Contentsquare’s Jean-Christophe Pitié on measuring CX when the visitor is an AI agent: an AI crawler is not a customer


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In this episode

Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer at Contentsquare, argues that customer experience analytics now has to separate three kinds of AI-era visitor: crawlers reading a site’s content, people referred by an LLM, and agents completing tasks on a customer’s behalf. Pitié spent 22 years at Microsoft, including leading microsoft.com, and now runs contentsquare.com as the company’s own “customer zero.” He explains why directly attributable AI referrals are still under half a percent of traffic even though AI shapes a far larger share of discovery, how Contentsquare’s AI analyst Sense and its agentic experimentation loop move teams from data to tested changes faster, and why peer benchmarks should cover friction but not the parts of an experience that make a brand distinct.

Key takeaways

  • AI referrals are small but nearly doubling. Contentsquare’s latest benchmark puts directly attributable AI-referred traffic at 0.45% of brand-site traffic, growing almost 100% year over year.
  • Referrals undercount AI’s influence. Industry research points to roughly 30% to 50% of consumers using AI somewhere in discovery, research or purchase decisions; in B2B, Pitié puts it at 90% plus.
  • An AI crawler is not a customer, and an AI referral is not an agent. Treating all “AI traffic” as one category leaves teams unable to act on any of it.
  • Marketers now have three AI questions to answer: whether AI is discovering and recommending the brand, whether AI-referred shoppers and their agents can buy successfully, and whether the brand’s own AI experiences actually help customers.
  • Each question needs its own KPI. Measure content access for crawlers, conversion for humans and task completion for agents. Pitié tracks all three on one dashboard for contentsquare.com.
  • Sense works as an AI analyst, not a decision-maker. It identifies friction, estimates financial impact and prioritizes opportunities; the team brings judgment and stays accountable for the outcome.
  • Agentic experimentation proposes and prioritizes tests; people approve them. Pitié warns that a run of individually winning tests can still turn a homepage into a mess if no one steps back.
  • Benchmark the friction, protect the differentiation. Peer benchmarks are for hygiene issues such as slow pages and unnecessary checkout steps, not for storytelling or product discovery.
  • The next debate is who owns the customer relationship. Pitié expects brands to still be choosing between partnering with AI interfaces and keeping control of their experience a year from now, and believes brands and content remain essential.

Chapters

  • 01:03 — How do you improve a journey that partly happens inside an AI assistant?
  • 03:14 — Pitié’s background: 22 years at Microsoft and “customer zero” at Contentsquare
  • 04:22 — What Contentsquare does and which teams use it
  • 05:44 — CX Circle in New York
  • 07:00 — How AI is rewriting the discovery and pre-purchase journey
  • 08:03 — AI referrals at 0.45% of traffic vs. 30–50% AI-influenced discovery
  • 09:44 — Why lumping all AI traffic together fails
  • 10:36 — Three AI questions every marketer now has to answer, and a KPI for each
  • 14:38 — Sense: how an AI analyst and a marketing team decide what matters
  • 17:09 — Agentic experimentation, and why accountability can’t be outsourced
  • 20:30 — Benchmarks: catching up to peers without losing differentiation
  • 22:39 — Keeping a marketing team adaptable through continual change
  • 25:02 — A year from now: will brands or AI own the customer relationship?

Why AI referrals undercount AI’s influence

Contentsquare’s benchmark data shows directly attributable AI-referred traffic at 0.45% of brand-site visits, growing almost 100% year over year. Pitié cautions that referrals only capture part of the picture: research from Contentsquare and the major consultancies consistently finds that roughly 30% to 50% of consumers use AI somewhere in discovery or purchase decisions, and in B2B the figure is above 90%. Shoppers can now get answers, build a shortlist and settle on criteria before a brand ever sees a visit. What doesn’t change, he says, is the need for a good product and an experience that converts without friction.

Why crawlers, AI-referred shoppers and agents need separate KPIs

Pitié frames the shift as three questions. First, is AI discovering and recommending the brand? Second, can shoppers referred by AI, or agents buying on their behalf, actually complete a purchase? Third, are the brand’s own chatbots and assistants helping customers? Each maps to a different measurement: content access for crawlers such as those from Google Gemini or ChatGPT, conversion for people arriving from an LLM, and task completion for agents. Combining them, he argues, leaves a team without a sharp enough read to act.

What an AI analyst should do, and what stays with the team

Sense, Contentsquare’s AI analyst, is trained on the company’s behavioral data and customer benchmarks. It identifies friction, estimates potential financial impact, prioritizes opportunities and compares a site against peers. Pitié describes it as having dozens of junior analysts doing the work, and says he hasn’t seen any customer ready to hand an agent the keys to change their website. People in the loop supply judgment and priorities, and they remain accountable for the business impact.

Why a page full of winning tests can still lose

Contentsquare’s agentic experimentation loop recommends tests tied to a business goal, prioritizes them by impact and suggests how to implement them; a person still approves before anything is published. Pitié’s caution is about accumulation: a promotional banner test, a bigger recommendation panel and an urgency message might each lift conversion on their own, yet together they can make a homepage a mess. Stepping back to protect brand standards and the overall experience is the part he believes AI can’t do yet.

What to benchmark and what to protect

The first question Pitié usually hears from executives is how their website or app compares with their peers. Benchmarks are useful for finding friction, slow pages and unnecessary checkout steps, which he calls basic hygiene. Storytelling and product discovery are unique to each brand and can’t be benchmarked. A footwear brand, a luxury house and a home-improvement retailer shouldn’t deliver identical experiences; the benchmark tells a team where to investigate, not what to design.

Who will own the customer relationship

Pitié expects that a year from now the industry will still be debating whether brands or AI interfaces own the customer relationship. Brands will have to choose between partnering with AI interfaces and keeping control of their full experience. His own view is that brands and content will remain essential and that whoever owns the content and the product will keep much of the control.


FAQ

What share of website traffic comes directly from AI assistants? Contentsquare’s latest benchmark puts directly attributable AI-referred traffic at 0.45%, growing almost 100% year over year. Pitié notes that referrals capture only part of AI’s influence on the journey.

Why shouldn’t brands treat all AI traffic as one category? Crawlers, AI-referred people and agents do different things on a site. Pitié recommends measuring content access for crawlers, conversion for humans and task completion for agents.

What is Contentsquare Sense? Sense is Contentsquare’s AI analyst, trained on the company’s behavioral data and customer benchmarks. It identifies friction, estimates financial impact and prioritizes opportunities, while people make the decisions.

Does agentic experimentation run tests automatically? No. It recommends and prioritizes tests by business impact and suggests how to implement them, but a person approves each test before it is published.

What should brands benchmark against their peers? Hygiene issues such as friction, slow pages and unnecessary checkout steps. Storytelling and product discovery are specific to each brand and shouldn’t be copied from a benchmark.

About Jean-Christope Pitié

With 20+ years of experience in international marketing and partner engagement, Jean-Christophe Pitié is committed to supporting companies of all sizes in their digital transformation. Passionate about technology and retail, he spent two decades at Microsoft, where he had the opportunity to contribute to the cloud transformation and launched Microsoft 365 as well as leading Microsoft Stores. Today, as Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer at Contentsquare, his main mission is to drive customer demand in markets around the world, continue to grow the company’s rich partner ecosystem, and bring holistic customer experience insights to more teams worldwide.

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Transcript

[00:01:03] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. How do you improve a customer journey when part of it happens inside an AI assistant you can’t observe, and the visitor that finally reaches your site may be software acting on a customer’s behalf? Experience analytics was built on the assumption that there’s a person behind every session. Staying agile now means reading signals from customers and from the agents acting for them, and most measurement programs were only designed for the first group. Today we’re going to talk about what customer experience analytics looks like when journeys run through LLMs and AI agents as well as people. Specifically, we’re gonna talk about what changes about the customer journey when LLMs and autonomous agents are part of it, and what stays the same,

[00:01:48] Greg Kihlström: what happens to optimization teams when AI can decide what matters, propose a fix, and run a test, and how attribution and benchmarking hold up when a growing share of the journey never shows up as a click. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Jean-Christophe Pitié, chief marketing and partnerships officer at Contentsquare. Jean-Christophe, welcome to the show.

[00:03:03] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Thank you, Greg. Good to see you again.

[00:03:05] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah, welcome back, I should say. Abs- absolutely. and so those that didn’t catch your last episode, why don’t you give a little background on you and your role at Contentsquare?

[00:03:14] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Sure. so I’m Jean-Christophe. You can call me JC. It’s gonna be easier. So as you said, I’m the Contentsquare CMO and head of partnership and monetization. I’m not gonna go through my resume, but I spent 22 years at Microsoft, including, leading microsoft.com, so I’ve been living in the challenge of, delivering digital experiences and attribution at scale, so I know that. And I will say, because it’s relevant for today, today I’m also customer zero for Contentsquare. Of course, I use Contentsquare on contentsquare.com, so as a-

[00:03:46] Jean-Christophe Pitié: … CMO and so my, my team uses our data and AI to, improve our own website and understand, what works or not. So I’m gonna be talking today about both my CMO hat and, my customer zero hat. If that makes sense.

[00:03:57] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, that’s great, and it’s, it’s, it’s great to be able to use, use the, the tools that you’re marketing, right, so, as well, so that’s great. And, and maybe to, to help with that, to set the stage for, for the conversation, for those less familiar with what Contentsquare offers, I know there’s, there’s a lot of, a lot of features to it, can… what’s some of the core problems that you solve for and who are the, who are, who’s the typical customer?

[00:04:22] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Yeah. I love our, tagline, brand tagline, and so Contentsquare help the brands you love deliver digital experiences worth coming back for. So we are really… If you think about the brands you love to, to be even more, make it real, you know. If you think about the brands you love and the frustration you have when their digital experiences lets you down, the app doesn’t work, you can’t find the product, blah, blah, blah, you know. But Contentsquare are here to help this brand delivers a great experience. And so how does that work? We capture how people interact with, this web and, mobile experiences, the scroll, the tap, where you click and so on, and then we turn all this data into insight and then recommendation for experimentation or improvement, so that’s what we do. I think the teams

[00:05:07] Jean-Christophe Pitié: who uses us are mostly, marketing, marketing and digital team, product team, if you have a product web-based, and of course data team. So they use our intelligence to improve customer, conversion, retention and customer experience. And some numbers about the company, we have about 1,300, employees across 14 countries, so very global, company, based mostly in Paris and New York, and that’s where I am now. And, we work with more than 2,000, global brands, and very, very well-known brand like, ASICS, Samsung, Louis Vuitton and, and so on.

[00:05:44] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. Well, and, and speaking of New York, we’re also… The, this show’s gonna air a little bit afterwards, but, like, tomorrow, I believe, your CX Circle conference is happening in New York, so I know we’re gonna touch on a few things that, that involve announcements at, at the conference, but what are you looking forward to most there?

[00:06:05] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Yeah. Just to explain maybe your, the audience, CX Circle is our big North America event. it’s tomorrow at, in the, at the Glass House in New York. And we bring customers, all customers, mostly B2C customers, from return and, CPG companies, together. They share ideas, they learn from each other, they see what’s coming next. And yeah, we’re expecting about 1,500 customers. That’s gonna be exciting.

[00:06:31] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.

[00:06:31] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Definitely very excited about the launch. But, what I love about this event is I want to learn, I want to see what customers are gonna make work from all the capabilities we’re gonna announce tomorrow. what will they change? What will they build they could not do before? And, I, I, I stole this tagline from someone but, for me, what excites me is I don’t want our technology to be cool, our product to be cool. I want it to help our customers build cool experiences or memorable experiences. So that’s what I’m exciting to find out tomorrow.

[00:07:00] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Love it. Love it. Yeah. And so, as part of that, as part of those announcements, one, one of the, one of the lines in the announcement is that the, the rules of customer experience are, are being rewritten. And I wonder if you could unpack that for us. Certainly, I, I know a lot of people listening out there are feeling it, but what rules are, are we talking about here, and, and what, what has changed in, in how the customer journeys are, are working?

[00:07:26] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Yeah. I’m gonna state the obvious, obviously, but yes, one massive change is, obviously AI, yeah? And how AI is, is, changing the discovery journey, the pre-purchase and what, what’s happening and I think we’re all experiencing, e- e- experiencing it today, so I’m not gonna spend too much time on it. But AI, you c- can answer a customer questions. They can assemble their shortlist and a checklist before any purchase, so before you ever see as a brand a visit. So this discovery is happening more and more, through AI or, I use AI as a, proxy for LLMs, Chat, ChatGPT-

[00:08:03] Greg Kihlström: Yeah

[00:08:03] Jean-Christophe Pitié: … and so on. and, and what we found out, it’s interesting to see maybe some numbers we, we see, with our, the, all the brands we have and the data we have from them, these brands. We see that there’s almost a products. Our latest benchmark puts like AI referrals, so traffic coming from AI being directly referred, something you can track to a brand website. It’s only today at .45%. So out of the trillions of data we have, .45, 0.45% of traffic is directly attributable, um… You can attribute directly to, an AI engine or LLM, which is, it’s growing almost 100% year over year, so it’s a fast growth, but it’s still pretty small.

[00:08:47] Jean-Christophe Pitié: But referrals, as we say, it only captures part of the influence. And, all the research, we’ve done customer research, I know basic, BCG, Bain, McKinsey, everyone does their own research. All the research, all research is points to the same direction, between, roughly between 30% and 50% of consumers use AI somewhere in the discovery, research, or purchasing decision. So 30 to 40, 50% in B2C. If you go to B2B, my space, it’s 90% plus.And so, so yeah, that’s a massive change in how you need to think about, your brands, the discovery process. what doesn’t change, to answer your question, I think you, you still need a good product. You still need an amazing experience that converts without any frictions. And, and so as a CMO or head of, marketing or return, you need, you need to prepare for these new journeys while keeping the good ones you have today generating revenue. But that’s-

[00:09:44] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, a- and, and as, as you said already, AI, it’s a… AI is a pretty big umbrella al- already, right? And even when we talk about AI traffic, that could also mean a lot of different things. it could, it could be a person who researched in an LLM, it could be a person’s agent or, or, many other things. What, what kind of problems do, does a brand, face when they try to lump all those as, as kind of one thing?

[00:10:16] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Yeah. No, it’s a great question, Greg, and I, I spend a lot of time with customers or my peers, CMO, and I think there is a lot of confusion with AI. we need to, unpack it, to your point. An AI crawler is not a customer. An AI referral is not an agent. So I think if I… can I, elaborate a bit because I’m very passionate-

[00:10:35] Greg Kihlström: Oh, yeah. Of course. Yeah

[00:10:36] Jean-Christophe Pitié: … about that space as a CMO. Yeah. If you think about m- marketers and our, our job as, as marketers, it used to be pretty simple. It used to be say, hey, 10 years ago, optimize for search and being the top ranking blue link, on Google. Then paid, paid media, sorry, social, social came up and so on, so it making it harder. But now if you think about it, there are three new questions you really need to answer, and you need, you need to have the answers. One, is AI discovering and recommending us as a brand? Because as we said earlier, 30% to 50% of customers are using AI in a, as a discovery journey. So you need to understand, hey, AI discovering and recommending us. Two, can shoppers, successful- successfully buy from us, referring by

[00:11:21] Jean-Christophe Pitié: AI or even their agents? we, we’re gonna talk probably about news, although it’s people are gonna start using agents to buy on their behalf. Can they buy successfully from us as a brand? That’s question two. And the third one, all, brands have been, launching and developing their own AI experiences, chatbot or personal assistant. Is it really actually helping customers? So, as a marketer, you need to be able to, answer these three questions, and they’re all AI related, but very different angles. And, and so each question and, needs a different answer. A crawler, you know what I’m talking about, a Google, Gemini crawler or ChatGPT crawler, they read and, scan your website content. So you need a specific KPI to make sure, hey, okay, am I successful, being, being read and, can the, can the crawler finds information which is relevant about my pricing product and so on? Then the second question, the second KPI, a person, a person referred by ChatGPT. Can they still shop? They st- they shop as a person. Can they, achieve what they want? And so, having these different KPIs and looking at it differently, very separately is, is very important. so I would say yes, measure content access for quarters, measure… keep measuring human conversions, measure a- agent task completion. When an agent, a muse or that’s gonna come on your website, is trying to complete a task, not really, task, or not really

[00:12:44] Jean-Christophe Pitié: to buy, so. So that’s what we are, recommending and, otherwise, if you confuse everything, you’re not gonna be, sharp enough and successful enough. And, for example, in my team that I, I’ve put in place a dashboard where I look at all these three KPIs and, and I, I track success and progress, across these different KPIs.

[00:14:38] Greg Kihlström: [gentle music] Maybe related to that, I know, an- one of the big announcements at the, at the conference is around the platform’s AI sense, component. And, I, I know one, one of the challenges that marketers had previously was getting enough signals, right? And, and getting signals from all the places. Now I feel like they have all the signals, but making, no pun intended, making sense of, of all of them is really the challenge, right? And so, you

[00:15:23] Greg Kihlström: know, my, my question with that is how does, how does a marketing team help an AI understand what matters? certainly, AI can match patterns and, and understand frequency of things and, and everything like that, but how do, how does humans and, and the AI work together to, to get to what, what’s really important?

[00:15:47] Jean-Christophe Pitié: No, it’s a great question. And, and, thank you. And sense, is our, AI intelligence. It’s, it’s our analyst, we could… It’s our analyst, AI analyst. It’s grounded in all the trillions of behavioral data points. So we’ve trained it on it and the customer benchmark. But to answer your question, how it works for us, sense is gonna identify friction and identify potential financial impact, all of that. It’s gonna prioritize opportunities. So basically, it’s gonna bring you evidence and recommendation to your point based on the pattern recognition, the benchmarking, and benchmarking your peers. sorry, your website versus peers. But at the end of the day, your team, the human beings, in the loop, are gonna bring judgment and, and a, and decision, and the priorities. I don’t think… at least

[00:16:32] Jean-Christophe Pitié: that’s how I use it. I see customer using it. I don’t see anyone ready to, yeah, hand the keys to, to, to an agent, even if, even if it’s our agents to make changes on the website or, and so on. So I would say it helps you reach an informed decision fa-faster. It’s like having dozens of analysts, junior analysts with you doing the work, but at the end of the day, yes, you remain human beings. You remain accountable for the, the decisions and the business impact.

[00:17:01] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. But I mean, I assume it can massively accelerate the, where, where you get those insights, right?

[00:17:09] Greg Kihlström: But yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, and, and another, another, announcement is around agentic experimentation, where AI can help with hypothesis and test design and, and everything like that. So, again, on, on the acceleration standpoint, I mean, I think I know a lot of the teams that I work with, they have the very best intentions to run a scientific experiment every time they do something, and then life or work happens and, and it kind of falls by the way. So, so to me, this seems really exciting to be able to do that in a, a structured way and a systematic way. Can you talk a little bit about, that and, how, how that works and again, how the, how the human also stays in the loop

[00:17:54] Greg Kihlström: in that process as well?

[00:17:56] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Yeah, it’s, it’s very intertwined, as you said. we, as part of the science analyst work we are doing, we are we- we are really, adding this agentic experimentation loop where, we help teams based on the amount of data, we help teams identify, uh- What they could improve in the existing experience to improve customer experience or engagement, whatever is your business goal. You’re gonna use a business goal. It’s gonna recommend to you test, it’s gonna prioritize a test based on business impact, which are the tests you should prioritize and, it’s gonna even make, a recommendation about this test and m- and make suggestion on how to implement it, on your site and so on. And you still have to approve that to publish it and, and run it.

[00:18:40] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.

[00:18:40] Jean-Christophe Pitié: So i- to your point, it, it really is gonna help you accelerate, from data to insights to action and then changes. It’s gonna really help you accelerate it and scale faster. That’s, that’s really a game changer.

[00:18:53] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.

[00:18:53] Jean-Christophe Pitié: I do, I do believe, the human approval and judgment, again, is super important. And, that’s what I was saying earlier. You can’t really outsource accountability. And what I mean by that is like maybe you as a marketer have seen it over and over with testing. Imagine you run test, test on a homepage on very small things, one, one test on a promotional banner, another one making a recommendation panel or content bigger.

[00:19:18] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.

[00:19:18] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Another one with a urgency messaging to buy now. Each test individually I’m sure you can impro- you can, improve, the conversion individually. But then at one point, if you don’t step back, your own page becomes a mess. You just messed us your own pages, your own page, even if each individual test made sense. And I think we’ve all been through that as marketers, and I think that’s where the human teams, all this, brand standard, customer experience, stepping back, together is gonna be so important because that’s something AI cannot do yet, I, I don’t believe.

[00:19:51] Greg Kihlström: Right. Right. Right. Yeah, and I th- I think the power is where it, humans are augmented, right? ’cause again, all, all of the, all of the capabilities can be informed by human strategy or whatever, but humans just can’t crunch the numbers in the same way or see the patterns or, or even do, do that work. Or in the case of the experimentation thing again, I, I just, I keep running into teams that are just they, they wish they had the time to set up these things, where if it could be set up and they just hit the button-

[00:20:22] Greg Kihlström: … how much quicker could they learn, right?

[00:20:24] Jean-Christophe Pitié: And, that’s exactly what we are building. It’s exactly-

[00:20:26] Greg Kihlström: Yeah

[00:20:26] Jean-Christophe Pitié: … this very fast scalable, experimentation, yeah, loop.

[00:20:30] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. another interesting thing is the, the benchmarks capability. And I, I know you briefly, you briefly touched on this but, being able to look at… it’s one thing to be able to improve your own performance against your own benchmark, but I, I, I think it’s, it’s interesting to be able to look against industry peers to be able to make a, a better business case and then things like that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and also, how does this… How do you, how do you maintain the balance between catching up to your peers but also making sure that you’re staying differentiated?

[00:21:07] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Yeah. Do related to your question, when I meet, when I meet with, customers, especially executives, the head marketing, the CRO or head of marketing for a big brand do you know what is a usually n- 90% of the times the fir quest- first question they ask me?

[00:21:23] Greg Kihlström: What’s that? [laughs]

[00:21:25] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Is the first question I usually get is, “Hey, how is my website or mobile app comparing to my peers?”

[00:21:31] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.

[00:21:31] Jean-Christophe Pitié: Number one question.And so to your point about benchmark. So they really, that’s the number one thing they want to know. Am I better or worse than my peers in the industry? Really number one question. And so this benchmarking is very, is very powerful, especially for, to identify friction, slow pages, unnecessary checkouts. To, to do that, I would call it a hygiene or a, a, a b- basic stuff. And I think benchmarking is a good place to learn or to learn from.

[00:21:58] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.

[00:21:58] Jean-Christophe Pitié: But to your point then, the storytelling, the product dis- discovery, all of that are very unique to the brand and that’s not something you can benchmark. So you need to keep your own, your own identity. So you know what I love to, to tell them usually is like, “You want to benchmark the friction or the, basic hygiene stuff, but you want to protect what makes you unique or, or differentiated.” And, and we all know, yeah, if you’re a shoe company like Zics or if you’re Louis Vuitton or if you’re a, Home Depot in the US, yeah, you can’t de- you’re not gonna deliver identical experiences, so.

[00:22:32] Jean-Christophe Pitié: So benchmark tells you where to investigate, but yeah, it doesn’t prescribe the design or, or so on.

[00:22:39] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. so a couple, couple things as we, as we wrap up here. So, your, your team uses the term agentic era. The, the traffic mix, the measurement models and, and the tools are probably gonna shi- keep shifting. we’ve seen this [laughs] already. I, I feel like when I talk about early days of things, it’s like two years ago as opposed to, 20 years ago or something like that. But, how do you as, also as a marketing leader, how do you keep your team i, in a mindset of, we, we all hear things, people don’t love change and, and some change is, is easier and, and better than others. But, change can still be

[00:23:24] Greg Kihlström: tough, and yet we seem to be in a, in a period of continual change. How do you as a leader keep your team adaptable and, and, and, and able to, to adapt and, and rebuild without feeling like they’re starting from scratch?

[00:23:40] Jean-Christophe Pitié: [laughs] It’s a great question. Uh-

[00:23:44] Greg Kihlström: [laughs]

[00:23:44] Jean-Christophe Pitié: I, I’m gonna be very humble and I don’t know if I have a secret sauce, but it’s very top of mind. I will say first, in my case, I’m a, I’m a learner, and, I’m very curious, so I try to lead by the example. I started, our own AI transformation probably, at the organizational level two, two and a half years ago. So, I’ve been building my own agents, professional in and at home, VITE coded, initially prompt VITE coded. So I’ve shown, I’ve led by example. And then of course, for the teams I, I’ve put in place, a, a framework, tools where we let people, try, adapt and, and so now I think we, we are past- The adoption process, or phase, we are moving into the automation and how do we use agents to automate some of the marketing task activities. So

[00:24:30] Jean-Christophe Pitié: we, we are moving there and, here we are getting more structure versus a chaotic, agentic, adoption phase. So, but I would say role modeling, learning, being not afraid to test and, and fail and learn, is probably how we do it. I’m also customer zero, as I said earlier, for Contentsquare, so I use a lot our own tech on our own website to, to make decisions. So, that’s how… Yeah, that’s how I do it. I don’t… And so, but people, processes, and tools and being very, very curious and agile. There’s no, secret sauce, but, uh-

[00:25:02] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. No, love it, love it. And last question for you. if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?

[00:25:10] Jean-Christophe Pitié: [laughs] if, if I had to bait, to bet, I would bet that we will still be debating, who earns, who owns stories or customer relationships, a year from now between the brand and the, the AI. there has been a lot of, debate about, you saw recently with Muse and Darts and Amazon blocking them, like, hey, who’s gonna, who’s gonna own that experience? I think it’s still gonna be a, a, a big debate a, year from now and, brands will have to decide whether they want to partner with the AI interface, gives them more control, or they’re gonna want to retain control of, all their customer experience. My personal conviction, we will debate about it, but I think at the end of the day, brands and content

[00:25:56] Jean-Christophe Pitié: are king and are gonna remain essential. So I think we’ll keep using AI, but I think the brands and, and, and who owns the content and product will, will stay in control a lot, but we still have that debate. That’s my personal view.


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