene. Outperformers invest more in technology for the first and more in maturity for the second.
Why consolidating your martech stack is the wrong default
The conventional view is that marketers bought too many shiny objects and should consolidate. Kaneshige says the research doesn’t support that. By his recollection, only about 3% of technologies across industries could and should be divested, while a larger share, around 12%, are quick wins that need no maturity increase at all: “you just need to turn the damn thing on.” He still recommends three questions: what can I turn off, what can I turn on, and what investments will extract more business value. In his words, alignment thinking is strategy, but consolidation is just a tactic.
Should AI enhance your martech stack or replace it?
The research found most organizations are adding AI as a layer on the existing stack, with a smaller share replacing SaaS functionality. Kaneshige says replacement carries real risk: the goal is speed, efficiency and cost reduction, but the organization ends up doing basically the same thing a bit faster, and it can make things worse. Adding AI often brings wholly new capabilities, which is where the upside is, but it depends on the foundation: data silos, the ability to handle unstructured data, integration, and workflows redesigned so human judgment and AI speed are combined well.
What goes wrong when AI content ships without governance
Using content generation as the low-hanging example, Kaneshige says AI is poor at the human experience: empathy, and knowing when something becomes creepy. Without the right governance and redesigned workflows, things get published that shouldn’t. He says the CMO Council has already seen it happen.
FAQ
What is an overbuilt martech stack? An overbuilt martech stack has more technology capability than the organization’s operational maturity can handle. Tom Kaneshige of the CMO Council describes it as a misalignment problem rather than a fault of the technology or the team.
What is the Apex Martech Matrix? The Apex Martech Matrix is research from the CMO Council and MartechTribe that plots martech stacks on two axes, technology capability and operational maturity. It benchmarks them against companies in the top 30% of revenue per employee across seven industries.
Should companies consolidate their martech stack? Not by default. Kaneshige says the research found only a small share of technologies should be divested, while a larger share are quick wins that simply need to be turned on. He calls alignment a strategy and consolidation just a tactic.
Does investing in organizational maturity always improve martech performance? No. Kaneshige says maturity is an investment that must be judged on ROI. It matters most in categories like email marketing where the technology is mature, and less in categories like marketing automation where the platform’s capability does the heavy lifting.
Should marketing teams use AI to enhance or replace their existing martech? Kaneshige says replacing SaaS functionality with AI often means doing the same thing slightly faster and can make things worse. Adding AI can bring wholly new capabilities, but only on a solid martech foundation, otherwise it accelerates and scales the wrong things.
What does operational maturity mean in martech? Kaneshige defines it specifically as people, skills and processes: the organization’s ability to extract value from the technology it owns.
About Tom Kaneshige
Tom Kaneshige is the Chief Content Officer at CMO Council. He creates all forms of digital thought leadership content that helps chief marketers, line of business leaders, as well as growth and revenue officers succeed in their rapidly evolving roles. As a content marketing strategist, he helps vendors shape and influence demand for their products and services. His pre-sales role is to gain brand influence, prominence and trust, as well as source qualified leads and customer opportunities. A Silicon Valley native, he has covered the intersection of business and technology for 20 years as an award-winning journalist at IDG (CIO Magazine, InfoWorld), Informa/Penton and TechTarget, and as a senior analyst at Forrester Research. He is immersed in the expanding marketing and sales technology landscape, disruptive trends impacting business leaders, and game-changing technology such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. Kaneshige heads a team that produces research reports, articles, white papers, strategic briefs, news releases, social media and web site information. He also edits monthly journals, digital magazines, newsletters, blogs and web content for CMO Council’s executive networks. These include the Business Performance Innovation Network, and the newly formed Growth Officer Council and Growth Guidance Center.
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Transcript
[00:00:32] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you: what if the problem with your MarTech stack isn’t that you bought the wrong tools, it’s that you bought the right tools for a company you aren’t? For 20 years, technology buying has run on a feature lens, analyst rankings, RFPs, demos, and the assumption that the best software produces the best performance. New research says that assumption doesn’t hold, and AI is about to make the cost of getting it wrong much higher. Today, we’re going to talk about why best-in-class and best-aligned are two completely different purchases, and only one of them shows up in business performance, what separates a stack that’s overbuilt from one that’s genuinely working and how leaders can tell which one they have, and why the AI layer you’re adding on top will amplify whatever foundation is already underneath it. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Tom Kaneshige, Chief Content Officer at CMO Council. Tom, welcome to the show.
[00:02:14] Tom Kaneshige: Thanks for having me.
[00:02:16] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Looking forward to diving in here, but before we do, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at CMO Council?
[00:02:23] Tom Kaneshige: Sure. So, I’m the Chief Content Officer, as you said. I, I head up research and reports. CMO Council has about, 16,000, senior marketing leaders that, we, access and, and engage with. and before that I was a, senior analyst with Forrester. and before that, dating myself here, I was a journalist, for Informa, IDG TechTarget.
[00:02:53] Greg Kihlström: Great. Great. So yeah, let, let’s dive in here. I wanna start… We’re gonna talk about a few things here, but wanna start by talking about one, one of the things I teed up in the intro, and just this, kind of this, this blind spot in, in MarTech and marketing has never had more, apparatus, if you will, around technology buying. we’ve got analyst grids, RFP cycles, proofs of concept, procurement reviews, all, and, and, and a lot more. Your research, argues all of that was answering kind of a different question than one of the ones that really matters. what was that whole, machinery actually optimizing for, if not business performance?
[00:03:37] Tom Kaneshige: So MarTech Tribe, our partner, for the past few years has been looking at public data to find out what’s in a company’s MarTech stack, right? And I’m not just talking about major components, I’m talking about 50 categories of MarTech. They can drill down into the, features, so they’re looking at, at a given MarTech stack, they’re looking at 1,300 features. So they’re doing a real deep dive analysis of what’s in that stack, what the capabilities are. and again, it’s all public, public data. so because they can’t drill down into every MarTech stack, what they did was they ch- they looked at the top companies across seven industries, and they defined the top companies as the top 30% of revenue, per employee. They’re using that as a proxy for business performance. And so they’re looking at… They, they’ve defined those companies, identified those companies across seven industries, and they are, doing deep dives into those stacks, right?
[00:04:55] Tom Kaneshige: in conjunction, they are also, looking at public data, to get a sense of how mature the organization is to leverage these tools, the, the MarTech stack. They’re looking at things like, self-reported information, press releases, case studies, even, job vacancies to get a sense of where the organization is. From there, they’re able to have a technology capabilities axis and they have a, now an, a operational maturity axis. And that’s where they, they can plot on this graph where MarTech stacks, land by company. By doing that, they’re able to compare, the MarTech investment patterns, between, industries, and they’re able to look at, the, how well the MarTech stack is performing in terms of their, the operational maturity to, to be able to leverage it- within the industry itself, right? Within an industry itself. So, so that’s what they’re doing. The blind spot that this is filling, this is, this is super exciting for me because, as a journalist and as an analyst, one of the blind spots in terms of evaluating MarTech was what’s happening on that practitioner side. The only way we were really able to do it is, finding companies that are willing to talk to us about it. It leads to very, anecdotal, view of what’s happening on that practitioner side. The Apex MarTech Matrix fills this blind spot with actual data of what are companies actually using, and we have a, a fairly good idea of how well they’re using it, right?
[00:06:59] Tom Kaneshige: So that’s the blind spot.
[00:07:01] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, I mean, and from my personal experience working with organizations, I mean, I th- there, there’s often the, the Ferrari analogy, right? Like, you buy, you buy the Ferrari to drive to the grocery store or whatever. so, and correct me if I’m wrong, but, one, one, one outcome of this is companies aren’t able to use the full MarTech stack that they’ve purchased, right? And so is that the fault of the platforms? Is that simply operational maturity and, and things like that? Or is it they actually bought the wrong thing? they either they over, over-built, over-bought, or under- under-bought, or they’re just simply,
[00:07:46] Greg Kihlström: there’s no mechanisms in place to get mature enough to use the platform. I know that’s like 10 different things [laughs] that I said there, but-
[00:07:55] Greg Kihlström: … how d- it sounds like this is getting to, to that question, right?
[00:08:00] Tom Kaneshige: Yeah, the gist of that is correct. I mean, it’s a broad sweep, right? But the gist of it is correct. And, and, and the idea is that, you have more technology capability than your operational maturity can handle.
And that’s what, we call over-built. And the Ferrari example you make i- is, is a great one. It’s like, it’s like buying a Ferrari, right? it’s great, great technology, great company or a great car, yet all your drivers are only familiar with driving on dirt roads.
[00:08:39] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. [laughs]
[00:08:39] Tom Kaneshige: Right? So you have this, this misalignment. It’s not the technology’s fault. It’s not even the, the driver’s fault. It’s a misalignment, a problem.
[00:08:48] Tom Kaneshige: So that’s over-built.
[00:08:50] Greg Kihlström: Makes sense. And so, g- going to the, the two axes that you, you mentioned as well, so the, whether capabilities are present in the platform and whether the people, processes, and skills exist to turn them into performance, maybe talk a little bit more, how does, how does an organization figure out where they are on this, on, on this kind of, this, spectrum?
[00:09:22] Tom Kaneshige: so you would, so MarTech Tribe, offers a service where you can, where they can go in and do an analysis of your, stack.
[00:09:35] Greg Kihlström: Okay.
[00:09:35] Tom Kaneshige: And then use the, the, the top 30% of revenue per employee stacks as a, kind of benchmark or, it’s just something to compare yourself against, right And again, that’s down to the feature tool level. That’s, that’s not just overall the stack.
[00:09:56] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Got it, got it. And, and so there’s also, the, the report distinguishes between what’s referred to as a precision company and versus an over-built. You ta- I know you talked a little bit about over-built, but what exact, how do you define a precision company, and, and what distinguishes that from an over-built one?
It’s very similar to, to a wave. And you have basically four quadrants. So, you have on the, again, just, just so we can visualize this here, on the Y-axis, you have technology capability, technological capability and on the, X- axis, you have o- organizational, operational maturity, right? And then you have the four quadrants. I guess we’ll start with the, I guess it would be the top left, right? That’s over-built, right? We’ve gone over what’s over-built. Below that is, is under-built, and that is where there’s a lot of opportunity to grow because you have strong organizational maturity, but y- you don’t have as much, you’re limited in your technological capability, right? They’re still aligned in terms you’re getting value out of it, ’cause you have the, the, at least some capabilities and you have the people to, to extract value out of it. But you can be doing a lot more.
[00:11:35] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:11:35] Tom Kaneshige: And that leads us to the t- upper right, which we call the powerhouse, and those, companies are, have a lot, again, a lot of tech- technological capability and a lot of operational maturity to extract value. So those are the quadrants.
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[00:13:16] Greg Kihlström: One of the things from, from the report that, I, I’ve certainly found interesting and, and, maybe counterintuitive to, to what we’re, we’re o- we’re, we’re often told is just, higher organizational maturity isn’t necessarily or universally associated with better performance. Can you talk a little bit about that? what… How did, how did that come out in the report? And, and, w- where does potentially maturity investment, maybe have diminishing returns?
[00:13:49] Tom Kaneshige: Okay. that’s a great question. So, let me see if I can break this down. I’m gonna use some examples here, right?
[00:13:56] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:57] Tom Kaneshige: The conventional wisdom says, “Hey, organizational maturity and investing in organizational maturity is always gonna be a win,” right? And, and what our report is saying is, “No, that’s, that’s not necessarily true.” If you look at organizational maturity as an investment, right? then you have to look at the ROI of that. So the dol- are the dollars that you are investing here, giving you the right returns in terms of business value, right? The same way you would look at, technology capabilities, right? So on the far side of the spectrum in terms of maturity, let’s look at marketing automation platforms, right? The real value of marketing automation is the sophisticated automated, flows, for critical things like customer segmentation, like, lead scoring, like lead nurture. There’s a big variance in terms of, of, what those capabilities are in terms of the technology that you, that you purchased.
[00:15:12] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:15:13] Tom Kaneshige: The mature- operational maturity to extract value out of that, I mean, you need it, but of course, but, but it’s a baseline, right? The technology is doing the heavy lifting work so you don’t need to invest in op- as much in operational maturity to extract value. What you need to invest in is the technological capability of that market automation platform. Does that make sense, right?
[00:15:37] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah, it does. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:15:39] Tom Kaneshige: So that’s one side of the spectrum where you, you don’t really need to invest a lot in o- operational maturity. On the other side of the spectrum is, say, email marketing. Now email marketing, the technological capabilities are, are pretty mature, right? You’re not gonna get a huge, variance in terms of, abilities. What matters is operational mat- maturity, which means can your marketers extract the most value out of that technology? And that’s when it comes to things like, how good are you at, delivering? How good are you at, authen- authenticating, avoiding blacklists, dealing with, bounce backs? things, like, list hygiene. These things require, experience and skill to really extract a lot of value out of it. So that’s what we’re seeing from the top performers, or what we’re calling out-performers, is that they’re inve- they’re aligning, the, the technology and the maturity together to get the most value, right? So they’re investing more in technology on, on, say, market automation, and they’re investing more in, maturity in, email marketing.
[00:17:03] Greg Kihlström: Well, and that seems like it takes a, a, a fair amount of judgment from the CMO or the, the, the marketing leaders to understand where to allocate the right amount of, of maturity, right? so sometimes I’m oversimplifying here, but sometimes it, it does make sense to put more dollars after technology. Sometimes it takes more, it makes more sense to put strategy or thought or even other s- types of, some of the email things you mentioned, it might be technical solutions, but it takes someone who’s knowledgeable enough about it to understand where to apply the, the technology, right? So is that, where… Is the, it’s the judgment versus kind of just spending dollars? [laughs] Is that, is that a, is that
[00:17:48] Greg Kihlström: a way to think about it?
[00:17:50] Tom Kaneshige: Well, well, yes, but that’s, that’s what the value of Apex Mar- Tech Matrix is, right? You can look at what’s happening in your own environment- And, compare that against the, the, the out-performers. And you can see, oh, I need to invest here, or I need to, I’m okay here, or, or I’m just excelling past the out-performers in this, in this area here, right? And-
[00:18:16] Greg Kihlström: Yeah
[00:18:16] Tom Kaneshige: … if I want to close the gaps, what do I need to invest in? do I need to invest in, m- technology that they’re using, or do I need to invest in, m- my organizational maturity? And when I’m talking about organizational maturity, let’s be specific. I’m talking about people, I’m talking about skills. I’m talking about processes, right?
[00:18:35] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. A- another thing that I think has a, a more nuanced answer, from, from the report that I think often gets just kind of a, kind of a monolithic of approach sometimes is the idea of, consolidating the stack, right? So, can you talk a little bit about some of the nuance there that, that was found in, in the report and, and just how to, how to think about it? It sounds like it’s not just, just consolidation alone is not, is not the, the right answer, right?
[00:19:09] Tom Kaneshige: Yeah. So, the idea, the conventional wisdom here is that you got too much stuff, [laughs] right?
[00:19:15] Greg Kihlström: Right. Right. [laughs]
[00:19:15] Tom Kaneshige: In your marketing. And largely I mean, to be fair, right, so, marketers have been, kind of accused of, of buying the next shiny object, that kind of thing.
[00:19:33] Greg Kihlström: Right. Right.
[00:19:33] Tom Kaneshige: And, and there’s, and there’s truth to that. I mean, when you buy the next shiny object, it drums up interest, right? It, shows that you’re, y- y- you’re not way back there, but y- but you’re on kind of the front lines, in the vanguard. And it shows that, that you can tout, “Hey, I have this new capability,” right? So, there’s a story to tell. So it, so that’s kinda one of the, traps that they fall into. But getting that capability, to execute in on that capability, that’s where it gets muddy, right? he marketers are l- are often the ones that are responsible for making that work, the human marketer I’m talking about.
[00:20:26] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:20:26] Tom Kaneshige: You know? But that means they have to, they might have to, up-skill, right? That lo- often o- always means that they have to change the way that they’re working. And, the skills that they identified with, might not be relevant in this new, with this new technology, right? So change management is hard, and that’s why you have kind of this technology bloat that you want to, consolidate. That’s the, that’s the conventional wisdom. Here’s the rub: our research shows that that’s not the case. So across industries there’s like, I don’t know, 3% that they found of company or, technologies, could and should be divested, right? The majority, I think it was like, I don’t know, 12% or something like, i- compared to divest- divesting technology. It’s, wait a minute, there’s quick wins here, right? You don’t really need to increase your maturity gap, you just need to, turn, turn the damn thing on, right? [laughs] And you’re gonna get, and they, they, they can immediately start extracting value, quick wins. So this idea of, of consolidating is, is not what we’re seeing, right?
[00:21:54] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:21:55] Tom Kaneshige: That said, you should still ask yourself three questions: What can I turn off? what can I turn on? And what kind of investments, can I make that will extract more business value, right? This kind of alignment thinking is strategy, but consolidation is just a tactic. Yeah.
[00:22:20] Greg Kihlström: It sounds like, yeah, the, the question of what to turn on is as important as what to turn o- I, usually I think a lot of these things are approached as a budget, budget conversation, and okay, if we can turn this thing off or get rid of this thing, then we can get this other thing, or hire this person or, or whatever the case may be. At least I hear less about, hey, what features are we not even, have we not even dusted off since we bought this platform three years ago? [laughs] And then they’re barely scratching the surface. So yeah, no, good, good, good points there. And I guess maybe that leads me to the, the last thing I wanna talk about, and certainly, w- need to talk about AI because it’s, it’s, it’s top of mind for so many. One of the other things the, the research found was kinda two, two parts. I mean, one is 85% of organizations are using AI to enhance their existing stack, and then 30% are replacing at least some of their SaaS functionality outright with, with AI. That’s two very, in, in some cases, very different, use cases and, and two different bets, so to speak. What, what is the thinking there of how to approach, what, when do you, when do you think about replacing versus enhancing?
[00:23:44] Tom Kaneshige: I mean, that’s a loaded question, right?
[00:23:46] Greg Kihlström: [laughs] Sure is.
[00:23:48] Tom Kaneshige: so I will say this, right? So our study shows that, like, I don’t know what it was. I, I, you’ll have to double check the numbers on the report but I think something like 85% are adding AI- As a layer, right? Adding more capabilities. and like something like 30% are replacing, right? Replacing has a lot of challenges and, and you can actually, make things worse when you replace, right? ‘Cause you’re, you’re, you’re looking for speed, you’re looking for efficiency, you’re looking for cost reduction, right? But in the end, you’re still basically doing the same thing. You might be able to do it a little bit faster and and a little bit more at scale, but you’re still basically doing the s- same thing. What we’re talking about when people are adding on AI, they’re adding, a lot of times they’re adding wholly new capabilities which is super exciting, right? but to do that, you better have a solid martech foundation because if you don’t, you’re going to accelerate and scale the wrong things very, very quickly.
[00:25:01] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:03] Tom Kaneshige: When you look at that, for example, it, it, it spans both things, right? To have the right foundation in place. So y- does your data supply chain, do you have data silos in there ca- how well can it, handle unstructured data, right? And, and get the answers to you quickly. how is your integration? But not just the data portion about it. Your marketers, your human marketers have to, have, be able to work with AI in a way that combines their strengths with AI’s speed and, and efficiency, right? and when I’m talking about human marketing, marketers, I’m largely talking about hu- human judgment, So you have to r- so the CMO has to redesign the workflows, so that these, strengths can be, put together well, right? And that’s gonna be the, that’s gonna be the real, challenge and y- you’re gonna see winners and losers in the next 12 months, on this.
[00:26:08] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, and, and I think part of the replacing with AI thing is, there, I would say there’s the, the worst cases of you’re just using a different tool that ends up with more human review time and other… you’re kind of trading, trading one bad for a, for another one, and then you have disconnected s- If, if you’re literally just using some standalone AI tool, you’re copying and pasting things, and there’s all kinds of other things. If you’re using a specific AI tool, you’re still adding something new. Now, if it streamlines things, great, but if it, again, just creates different work and kind of pushes the review process and the redo and the rework down, then really you’re just kind
[00:26:53] Greg Kihlström: of at the same place. You just get to say you’re using AI, [laughs] right?
[00:26:58] Tom Kaneshige: Well, well, all right. Let’s take the, the, the low-hanging fruit of content, generation.So what AI is poor at is, the human experience, of course, the empathy, the, w- when something becomes creepy, those kind of things, right? And if you don’t have the right governance in place, right, that’s gonna make, that, things are gonna get out there that shouldn’t get out there, right? And so it actually, b- by bringing AI in at that level without the right governance, without the right redesigned workflows to handle it, you’re, you’re just asking for trouble, right? And we’ve seen it. We’ve, we’ve [laughs] actually seen it happen, so.
[00:27:39] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. No, definitely. Well, well Tom, thanks so much for joining today. definitely could talk about this [laughs] quite a, quite a bit more, but, and I definitely, I recommend everybody, takes a look at the report. We’ll put a link in the, in the show notes as well. But before we wrap up, got two last questions for you. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
[00:28:03] Tom Kaneshige: Well, we would be… Well, I mentioned it. we would be talking about in, in marketing how AI and human marketers are working together. That’s what we would be talking about there’s this prevailing idea that, that, human marketers are gonna be replaced, right? And that, that’s true. You’re g- there, there will be s- some of that, and it’s gonna be, be difficult. but this idea that human judgment’s gonna be replaced, I would argue that, no, human judgment’s gonna be more important than ever in this, in this day and age. So how well marketers or CMOs can, can integrate the two strengths, is gonna be, key.
[00:28:49] Greg Kihlström: Love it. Love it. And last question, what do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:28:58] Tom Kaneshige: So as I said before, I was a journalist, analyst. I’ve been at the crossroads of marketing, of technology and business for most of my career out of the Silicon Valley, and, if you’re not open to change, [laughs] if you can’t adapt, then you’re, you’re, you’re in a lot of trouble, right? But the good thing is that it’s, it’s fascinating stuff, right? I mean, we’re talking about real innovation. We’re talking about real disruption. We’re talking about real transformations that, that, companies and people have to go through, and, that’s exciting. Scary. Scary. Very scary, especially now, very scary, but, but really exciting. So I don’t need to sharpen my adaptability or anything like that because that’s, that’s the culture that we’re, we’re in right now. CMO Council’s looking at adaptability as a core cultural feature, right? almost, well, in some cases replacing a customer-centric culture to an adaptability culture right, as a key to success.
