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Brightly Software’s Whitney Rosa explains why B2B marketing is shifting from campaign-centric to system-centric, powered by AI agents that automate decisions, optimize in real time, and scale marketing impact.
This episode features an interview with Whitney Rosa, Director of Global Marketing Operations at Brightly Software, a Siemens company that delivers data-driven asset management solutions to help organizations drive digital transformation and sustainable growth.
Whitney shares how Brightly Software is approaching agentic marketing from an operations-first perspective. She explains how her team is moving beyond traditional campaign-based execution to build systems that can make decisions, adapt in real time, and operate continuously across the marketing funnel.
She also discusses what it takes to lead this shift as a marketing operations leader, from creating a culture of experimentation to identifying where AI can reduce manual work and unlock more strategic impact. Whitney highlights how agentic AI is helping her team scale decision-making, improve collaboration across the business, and rethink how marketing teams operate.
Key Takeaways:
TRANSCRIPT
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Which is nice, and I'm just gonna get my notes brought up over here, and we'll get us kicked off.
Okay, Whitney, thank you so much for joining us on The Agentic Marketer, where we're taking a peek into today's leaders tech stacks and AI strategies. Whitney, thank you for joining. I would love for you just to kick things off and just tell me a little bit about yourself and the work that you're doing over at brightly software.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm director of global marketing operations at Brightly and supporter marketing organization with our tech stack enabling with all of our campaign motions and so much more beyond that as a Siemens company. Brightly supports digital transformation and sustainable growth by delivering innovative data driven asset management solutions across a variety of industries. So our software helps our clients manage and optimize their assets after operations and offers predictive insights to help our clients prevent the next leak, flood, costly power outage, or so much more. And we help them with capital planning too, so that they have plenty of funding to solve said problems when they inevitably
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's amazing. Okay, the show obviously is called the agentic marketer. I love to kick the podcast off with this question because everyone has like a slightly different answer. So for you Whitney, agentic marketing and being an agentic marketer, what does that mean to you? Like how are you defining that term?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think agentic marketing is marketing where AI doesn't just assist humans, it acts on their behalf, obviously, within clear guardrails. But instead of AI being a tool you're prompting, it's a system that can observe signals, make decisions, and act over time. So as an agentic marketer, we're designing those systems. We're thinking about how we train them with inputs across the business, whether it's from product or sales or BI or customer service. And we're telling the AI where autonomy makes sense and where outcomes matter and then where do humans get to stay in control. So it's that mindset shift from how do I do this faster to what decisions should humans make and what decisions can agents handle better than we can.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Amazing. I really like that answer is it's like you're not prompting anymore. Like these are systems that are going to run autonomously that you don't need to continuously prompt. And to be an agent marketer, you have to now build those systems, which does feel like a very big leap from where we were even a couple of years ago, where you were using more like we term it co-pilot, but something that was assisting you in running co-pilot versus you giving it actions and systems, and then it's running autonomously. So I really love that answer, Whitney. That was great. Now, obviously it's different from traditional marketing, but when you think about the world right now, when you're building these systems for agentic versus traditional marketing as it was before, what do you think is like the biggest differentiation between the two?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think traditional marketing is really process driven and super manual, right? We use automation, but it's very linear, right? If this happens, then go do this. But agentic marketing is adaptive and nonlinear. So because we have those agents that can respond to real time inputs, whether it's fire behavior or performance signals or intent data, they can adjust their execution without waiting for that human to step in every time. So I think it really leads to a lot of speed and increased scale of decision making. Whereas with traditional marketing, it's a lot more like let's review and decide and execute and evaluate and then optimize. So we wash, rinse and repeat and keep doing that over again until we get the desired results. So I think with agentic teams, we're deciding that decision logic early and we're letting it run and operate continuously.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, amazing. I before the podcast we were talking about, you've spent a lot of time in attribution. So I think about like traditional marketing and to your point of how much you spend going back and reviewing and you're looking at like, is this attribution and our scoring models and stuff like that. And I feel like that is a constant iteration and a very manual process where to your point, I do like the mind, the mindset of like, okay, with the Gentic, you've got to get that all done up front. You have to set those systems up early. You have to build that in the beginning and then let those systems run, which is not the way that it's been before. Like I've been in my earlier part of my career, did a lot of attribution and scoring models. And I remember you just going and tweet those all the time. It was just like, that was your job. And that is really not necessary anymore in a Gentic world, which is a crazy shift.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yes.
All the time, nonstop.
It is, it's a really big shift.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Now, on the point of shifting, so you've obviously done this, it sounds like you've been kind of at the forefront and leading this. What did it take for you to make that leap from experimentation or from that original, like traditional marketing and starting to dabble in AI to now truly like leading with agent tech marketing within your organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think it's a journey. I think we've also made this journey before. If you go back in time, right, we were all marketers and then marketing automation platforms came out and we had this explosion of MarTech come out and we all had to learn how to use those tools, where to use them, when to use them, and now they're commonplace. But I think it's the same thing with AI. And so I think as a leader, you really need to encourage and support your team and invest in learning AI. I think you have to create those safe spaces to build confidence and excitement and let people be comfortable taking risks and thinking creatively about how they want to use AI. And I think once you get to that point, right, that's where you're really ready to make that transition. And you can start to redesign processes to incorporate AI. So getting clear on your data governance, decide where those humans add significant value and where they don't. So that's that to me is where the leadership really matters, right? If we as leaders treat our infrastructure with AI as something we must implement and optimize, our teams will leverage it and progress. If we keep it optional, it's really gonna stay just a toy and we're not gonna see that cultural shift that we really need to have in order to progress, just like we did when we progressed to the MarTech we know and love today.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. I feel like two of the things you touched on there, it's so interesting to find this, this balance of like, yes, we need to make it more of a non-optional. Like you need to be using AI in your teams today. Like that is kind of a non-negotiable now. But I like to your point of you have to give a safe space to fail. And it's always an interesting time to be in where it's like, okay, this is something you have to figure out. Like as a, as a leader, are telling your team, like this is sort of a must have for us. But I think it does take a, a particular leader to be able to also create that safe space to say like, it's okay to fail because this is fairly new. Like it's, you are going to have to go figure this out. Like I'm telling you as a team, we need to go learn these things, but I'm also saying like, you can fail at this and finding that balance is, it's definitely hard. And I know it sounds like you and the team have been doing a really good job of that and have created that safe space for failure, but also then like allowing your team to make that shift. You're not experimenting anymore. It's become deeply ingrained in your team. And I think once you find that balance, that is, that's how you get your team there.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think too, like creating space as a leader where the education is valued and a priority. I feel like every week I'm like, look, here's a really interesting podcast or here's a really interesting article or great webinar, like virtual conference talking about AI or how to use it. Like go get ideas, come back, creatively and let's try it out. Right? We can do soft launches in our tools that have agentic AI. We can work with our partners across the business to build agents. We can try it out and optimize and iterate as we go, just like we've always done with MarTech. It's just a new way of doing it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. Now I'm curious, where are you seeing agentic AI show up most visibly in your team today and where are you getting value from agentic AI within your marketing organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, we see it a lot where there's high value, excuse me, high volume and repeated decision making. So really looking at, we talked about attribution, right? Like a huge volume of data there. It's repeated decision making all the time. So leveraging agentic systems for monitoring performance or surfacing insights, that's a huge place, I think, for it. And then as marketers, right, we're always creating content. We're constantly transforming it to different content types. So like so many others, we're seeing it in that content space, right? How do you have that webinar and then leverage AI to get the blog and the white paper and everything else out of it? So that's where we're really seeing it. And then I think that next step for us is really not just the efficiency we're getting out of it, but okay, now we've had efficiency. So how do we use that extra time to focus on strategic work and decisions and leverage that benefit of AI, which is hugely helpful. So I think that's our biggest use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, now, if you're thinking about the agentic AI within your organization today, I'm curious, we hear a lot in the market right now. They're like, don't just bring things on just for the sake of bringing them on. Like first find the problem that you're trying to solve for. And it seems so simple, but it is really important to be like, okay, like this is the use case or this is the manual, like volume heavy tasks that we're trying to solve for. So I'm curious, when you're looking at your agentic AI, like what are the biggest problems that you're initially trying to solve for when you're looking at what you're utilizing within your organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think we're trying to solve for things where we have limited bandwidth or capacity, right? Like if you use SDRs or BDRs, right, they work a set number of hours in a set time zone and you might not have a global organization to cover your website chat all the time, right? But you can leverage AI and have 24 seven coverage on there. And it's amazing, right? Like that's a place for AI to be immensely helpful. So I think that's a great example. But also just in our MarTech, right? Where can we look at repeated use cases, right? Whether it's like pulling data and insights in and transforming into something really digestible that we can serve up on every account or every contact. So our sales team knows what they're doing or what they should talk about when they pick up the phone, right? Like those are great examples of where you can use AI and it saves time, but also is more impactful for the business.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. Is there anything unexpected that agentic marketing or really bringing agentic AI into your team that helped unlock for your team that you weren't anticipating?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, you know, it's funny. My team and I were talking about this recently and we were talking about how there's a lot more increased collaboration because we're going back to, you're being an agentic marketer, right? So you're training the AI. And so we're seeing our team work more across the business than they did before, right? Before you might always work with just your campaign managers in your MarTech automation platform to send emails and build nurtures and things like that. But now, you know, you're training AI who's talking about your products or helping with customer support issues or things like that. And so we're having just greater collaboration across the business there. So I think that's really exciting and great for people who, you know, in operations who are typically behind the scenes to get to make some new connections.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, that's amazing. Now, the last one I have particularly about your team in agentic marketing, I always like to ask is about metrics that you're looking for. Just in general, your marketing team, like what metrics matter most to you? And then most importantly, when you are bringing on agentic marketing or agentic AI, what are you looking for? Like where's the lift happening? Like what metrics are you watching to make sure like, yes, this is working? Or is there anything else that you are particularly tracking to know that there is actual performance happening?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, we're a very, very data driven marketing team. I've talked a lot before in my career about attribution, and that continues to be our biggest metric. So it's been really interesting to see how we can tie in AI support into measuring attribution from a marketing viewpoint. And so that's our biggest metric, right? Is how much revenue are we getting from a specific channel? So we're starting to look at AI as channels, right? Where are we leveraging an agentic marketer to help us do something and where does that lead to revenue costs? So looking at volume and the conversions as well while we're continuously training our agent too is a big benefit too, right? We want to be able to make sure that what they're giving back is accurate. So how many times do we have to go back and retrain is another metric we're looking at as well.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Amazing. Okay, now I want to shift and look a little bit forward and just get your take. Because, obviously, I think that some of the stuff you shared about Jill is is really incredible, and a lot of teams are looking for that ability to scale without having to raise headcount.
So if you were advising another marketing leader on where they should start with adopting AI, even if it's not like Jill or that version of agentic marketing, I'm curious your take as a leader who is obviously very much leaned into AI. Where would you tell them to start?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I would say probably start just general education on why you want to bring AI into the fold, how it's going to help your team, what opportunities is it gonna bring, what gaps is it gonna close. And then once you have that, maybe you get a lot less pushback on adopting it. And then from there, really define what that success metric will look like by bringing the the AI tool inbound so that you know upfront what you need to achieve in order to show that ROI.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep. I totally agree. I think one of the things I know I misjudged in this process is I'm sure I don't know if it's the same for you at Brightly Software, but if it is for, like, our listeners, but there's a big push, like, tops down for how are you using AI? How are you adopting AI? So that upwards communication wasn't as hard of saying, like, oh, we're using AI. It was convincing the team and the downward communication of why this is worthwhile for you because it is a new process. It does take a lot time. So I like where you, like, anchor that in the why we're doing this, what this is gonna impact, really help not only, like, leadership who are pushing you to do it, but also help me to get the rest of the team on board with why this is, like, an imperative for our team. And it's not just because, oh, our board told us to do it. It's like, no. These they're, like, actual metrics that this is going to impact, and let's anchor in that and get people bought into that process. So I I totally agree.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah. And in in a b to b mark marketing organization, we need to be able to have sales in alignment with everything that we're doing because we are joined at the hip. So we want them to be brought in and bought in at the front too so that we can share those common pipeline goals. So totally. They were they were very receptive and also very, very much loved, Jill.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yes. Usually for sales, if it's gonna help them close more deals, it's pretty easy to get. And once you can prove that, they get on board.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Improve it. Yeah.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Now from a buyer expectation standpoint, do you think there's anything that we are really underestimating as marketers? Like, we we talk a lot about buyers expect, like, personalization, but I think even what personalization is over time has, like, really changed. So from your take as someone adopting AI pretty frequently and, you know, you mentioned you're in the back end of of your Gentec marketing platform and with Jill, and you're looking at how buyers are interacting with your site, what do you think we're underestimating that you would flag to marketers like, hey. You you need to stay on top of this?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I mean, I think you you you called it out personalization, but how can you get the right personalization at the right time? So right now, prior to AI, it's it's a very generic outreach. Using AI, it's still personalized, but is it personalized to the benefit of the buyer? Are they feeling that it's a one to one email even though it's being generated via AI? And also the immediate follow-up. You know, someone who form fills to they will not talk to a sales rep who waits five days to reach out and to complete that meeting. Like, they want it within two seconds. So I think just making sure that there's that tool that you can use to really hone in on getting the right personalization and time to lead is key, and that's obviously what we're really leveraging Qualified for.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. I think the instant gratification and instant follow-up is so important.
And I know, obviously, working with Qualified every single day as, like, an end user, and I get to pilot it, but I've just become so accustomed to, like, yeah. If I'm gonna fill out a form, someone's gonna follow-up with me, or I can get my questions answered right away. And I know in my personal life, I'll go, you know, if I'm looking for something online and if I don't get if I fill out a form and ask someone, like, we're doing some work in our house, I was looking for, like, a plumber, and they didn't get back to me right away. I'm like, what is the like, I've been trained now to expect that instant gratification. And when you don't have it, and I'm like, man but I think that is happening to all of our buyers now, whether it's from, like, a b to c standpoint and, like, the one click to purchase. Like, we've all just gotten so trained to expect that instant response and gratification. And when you don't get it, like, man, we lose interest fast.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Or you lose trust that they're, you know, there to deliver because they're not putting you first.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep.
Yeah. Totally. Now looking ahead in the next twelve months, what do you think the single biggest change for b two b marketing will be?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I guess I could say, you know, probably twelve months from now, everyone will use AI in marketing. So how are you going to use it in the correct way to differentiate yourself from your competitors by really removing that friction from the buyer experience and making that human experience from a client to client perspective better. So I think that is the change for the next twelve months.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep. And if everyone is going to be using AI in the next twelve months, I feel like there is potentially a skill gap. From like, if you're listening to this and you're like, man, if everyone needs to be using AI, my whole team, whether myself or, you know, my direct reports or whatever is. If you could give advice, Whitney, to any of those people who are listening that are a little bit nervous that they're going to be expected in the next twelve months to be utilizing AI across the board, do you think there are particular skills that we can be focusing on to make sure we are prepped for that shift in the next twelve months?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I think at least in my team, we are really focused on, I guess you can call it orchestration. We have a lot of different platforms that offer various AI tools. So how are we going to integrate that across the whole marketing team, the sales team, our sales operations team so that we can really align that tech stack, really clean that data, design intentional handoffs between those systems so that they're talking. We're not overriding each other. We're not duplicating efforts. Even include the human handoff there so that you're leveraging all of the tools you have at your disposal to really maximize your ROI.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. And now my last question before we move into my favorite section, which is our lightning round.
Besides this, like, agentic marketing inbound pipeline, are there any other emerging agentic use cases or, like, AI agents that you think are going to be impactful for marketing in the coming twelve months?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I mean, living in operations, right? We don't really thrive in the flashy use cases. We're really more in the operational ones, but so much value in monitoring performance and surfacing insights. I think with the amount of data we can collect as marketers right now, it's impossible as a person to leverage the data that we get and get insights out of it and then keep up with the data that's coming in, right? The minute you pull something from a system that's out of date. So leveraging those agents to continually monitor that and surface it is a huge use case that I find really valuable. I think as businesses will start to see that be more important and time-saving when it comes to QBRs and business reviews and all of the things that take up so much time for everyone, those agents will be really, really valuable. I think too, autonomous testing and optimization across channels, that's a big one. And then to my point, how do you string those together? So it's, we tested in this one place and now we're connecting it here. How can we work those two together to optimize and iterate and start moving from channels specific AI agents to more omni-channel agents? I think that's a really interesting next phase as we grow as marketers. And then I think another one is intelligent routing prioritization based on intent and behavior. Current systems really follow that if then, they're very statement-based. So how do we progress that to leverage AI where we can start to say they're interested in this, so that changes how we route them or prioritize them. So I'm really excited about that use case. I think there's a lot of value there. We're trying to constantly surface high quality leads or opportunities or get to those buyers or the buyers who are a little bit more motivated than others. I think that will be a really impactful use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. Okay, I'd like to wrap things up. I have a couple, we call them lightning round questions. So, like, quick questions, quick answers. First one is, other than ChatGPT, because that tends to be most everyone's answer, what was the first AI tool that you started experimenting with?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Honestly, Qualified, which is really funny. But it was really one of the first places that it clicked for me as a MOPs leader that our future is training and optimizing and leveraging AI. In my previous roles, it was starting to train the AI SDR and progress that forward. And it was really interesting having to go work with our product team to get specific answers to make sure we're feeding it the right information, pulling that and giving it back and saying, like, well, this didn't seem quite right. Can you score this? Can we correct it? Can we train it better? It was really the first glimpse for me of, like, oh, this is what an agentic marketer does and this is what our future is going to look like.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Oh God, agentic or AI. I mean, I feel like they're everywhere. You cannot escape it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You cannot escape it.
I think it's so funny. I'll scroll LinkedIn and, like, every ad that I get is some agentic or AI, which, like, we're just as guilty of it. I get it. But I'm like, it has permeated everything. It is everywhere.
Okay, one marketer to follow who's ahead of the curve on AI.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I'm really fascinated by Amelia Lerutte, the Chief AI Officer at SaaStr. I think it's really fascinating to see how she's running marketing, and I think it's a really interesting glimpse of what our life as marketers will really look like soon. So I love following them and seeing what they're doing and hearing how she's keeping up with her agents. Yeah, the part, she recently did a LinkedIn post and she was talking about how instead of managing people, she manages her agents. And it's still the 30 minutes every day or every week to optimize them and check in on them, but it's an AI agent instead of a human. And I was like, wow, that's crazy, but really interesting. I think a great glimpse of the future.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I think Jason and Amelia are great follows for just anything agentic. And I feel like they're always sharing actual statistics and how things are performing, which I feel like is a rare glimpse. So I second that. I think both Amelia and Jason are great follows if you're looking for real world use cases on AI and how the future of marketing and org structures will be, because I feel like Amelia is really pioneering that.
If you could automate one part of your life outside of work with AI, what would it be?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
God, I would love to automate laundry or maybe have it clean the kitchen after a meal. It can all kind of load and empty the dishwasher and wash all the pots and pans.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. I'm like, we have so much AI for manual work, like the whole podcast we talked about, if it's manual work. And I'm like, but what about the manual work in my day-to-day, which is like laundry, dishes? Really need AI for that.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I know, I would love that. I don't know how that works, but I would really say yes. I know. I feel like we're already all seeing it with our taxes and finance and you can use it in your budgeting tool and things like that, and it's like, oh, that's great, love that. But I really would like someone to wash my pots and pans.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep.
100%. I would like someone to fold the thousands of baby clothes that I have. That would be fantastic. Well, Whitney, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. It was so great having you.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
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Brightly Software’s Whitney Rosa explains why B2B marketing is shifting from campaign-centric to system-centric, powered by AI agents that automate decisions, optimize in real time, and scale marketing impact.
This episode features an interview with Whitney Rosa, Director of Global Marketing Operations at Brightly Software, a Siemens company that delivers data-driven asset management solutions to help organizations drive digital transformation and sustainable growth.
Whitney shares how Brightly Software is approaching agentic marketing from an operations-first perspective. She explains how her team is moving beyond traditional campaign-based execution to build systems that can make decisions, adapt in real time, and operate continuously across the marketing funnel.
She also discusses what it takes to lead this shift as a marketing operations leader, from creating a culture of experimentation to identifying where AI can reduce manual work and unlock more strategic impact. Whitney highlights how agentic AI is helping her team scale decision-making, improve collaboration across the business, and rethink how marketing teams operate.
Key Takeaways:
TRANSCRIPT
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Which is nice, and I'm just gonna get my notes brought up over here, and we'll get us kicked off.
Okay, Whitney, thank you so much for joining us on The Agentic Marketer, where we're taking a peek into today's leaders tech stacks and AI strategies. Whitney, thank you for joining. I would love for you just to kick things off and just tell me a little bit about yourself and the work that you're doing over at brightly software.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm director of global marketing operations at Brightly and supporter marketing organization with our tech stack enabling with all of our campaign motions and so much more beyond that as a Siemens company. Brightly supports digital transformation and sustainable growth by delivering innovative data driven asset management solutions across a variety of industries. So our software helps our clients manage and optimize their assets after operations and offers predictive insights to help our clients prevent the next leak, flood, costly power outage, or so much more. And we help them with capital planning too, so that they have plenty of funding to solve said problems when they inevitably
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's amazing. Okay, the show obviously is called the agentic marketer. I love to kick the podcast off with this question because everyone has like a slightly different answer. So for you Whitney, agentic marketing and being an agentic marketer, what does that mean to you? Like how are you defining that term?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think agentic marketing is marketing where AI doesn't just assist humans, it acts on their behalf, obviously, within clear guardrails. But instead of AI being a tool you're prompting, it's a system that can observe signals, make decisions, and act over time. So as an agentic marketer, we're designing those systems. We're thinking about how we train them with inputs across the business, whether it's from product or sales or BI or customer service. And we're telling the AI where autonomy makes sense and where outcomes matter and then where do humans get to stay in control. So it's that mindset shift from how do I do this faster to what decisions should humans make and what decisions can agents handle better than we can.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Amazing. I really like that answer is it's like you're not prompting anymore. Like these are systems that are going to run autonomously that you don't need to continuously prompt. And to be an agent marketer, you have to now build those systems, which does feel like a very big leap from where we were even a couple of years ago, where you were using more like we term it co-pilot, but something that was assisting you in running co-pilot versus you giving it actions and systems, and then it's running autonomously. So I really love that answer, Whitney. That was great. Now, obviously it's different from traditional marketing, but when you think about the world right now, when you're building these systems for agentic versus traditional marketing as it was before, what do you think is like the biggest differentiation between the two?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think traditional marketing is really process driven and super manual, right? We use automation, but it's very linear, right? If this happens, then go do this. But agentic marketing is adaptive and nonlinear. So because we have those agents that can respond to real time inputs, whether it's fire behavior or performance signals or intent data, they can adjust their execution without waiting for that human to step in every time. So I think it really leads to a lot of speed and increased scale of decision making. Whereas with traditional marketing, it's a lot more like let's review and decide and execute and evaluate and then optimize. So we wash, rinse and repeat and keep doing that over again until we get the desired results. So I think with agentic teams, we're deciding that decision logic early and we're letting it run and operate continuously.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, amazing. I before the podcast we were talking about, you've spent a lot of time in attribution. So I think about like traditional marketing and to your point of how much you spend going back and reviewing and you're looking at like, is this attribution and our scoring models and stuff like that. And I feel like that is a constant iteration and a very manual process where to your point, I do like the mind, the mindset of like, okay, with the Gentic, you've got to get that all done up front. You have to set those systems up early. You have to build that in the beginning and then let those systems run, which is not the way that it's been before. Like I've been in my earlier part of my career, did a lot of attribution and scoring models. And I remember you just going and tweet those all the time. It was just like, that was your job. And that is really not necessary anymore in a Gentic world, which is a crazy shift.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yes.
All the time, nonstop.
It is, it's a really big shift.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Now, on the point of shifting, so you've obviously done this, it sounds like you've been kind of at the forefront and leading this. What did it take for you to make that leap from experimentation or from that original, like traditional marketing and starting to dabble in AI to now truly like leading with agent tech marketing within your organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think it's a journey. I think we've also made this journey before. If you go back in time, right, we were all marketers and then marketing automation platforms came out and we had this explosion of MarTech come out and we all had to learn how to use those tools, where to use them, when to use them, and now they're commonplace. But I think it's the same thing with AI. And so I think as a leader, you really need to encourage and support your team and invest in learning AI. I think you have to create those safe spaces to build confidence and excitement and let people be comfortable taking risks and thinking creatively about how they want to use AI. And I think once you get to that point, right, that's where you're really ready to make that transition. And you can start to redesign processes to incorporate AI. So getting clear on your data governance, decide where those humans add significant value and where they don't. So that's that to me is where the leadership really matters, right? If we as leaders treat our infrastructure with AI as something we must implement and optimize, our teams will leverage it and progress. If we keep it optional, it's really gonna stay just a toy and we're not gonna see that cultural shift that we really need to have in order to progress, just like we did when we progressed to the MarTech we know and love today.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. I feel like two of the things you touched on there, it's so interesting to find this, this balance of like, yes, we need to make it more of a non-optional. Like you need to be using AI in your teams today. Like that is kind of a non-negotiable now. But I like to your point of you have to give a safe space to fail. And it's always an interesting time to be in where it's like, okay, this is something you have to figure out. Like as a, as a leader, are telling your team, like this is sort of a must have for us. But I think it does take a, a particular leader to be able to also create that safe space to say like, it's okay to fail because this is fairly new. Like it's, you are going to have to go figure this out. Like I'm telling you as a team, we need to go learn these things, but I'm also saying like, you can fail at this and finding that balance is, it's definitely hard. And I know it sounds like you and the team have been doing a really good job of that and have created that safe space for failure, but also then like allowing your team to make that shift. You're not experimenting anymore. It's become deeply ingrained in your team. And I think once you find that balance, that is, that's how you get your team there.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think too, like creating space as a leader where the education is valued and a priority. I feel like every week I'm like, look, here's a really interesting podcast or here's a really interesting article or great webinar, like virtual conference talking about AI or how to use it. Like go get ideas, come back, creatively and let's try it out. Right? We can do soft launches in our tools that have agentic AI. We can work with our partners across the business to build agents. We can try it out and optimize and iterate as we go, just like we've always done with MarTech. It's just a new way of doing it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. Now I'm curious, where are you seeing agentic AI show up most visibly in your team today and where are you getting value from agentic AI within your marketing organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, we see it a lot where there's high value, excuse me, high volume and repeated decision making. So really looking at, we talked about attribution, right? Like a huge volume of data there. It's repeated decision making all the time. So leveraging agentic systems for monitoring performance or surfacing insights, that's a huge place, I think, for it. And then as marketers, right, we're always creating content. We're constantly transforming it to different content types. So like so many others, we're seeing it in that content space, right? How do you have that webinar and then leverage AI to get the blog and the white paper and everything else out of it? So that's where we're really seeing it. And then I think that next step for us is really not just the efficiency we're getting out of it, but okay, now we've had efficiency. So how do we use that extra time to focus on strategic work and decisions and leverage that benefit of AI, which is hugely helpful. So I think that's our biggest use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, now, if you're thinking about the agentic AI within your organization today, I'm curious, we hear a lot in the market right now. They're like, don't just bring things on just for the sake of bringing them on. Like first find the problem that you're trying to solve for. And it seems so simple, but it is really important to be like, okay, like this is the use case or this is the manual, like volume heavy tasks that we're trying to solve for. So I'm curious, when you're looking at your agentic AI, like what are the biggest problems that you're initially trying to solve for when you're looking at what you're utilizing within your organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think we're trying to solve for things where we have limited bandwidth or capacity, right? Like if you use SDRs or BDRs, right, they work a set number of hours in a set time zone and you might not have a global organization to cover your website chat all the time, right? But you can leverage AI and have 24 seven coverage on there. And it's amazing, right? Like that's a place for AI to be immensely helpful. So I think that's a great example. But also just in our MarTech, right? Where can we look at repeated use cases, right? Whether it's like pulling data and insights in and transforming into something really digestible that we can serve up on every account or every contact. So our sales team knows what they're doing or what they should talk about when they pick up the phone, right? Like those are great examples of where you can use AI and it saves time, but also is more impactful for the business.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. Is there anything unexpected that agentic marketing or really bringing agentic AI into your team that helped unlock for your team that you weren't anticipating?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, you know, it's funny. My team and I were talking about this recently and we were talking about how there's a lot more increased collaboration because we're going back to, you're being an agentic marketer, right? So you're training the AI. And so we're seeing our team work more across the business than they did before, right? Before you might always work with just your campaign managers in your MarTech automation platform to send emails and build nurtures and things like that. But now, you know, you're training AI who's talking about your products or helping with customer support issues or things like that. And so we're having just greater collaboration across the business there. So I think that's really exciting and great for people who, you know, in operations who are typically behind the scenes to get to make some new connections.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, that's amazing. Now, the last one I have particularly about your team in agentic marketing, I always like to ask is about metrics that you're looking for. Just in general, your marketing team, like what metrics matter most to you? And then most importantly, when you are bringing on agentic marketing or agentic AI, what are you looking for? Like where's the lift happening? Like what metrics are you watching to make sure like, yes, this is working? Or is there anything else that you are particularly tracking to know that there is actual performance happening?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, we're a very, very data driven marketing team. I've talked a lot before in my career about attribution, and that continues to be our biggest metric. So it's been really interesting to see how we can tie in AI support into measuring attribution from a marketing viewpoint. And so that's our biggest metric, right? Is how much revenue are we getting from a specific channel? So we're starting to look at AI as channels, right? Where are we leveraging an agentic marketer to help us do something and where does that lead to revenue costs? So looking at volume and the conversions as well while we're continuously training our agent too is a big benefit too, right? We want to be able to make sure that what they're giving back is accurate. So how many times do we have to go back and retrain is another metric we're looking at as well.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Amazing. Okay, now I want to shift and look a little bit forward and just get your take. Because, obviously, I think that some of the stuff you shared about Jill is is really incredible, and a lot of teams are looking for that ability to scale without having to raise headcount.
So if you were advising another marketing leader on where they should start with adopting AI, even if it's not like Jill or that version of agentic marketing, I'm curious your take as a leader who is obviously very much leaned into AI. Where would you tell them to start?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I would say probably start just general education on why you want to bring AI into the fold, how it's going to help your team, what opportunities is it gonna bring, what gaps is it gonna close. And then once you have that, maybe you get a lot less pushback on adopting it. And then from there, really define what that success metric will look like by bringing the the AI tool inbound so that you know upfront what you need to achieve in order to show that ROI.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep. I totally agree. I think one of the things I know I misjudged in this process is I'm sure I don't know if it's the same for you at Brightly Software, but if it is for, like, our listeners, but there's a big push, like, tops down for how are you using AI? How are you adopting AI? So that upwards communication wasn't as hard of saying, like, oh, we're using AI. It was convincing the team and the downward communication of why this is worthwhile for you because it is a new process. It does take a lot time. So I like where you, like, anchor that in the why we're doing this, what this is gonna impact, really help not only, like, leadership who are pushing you to do it, but also help me to get the rest of the team on board with why this is, like, an imperative for our team. And it's not just because, oh, our board told us to do it. It's like, no. These they're, like, actual metrics that this is going to impact, and let's anchor in that and get people bought into that process. So I I totally agree.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah. And in in a b to b mark marketing organization, we need to be able to have sales in alignment with everything that we're doing because we are joined at the hip. So we want them to be brought in and bought in at the front too so that we can share those common pipeline goals. So totally. They were they were very receptive and also very, very much loved, Jill.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yes. Usually for sales, if it's gonna help them close more deals, it's pretty easy to get. And once you can prove that, they get on board.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Improve it. Yeah.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Now from a buyer expectation standpoint, do you think there's anything that we are really underestimating as marketers? Like, we we talk a lot about buyers expect, like, personalization, but I think even what personalization is over time has, like, really changed. So from your take as someone adopting AI pretty frequently and, you know, you mentioned you're in the back end of of your Gentec marketing platform and with Jill, and you're looking at how buyers are interacting with your site, what do you think we're underestimating that you would flag to marketers like, hey. You you need to stay on top of this?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I mean, I think you you you called it out personalization, but how can you get the right personalization at the right time? So right now, prior to AI, it's it's a very generic outreach. Using AI, it's still personalized, but is it personalized to the benefit of the buyer? Are they feeling that it's a one to one email even though it's being generated via AI? And also the immediate follow-up. You know, someone who form fills to they will not talk to a sales rep who waits five days to reach out and to complete that meeting. Like, they want it within two seconds. So I think just making sure that there's that tool that you can use to really hone in on getting the right personalization and time to lead is key, and that's obviously what we're really leveraging Qualified for.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. I think the instant gratification and instant follow-up is so important.
And I know, obviously, working with Qualified every single day as, like, an end user, and I get to pilot it, but I've just become so accustomed to, like, yeah. If I'm gonna fill out a form, someone's gonna follow-up with me, or I can get my questions answered right away. And I know in my personal life, I'll go, you know, if I'm looking for something online and if I don't get if I fill out a form and ask someone, like, we're doing some work in our house, I was looking for, like, a plumber, and they didn't get back to me right away. I'm like, what is the like, I've been trained now to expect that instant gratification. And when you don't have it, and I'm like, man but I think that is happening to all of our buyers now, whether it's from, like, a b to c standpoint and, like, the one click to purchase. Like, we've all just gotten so trained to expect that instant response and gratification. And when you don't get it, like, man, we lose interest fast.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Or you lose trust that they're, you know, there to deliver because they're not putting you first.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep.
Yeah. Totally. Now looking ahead in the next twelve months, what do you think the single biggest change for b two b marketing will be?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I guess I could say, you know, probably twelve months from now, everyone will use AI in marketing. So how are you going to use it in the correct way to differentiate yourself from your competitors by really removing that friction from the buyer experience and making that human experience from a client to client perspective better. So I think that is the change for the next twelve months.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep. And if everyone is going to be using AI in the next twelve months, I feel like there is potentially a skill gap. From like, if you're listening to this and you're like, man, if everyone needs to be using AI, my whole team, whether myself or, you know, my direct reports or whatever is. If you could give advice, Whitney, to any of those people who are listening that are a little bit nervous that they're going to be expected in the next twelve months to be utilizing AI across the board, do you think there are particular skills that we can be focusing on to make sure we are prepped for that shift in the next twelve months?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I think at least in my team, we are really focused on, I guess you can call it orchestration. We have a lot of different platforms that offer various AI tools. So how are we going to integrate that across the whole marketing team, the sales team, our sales operations team so that we can really align that tech stack, really clean that data, design intentional handoffs between those systems so that they're talking. We're not overriding each other. We're not duplicating efforts. Even include the human handoff there so that you're leveraging all of the tools you have at your disposal to really maximize your ROI.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. And now my last question before we move into my favorite section, which is our lightning round.
Besides this, like, agentic marketing inbound pipeline, are there any other emerging agentic use cases or, like, AI agents that you think are going to be impactful for marketing in the coming twelve months?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I mean, living in operations, right? We don't really thrive in the flashy use cases. We're really more in the operational ones, but so much value in monitoring performance and surfacing insights. I think with the amount of data we can collect as marketers right now, it's impossible as a person to leverage the data that we get and get insights out of it and then keep up with the data that's coming in, right? The minute you pull something from a system that's out of date. So leveraging those agents to continually monitor that and surface it is a huge use case that I find really valuable. I think as businesses will start to see that be more important and time-saving when it comes to QBRs and business reviews and all of the things that take up so much time for everyone, those agents will be really, really valuable. I think too, autonomous testing and optimization across channels, that's a big one. And then to my point, how do you string those together? So it's, we tested in this one place and now we're connecting it here. How can we work those two together to optimize and iterate and start moving from channels specific AI agents to more omni-channel agents? I think that's a really interesting next phase as we grow as marketers. And then I think another one is intelligent routing prioritization based on intent and behavior. Current systems really follow that if then, they're very statement-based. So how do we progress that to leverage AI where we can start to say they're interested in this, so that changes how we route them or prioritize them. So I'm really excited about that use case. I think there's a lot of value there. We're trying to constantly surface high quality leads or opportunities or get to those buyers or the buyers who are a little bit more motivated than others. I think that will be a really impactful use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. Okay, I'd like to wrap things up. I have a couple, we call them lightning round questions. So, like, quick questions, quick answers. First one is, other than ChatGPT, because that tends to be most everyone's answer, what was the first AI tool that you started experimenting with?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Honestly, Qualified, which is really funny. But it was really one of the first places that it clicked for me as a MOPs leader that our future is training and optimizing and leveraging AI. In my previous roles, it was starting to train the AI SDR and progress that forward. And it was really interesting having to go work with our product team to get specific answers to make sure we're feeding it the right information, pulling that and giving it back and saying, like, well, this didn't seem quite right. Can you score this? Can we correct it? Can we train it better? It was really the first glimpse for me of, like, oh, this is what an agentic marketer does and this is what our future is going to look like.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Oh God, agentic or AI. I mean, I feel like they're everywhere. You cannot escape it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You cannot escape it.
I think it's so funny. I'll scroll LinkedIn and, like, every ad that I get is some agentic or AI, which, like, we're just as guilty of it. I get it. But I'm like, it has permeated everything. It is everywhere.
Okay, one marketer to follow who's ahead of the curve on AI.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I'm really fascinated by Amelia Lerutte, the Chief AI Officer at SaaStr. I think it's really fascinating to see how she's running marketing, and I think it's a really interesting glimpse of what our life as marketers will really look like soon. So I love following them and seeing what they're doing and hearing how she's keeping up with her agents. Yeah, the part, she recently did a LinkedIn post and she was talking about how instead of managing people, she manages her agents. And it's still the 30 minutes every day or every week to optimize them and check in on them, but it's an AI agent instead of a human. And I was like, wow, that's crazy, but really interesting. I think a great glimpse of the future.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I think Jason and Amelia are great follows for just anything agentic. And I feel like they're always sharing actual statistics and how things are performing, which I feel like is a rare glimpse. So I second that. I think both Amelia and Jason are great follows if you're looking for real world use cases on AI and how the future of marketing and org structures will be, because I feel like Amelia is really pioneering that.
If you could automate one part of your life outside of work with AI, what would it be?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
God, I would love to automate laundry or maybe have it clean the kitchen after a meal. It can all kind of load and empty the dishwasher and wash all the pots and pans.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. I'm like, we have so much AI for manual work, like the whole podcast we talked about, if it's manual work. And I'm like, but what about the manual work in my day-to-day, which is like laundry, dishes? Really need AI for that.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I know, I would love that. I don't know how that works, but I would really say yes. I know. I feel like we're already all seeing it with our taxes and finance and you can use it in your budgeting tool and things like that, and it's like, oh, that's great, love that. But I really would like someone to wash my pots and pans.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep.
100%. I would like someone to fold the thousands of baby clothes that I have. That would be fantastic. Well, Whitney, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. It was so great having you.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
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Brightly Software’s Whitney Rosa explains why B2B marketing is shifting from campaign-centric to system-centric, powered by AI agents that automate decisions, optimize in real time, and scale marketing impact.
This episode features an interview with Whitney Rosa, Director of Global Marketing Operations at Brightly Software, a Siemens company that delivers data-driven asset management solutions to help organizations drive digital transformation and sustainable growth.
Whitney shares how Brightly Software is approaching agentic marketing from an operations-first perspective. She explains how her team is moving beyond traditional campaign-based execution to build systems that can make decisions, adapt in real time, and operate continuously across the marketing funnel.
She also discusses what it takes to lead this shift as a marketing operations leader, from creating a culture of experimentation to identifying where AI can reduce manual work and unlock more strategic impact. Whitney highlights how agentic AI is helping her team scale decision-making, improve collaboration across the business, and rethink how marketing teams operate.
Key Takeaways:
TRANSCRIPT
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Which is nice, and I'm just gonna get my notes brought up over here, and we'll get us kicked off.
Okay, Whitney, thank you so much for joining us on The Agentic Marketer, where we're taking a peek into today's leaders tech stacks and AI strategies. Whitney, thank you for joining. I would love for you just to kick things off and just tell me a little bit about yourself and the work that you're doing over at brightly software.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm director of global marketing operations at Brightly and supporter marketing organization with our tech stack enabling with all of our campaign motions and so much more beyond that as a Siemens company. Brightly supports digital transformation and sustainable growth by delivering innovative data driven asset management solutions across a variety of industries. So our software helps our clients manage and optimize their assets after operations and offers predictive insights to help our clients prevent the next leak, flood, costly power outage, or so much more. And we help them with capital planning too, so that they have plenty of funding to solve said problems when they inevitably
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's amazing. Okay, the show obviously is called the agentic marketer. I love to kick the podcast off with this question because everyone has like a slightly different answer. So for you Whitney, agentic marketing and being an agentic marketer, what does that mean to you? Like how are you defining that term?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think agentic marketing is marketing where AI doesn't just assist humans, it acts on their behalf, obviously, within clear guardrails. But instead of AI being a tool you're prompting, it's a system that can observe signals, make decisions, and act over time. So as an agentic marketer, we're designing those systems. We're thinking about how we train them with inputs across the business, whether it's from product or sales or BI or customer service. And we're telling the AI where autonomy makes sense and where outcomes matter and then where do humans get to stay in control. So it's that mindset shift from how do I do this faster to what decisions should humans make and what decisions can agents handle better than we can.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Amazing. I really like that answer is it's like you're not prompting anymore. Like these are systems that are going to run autonomously that you don't need to continuously prompt. And to be an agent marketer, you have to now build those systems, which does feel like a very big leap from where we were even a couple of years ago, where you were using more like we term it co-pilot, but something that was assisting you in running co-pilot versus you giving it actions and systems, and then it's running autonomously. So I really love that answer, Whitney. That was great. Now, obviously it's different from traditional marketing, but when you think about the world right now, when you're building these systems for agentic versus traditional marketing as it was before, what do you think is like the biggest differentiation between the two?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think traditional marketing is really process driven and super manual, right? We use automation, but it's very linear, right? If this happens, then go do this. But agentic marketing is adaptive and nonlinear. So because we have those agents that can respond to real time inputs, whether it's fire behavior or performance signals or intent data, they can adjust their execution without waiting for that human to step in every time. So I think it really leads to a lot of speed and increased scale of decision making. Whereas with traditional marketing, it's a lot more like let's review and decide and execute and evaluate and then optimize. So we wash, rinse and repeat and keep doing that over again until we get the desired results. So I think with agentic teams, we're deciding that decision logic early and we're letting it run and operate continuously.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, amazing. I before the podcast we were talking about, you've spent a lot of time in attribution. So I think about like traditional marketing and to your point of how much you spend going back and reviewing and you're looking at like, is this attribution and our scoring models and stuff like that. And I feel like that is a constant iteration and a very manual process where to your point, I do like the mind, the mindset of like, okay, with the Gentic, you've got to get that all done up front. You have to set those systems up early. You have to build that in the beginning and then let those systems run, which is not the way that it's been before. Like I've been in my earlier part of my career, did a lot of attribution and scoring models. And I remember you just going and tweet those all the time. It was just like, that was your job. And that is really not necessary anymore in a Gentic world, which is a crazy shift.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yes.
All the time, nonstop.
It is, it's a really big shift.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Now, on the point of shifting, so you've obviously done this, it sounds like you've been kind of at the forefront and leading this. What did it take for you to make that leap from experimentation or from that original, like traditional marketing and starting to dabble in AI to now truly like leading with agent tech marketing within your organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think it's a journey. I think we've also made this journey before. If you go back in time, right, we were all marketers and then marketing automation platforms came out and we had this explosion of MarTech come out and we all had to learn how to use those tools, where to use them, when to use them, and now they're commonplace. But I think it's the same thing with AI. And so I think as a leader, you really need to encourage and support your team and invest in learning AI. I think you have to create those safe spaces to build confidence and excitement and let people be comfortable taking risks and thinking creatively about how they want to use AI. And I think once you get to that point, right, that's where you're really ready to make that transition. And you can start to redesign processes to incorporate AI. So getting clear on your data governance, decide where those humans add significant value and where they don't. So that's that to me is where the leadership really matters, right? If we as leaders treat our infrastructure with AI as something we must implement and optimize, our teams will leverage it and progress. If we keep it optional, it's really gonna stay just a toy and we're not gonna see that cultural shift that we really need to have in order to progress, just like we did when we progressed to the MarTech we know and love today.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. I feel like two of the things you touched on there, it's so interesting to find this, this balance of like, yes, we need to make it more of a non-optional. Like you need to be using AI in your teams today. Like that is kind of a non-negotiable now. But I like to your point of you have to give a safe space to fail. And it's always an interesting time to be in where it's like, okay, this is something you have to figure out. Like as a, as a leader, are telling your team, like this is sort of a must have for us. But I think it does take a, a particular leader to be able to also create that safe space to say like, it's okay to fail because this is fairly new. Like it's, you are going to have to go figure this out. Like I'm telling you as a team, we need to go learn these things, but I'm also saying like, you can fail at this and finding that balance is, it's definitely hard. And I know it sounds like you and the team have been doing a really good job of that and have created that safe space for failure, but also then like allowing your team to make that shift. You're not experimenting anymore. It's become deeply ingrained in your team. And I think once you find that balance, that is, that's how you get your team there.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think too, like creating space as a leader where the education is valued and a priority. I feel like every week I'm like, look, here's a really interesting podcast or here's a really interesting article or great webinar, like virtual conference talking about AI or how to use it. Like go get ideas, come back, creatively and let's try it out. Right? We can do soft launches in our tools that have agentic AI. We can work with our partners across the business to build agents. We can try it out and optimize and iterate as we go, just like we've always done with MarTech. It's just a new way of doing it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. Now I'm curious, where are you seeing agentic AI show up most visibly in your team today and where are you getting value from agentic AI within your marketing organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, we see it a lot where there's high value, excuse me, high volume and repeated decision making. So really looking at, we talked about attribution, right? Like a huge volume of data there. It's repeated decision making all the time. So leveraging agentic systems for monitoring performance or surfacing insights, that's a huge place, I think, for it. And then as marketers, right, we're always creating content. We're constantly transforming it to different content types. So like so many others, we're seeing it in that content space, right? How do you have that webinar and then leverage AI to get the blog and the white paper and everything else out of it? So that's where we're really seeing it. And then I think that next step for us is really not just the efficiency we're getting out of it, but okay, now we've had efficiency. So how do we use that extra time to focus on strategic work and decisions and leverage that benefit of AI, which is hugely helpful. So I think that's our biggest use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, now, if you're thinking about the agentic AI within your organization today, I'm curious, we hear a lot in the market right now. They're like, don't just bring things on just for the sake of bringing them on. Like first find the problem that you're trying to solve for. And it seems so simple, but it is really important to be like, okay, like this is the use case or this is the manual, like volume heavy tasks that we're trying to solve for. So I'm curious, when you're looking at your agentic AI, like what are the biggest problems that you're initially trying to solve for when you're looking at what you're utilizing within your organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think we're trying to solve for things where we have limited bandwidth or capacity, right? Like if you use SDRs or BDRs, right, they work a set number of hours in a set time zone and you might not have a global organization to cover your website chat all the time, right? But you can leverage AI and have 24 seven coverage on there. And it's amazing, right? Like that's a place for AI to be immensely helpful. So I think that's a great example. But also just in our MarTech, right? Where can we look at repeated use cases, right? Whether it's like pulling data and insights in and transforming into something really digestible that we can serve up on every account or every contact. So our sales team knows what they're doing or what they should talk about when they pick up the phone, right? Like those are great examples of where you can use AI and it saves time, but also is more impactful for the business.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. Is there anything unexpected that agentic marketing or really bringing agentic AI into your team that helped unlock for your team that you weren't anticipating?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, you know, it's funny. My team and I were talking about this recently and we were talking about how there's a lot more increased collaboration because we're going back to, you're being an agentic marketer, right? So you're training the AI. And so we're seeing our team work more across the business than they did before, right? Before you might always work with just your campaign managers in your MarTech automation platform to send emails and build nurtures and things like that. But now, you know, you're training AI who's talking about your products or helping with customer support issues or things like that. And so we're having just greater collaboration across the business there. So I think that's really exciting and great for people who, you know, in operations who are typically behind the scenes to get to make some new connections.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, that's amazing. Now, the last one I have particularly about your team in agentic marketing, I always like to ask is about metrics that you're looking for. Just in general, your marketing team, like what metrics matter most to you? And then most importantly, when you are bringing on agentic marketing or agentic AI, what are you looking for? Like where's the lift happening? Like what metrics are you watching to make sure like, yes, this is working? Or is there anything else that you are particularly tracking to know that there is actual performance happening?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, we're a very, very data driven marketing team. I've talked a lot before in my career about attribution, and that continues to be our biggest metric. So it's been really interesting to see how we can tie in AI support into measuring attribution from a marketing viewpoint. And so that's our biggest metric, right? Is how much revenue are we getting from a specific channel? So we're starting to look at AI as channels, right? Where are we leveraging an agentic marketer to help us do something and where does that lead to revenue costs? So looking at volume and the conversions as well while we're continuously training our agent too is a big benefit too, right? We want to be able to make sure that what they're giving back is accurate. So how many times do we have to go back and retrain is another metric we're looking at as well.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Amazing. Okay, now I want to shift and look a little bit forward and just get your take. Because, obviously, I think that some of the stuff you shared about Jill is is really incredible, and a lot of teams are looking for that ability to scale without having to raise headcount.
So if you were advising another marketing leader on where they should start with adopting AI, even if it's not like Jill or that version of agentic marketing, I'm curious your take as a leader who is obviously very much leaned into AI. Where would you tell them to start?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I would say probably start just general education on why you want to bring AI into the fold, how it's going to help your team, what opportunities is it gonna bring, what gaps is it gonna close. And then once you have that, maybe you get a lot less pushback on adopting it. And then from there, really define what that success metric will look like by bringing the the AI tool inbound so that you know upfront what you need to achieve in order to show that ROI.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep. I totally agree. I think one of the things I know I misjudged in this process is I'm sure I don't know if it's the same for you at Brightly Software, but if it is for, like, our listeners, but there's a big push, like, tops down for how are you using AI? How are you adopting AI? So that upwards communication wasn't as hard of saying, like, oh, we're using AI. It was convincing the team and the downward communication of why this is worthwhile for you because it is a new process. It does take a lot time. So I like where you, like, anchor that in the why we're doing this, what this is gonna impact, really help not only, like, leadership who are pushing you to do it, but also help me to get the rest of the team on board with why this is, like, an imperative for our team. And it's not just because, oh, our board told us to do it. It's like, no. These they're, like, actual metrics that this is going to impact, and let's anchor in that and get people bought into that process. So I I totally agree.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah. And in in a b to b mark marketing organization, we need to be able to have sales in alignment with everything that we're doing because we are joined at the hip. So we want them to be brought in and bought in at the front too so that we can share those common pipeline goals. So totally. They were they were very receptive and also very, very much loved, Jill.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yes. Usually for sales, if it's gonna help them close more deals, it's pretty easy to get. And once you can prove that, they get on board.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Improve it. Yeah.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Now from a buyer expectation standpoint, do you think there's anything that we are really underestimating as marketers? Like, we we talk a lot about buyers expect, like, personalization, but I think even what personalization is over time has, like, really changed. So from your take as someone adopting AI pretty frequently and, you know, you mentioned you're in the back end of of your Gentec marketing platform and with Jill, and you're looking at how buyers are interacting with your site, what do you think we're underestimating that you would flag to marketers like, hey. You you need to stay on top of this?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I mean, I think you you you called it out personalization, but how can you get the right personalization at the right time? So right now, prior to AI, it's it's a very generic outreach. Using AI, it's still personalized, but is it personalized to the benefit of the buyer? Are they feeling that it's a one to one email even though it's being generated via AI? And also the immediate follow-up. You know, someone who form fills to they will not talk to a sales rep who waits five days to reach out and to complete that meeting. Like, they want it within two seconds. So I think just making sure that there's that tool that you can use to really hone in on getting the right personalization and time to lead is key, and that's obviously what we're really leveraging Qualified for.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. I think the instant gratification and instant follow-up is so important.
And I know, obviously, working with Qualified every single day as, like, an end user, and I get to pilot it, but I've just become so accustomed to, like, yeah. If I'm gonna fill out a form, someone's gonna follow-up with me, or I can get my questions answered right away. And I know in my personal life, I'll go, you know, if I'm looking for something online and if I don't get if I fill out a form and ask someone, like, we're doing some work in our house, I was looking for, like, a plumber, and they didn't get back to me right away. I'm like, what is the like, I've been trained now to expect that instant gratification. And when you don't have it, and I'm like, man but I think that is happening to all of our buyers now, whether it's from, like, a b to c standpoint and, like, the one click to purchase. Like, we've all just gotten so trained to expect that instant response and gratification. And when you don't get it, like, man, we lose interest fast.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Or you lose trust that they're, you know, there to deliver because they're not putting you first.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep.
Yeah. Totally. Now looking ahead in the next twelve months, what do you think the single biggest change for b two b marketing will be?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I guess I could say, you know, probably twelve months from now, everyone will use AI in marketing. So how are you going to use it in the correct way to differentiate yourself from your competitors by really removing that friction from the buyer experience and making that human experience from a client to client perspective better. So I think that is the change for the next twelve months.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep. And if everyone is going to be using AI in the next twelve months, I feel like there is potentially a skill gap. From like, if you're listening to this and you're like, man, if everyone needs to be using AI, my whole team, whether myself or, you know, my direct reports or whatever is. If you could give advice, Whitney, to any of those people who are listening that are a little bit nervous that they're going to be expected in the next twelve months to be utilizing AI across the board, do you think there are particular skills that we can be focusing on to make sure we are prepped for that shift in the next twelve months?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I think at least in my team, we are really focused on, I guess you can call it orchestration. We have a lot of different platforms that offer various AI tools. So how are we going to integrate that across the whole marketing team, the sales team, our sales operations team so that we can really align that tech stack, really clean that data, design intentional handoffs between those systems so that they're talking. We're not overriding each other. We're not duplicating efforts. Even include the human handoff there so that you're leveraging all of the tools you have at your disposal to really maximize your ROI.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. And now my last question before we move into my favorite section, which is our lightning round.
Besides this, like, agentic marketing inbound pipeline, are there any other emerging agentic use cases or, like, AI agents that you think are going to be impactful for marketing in the coming twelve months?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I mean, living in operations, right? We don't really thrive in the flashy use cases. We're really more in the operational ones, but so much value in monitoring performance and surfacing insights. I think with the amount of data we can collect as marketers right now, it's impossible as a person to leverage the data that we get and get insights out of it and then keep up with the data that's coming in, right? The minute you pull something from a system that's out of date. So leveraging those agents to continually monitor that and surface it is a huge use case that I find really valuable. I think as businesses will start to see that be more important and time-saving when it comes to QBRs and business reviews and all of the things that take up so much time for everyone, those agents will be really, really valuable. I think too, autonomous testing and optimization across channels, that's a big one. And then to my point, how do you string those together? So it's, we tested in this one place and now we're connecting it here. How can we work those two together to optimize and iterate and start moving from channels specific AI agents to more omni-channel agents? I think that's a really interesting next phase as we grow as marketers. And then I think another one is intelligent routing prioritization based on intent and behavior. Current systems really follow that if then, they're very statement-based. So how do we progress that to leverage AI where we can start to say they're interested in this, so that changes how we route them or prioritize them. So I'm really excited about that use case. I think there's a lot of value there. We're trying to constantly surface high quality leads or opportunities or get to those buyers or the buyers who are a little bit more motivated than others. I think that will be a really impactful use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. Okay, I'd like to wrap things up. I have a couple, we call them lightning round questions. So, like, quick questions, quick answers. First one is, other than ChatGPT, because that tends to be most everyone's answer, what was the first AI tool that you started experimenting with?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Honestly, Qualified, which is really funny. But it was really one of the first places that it clicked for me as a MOPs leader that our future is training and optimizing and leveraging AI. In my previous roles, it was starting to train the AI SDR and progress that forward. And it was really interesting having to go work with our product team to get specific answers to make sure we're feeding it the right information, pulling that and giving it back and saying, like, well, this didn't seem quite right. Can you score this? Can we correct it? Can we train it better? It was really the first glimpse for me of, like, oh, this is what an agentic marketer does and this is what our future is going to look like.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Oh God, agentic or AI. I mean, I feel like they're everywhere. You cannot escape it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You cannot escape it.
I think it's so funny. I'll scroll LinkedIn and, like, every ad that I get is some agentic or AI, which, like, we're just as guilty of it. I get it. But I'm like, it has permeated everything. It is everywhere.
Okay, one marketer to follow who's ahead of the curve on AI.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I'm really fascinated by Amelia Lerutte, the Chief AI Officer at SaaStr. I think it's really fascinating to see how she's running marketing, and I think it's a really interesting glimpse of what our life as marketers will really look like soon. So I love following them and seeing what they're doing and hearing how she's keeping up with her agents. Yeah, the part, she recently did a LinkedIn post and she was talking about how instead of managing people, she manages her agents. And it's still the 30 minutes every day or every week to optimize them and check in on them, but it's an AI agent instead of a human. And I was like, wow, that's crazy, but really interesting. I think a great glimpse of the future.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I think Jason and Amelia are great follows for just anything agentic. And I feel like they're always sharing actual statistics and how things are performing, which I feel like is a rare glimpse. So I second that. I think both Amelia and Jason are great follows if you're looking for real world use cases on AI and how the future of marketing and org structures will be, because I feel like Amelia is really pioneering that.
If you could automate one part of your life outside of work with AI, what would it be?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
God, I would love to automate laundry or maybe have it clean the kitchen after a meal. It can all kind of load and empty the dishwasher and wash all the pots and pans.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. I'm like, we have so much AI for manual work, like the whole podcast we talked about, if it's manual work. And I'm like, but what about the manual work in my day-to-day, which is like laundry, dishes? Really need AI for that.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I know, I would love that. I don't know how that works, but I would really say yes. I know. I feel like we're already all seeing it with our taxes and finance and you can use it in your budgeting tool and things like that, and it's like, oh, that's great, love that. But I really would like someone to wash my pots and pans.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep.
100%. I would like someone to fold the thousands of baby clothes that I have. That would be fantastic. Well, Whitney, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. It was so great having you.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
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Brightly Software’s Whitney Rosa explains why B2B marketing is shifting from campaign-centric to system-centric, powered by AI agents that automate decisions, optimize in real time, and scale marketing impact.
This episode features an interview with Whitney Rosa, Director of Global Marketing Operations at Brightly Software, a Siemens company that delivers data-driven asset management solutions to help organizations drive digital transformation and sustainable growth.
Whitney shares how Brightly Software is approaching agentic marketing from an operations-first perspective. She explains how her team is moving beyond traditional campaign-based execution to build systems that can make decisions, adapt in real time, and operate continuously across the marketing funnel.
She also discusses what it takes to lead this shift as a marketing operations leader, from creating a culture of experimentation to identifying where AI can reduce manual work and unlock more strategic impact. Whitney highlights how agentic AI is helping her team scale decision-making, improve collaboration across the business, and rethink how marketing teams operate.
Key Takeaways:
TRANSCRIPT
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Which is nice, and I'm just gonna get my notes brought up over here, and we'll get us kicked off.
Okay, Whitney, thank you so much for joining us on The Agentic Marketer, where we're taking a peek into today's leaders tech stacks and AI strategies. Whitney, thank you for joining. I would love for you just to kick things off and just tell me a little bit about yourself and the work that you're doing over at brightly software.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm director of global marketing operations at Brightly and supporter marketing organization with our tech stack enabling with all of our campaign motions and so much more beyond that as a Siemens company. Brightly supports digital transformation and sustainable growth by delivering innovative data driven asset management solutions across a variety of industries. So our software helps our clients manage and optimize their assets after operations and offers predictive insights to help our clients prevent the next leak, flood, costly power outage, or so much more. And we help them with capital planning too, so that they have plenty of funding to solve said problems when they inevitably
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's amazing. Okay, the show obviously is called the agentic marketer. I love to kick the podcast off with this question because everyone has like a slightly different answer. So for you Whitney, agentic marketing and being an agentic marketer, what does that mean to you? Like how are you defining that term?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think agentic marketing is marketing where AI doesn't just assist humans, it acts on their behalf, obviously, within clear guardrails. But instead of AI being a tool you're prompting, it's a system that can observe signals, make decisions, and act over time. So as an agentic marketer, we're designing those systems. We're thinking about how we train them with inputs across the business, whether it's from product or sales or BI or customer service. And we're telling the AI where autonomy makes sense and where outcomes matter and then where do humans get to stay in control. So it's that mindset shift from how do I do this faster to what decisions should humans make and what decisions can agents handle better than we can.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Amazing. I really like that answer is it's like you're not prompting anymore. Like these are systems that are going to run autonomously that you don't need to continuously prompt. And to be an agent marketer, you have to now build those systems, which does feel like a very big leap from where we were even a couple of years ago, where you were using more like we term it co-pilot, but something that was assisting you in running co-pilot versus you giving it actions and systems, and then it's running autonomously. So I really love that answer, Whitney. That was great. Now, obviously it's different from traditional marketing, but when you think about the world right now, when you're building these systems for agentic versus traditional marketing as it was before, what do you think is like the biggest differentiation between the two?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think traditional marketing is really process driven and super manual, right? We use automation, but it's very linear, right? If this happens, then go do this. But agentic marketing is adaptive and nonlinear. So because we have those agents that can respond to real time inputs, whether it's fire behavior or performance signals or intent data, they can adjust their execution without waiting for that human to step in every time. So I think it really leads to a lot of speed and increased scale of decision making. Whereas with traditional marketing, it's a lot more like let's review and decide and execute and evaluate and then optimize. So we wash, rinse and repeat and keep doing that over again until we get the desired results. So I think with agentic teams, we're deciding that decision logic early and we're letting it run and operate continuously.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, amazing. I before the podcast we were talking about, you've spent a lot of time in attribution. So I think about like traditional marketing and to your point of how much you spend going back and reviewing and you're looking at like, is this attribution and our scoring models and stuff like that. And I feel like that is a constant iteration and a very manual process where to your point, I do like the mind, the mindset of like, okay, with the Gentic, you've got to get that all done up front. You have to set those systems up early. You have to build that in the beginning and then let those systems run, which is not the way that it's been before. Like I've been in my earlier part of my career, did a lot of attribution and scoring models. And I remember you just going and tweet those all the time. It was just like, that was your job. And that is really not necessary anymore in a Gentic world, which is a crazy shift.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yes.
All the time, nonstop.
It is, it's a really big shift.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Now, on the point of shifting, so you've obviously done this, it sounds like you've been kind of at the forefront and leading this. What did it take for you to make that leap from experimentation or from that original, like traditional marketing and starting to dabble in AI to now truly like leading with agent tech marketing within your organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think it's a journey. I think we've also made this journey before. If you go back in time, right, we were all marketers and then marketing automation platforms came out and we had this explosion of MarTech come out and we all had to learn how to use those tools, where to use them, when to use them, and now they're commonplace. But I think it's the same thing with AI. And so I think as a leader, you really need to encourage and support your team and invest in learning AI. I think you have to create those safe spaces to build confidence and excitement and let people be comfortable taking risks and thinking creatively about how they want to use AI. And I think once you get to that point, right, that's where you're really ready to make that transition. And you can start to redesign processes to incorporate AI. So getting clear on your data governance, decide where those humans add significant value and where they don't. So that's that to me is where the leadership really matters, right? If we as leaders treat our infrastructure with AI as something we must implement and optimize, our teams will leverage it and progress. If we keep it optional, it's really gonna stay just a toy and we're not gonna see that cultural shift that we really need to have in order to progress, just like we did when we progressed to the MarTech we know and love today.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. I feel like two of the things you touched on there, it's so interesting to find this, this balance of like, yes, we need to make it more of a non-optional. Like you need to be using AI in your teams today. Like that is kind of a non-negotiable now. But I like to your point of you have to give a safe space to fail. And it's always an interesting time to be in where it's like, okay, this is something you have to figure out. Like as a, as a leader, are telling your team, like this is sort of a must have for us. But I think it does take a, a particular leader to be able to also create that safe space to say like, it's okay to fail because this is fairly new. Like it's, you are going to have to go figure this out. Like I'm telling you as a team, we need to go learn these things, but I'm also saying like, you can fail at this and finding that balance is, it's definitely hard. And I know it sounds like you and the team have been doing a really good job of that and have created that safe space for failure, but also then like allowing your team to make that shift. You're not experimenting anymore. It's become deeply ingrained in your team. And I think once you find that balance, that is, that's how you get your team there.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think too, like creating space as a leader where the education is valued and a priority. I feel like every week I'm like, look, here's a really interesting podcast or here's a really interesting article or great webinar, like virtual conference talking about AI or how to use it. Like go get ideas, come back, creatively and let's try it out. Right? We can do soft launches in our tools that have agentic AI. We can work with our partners across the business to build agents. We can try it out and optimize and iterate as we go, just like we've always done with MarTech. It's just a new way of doing it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. Now I'm curious, where are you seeing agentic AI show up most visibly in your team today and where are you getting value from agentic AI within your marketing organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, we see it a lot where there's high value, excuse me, high volume and repeated decision making. So really looking at, we talked about attribution, right? Like a huge volume of data there. It's repeated decision making all the time. So leveraging agentic systems for monitoring performance or surfacing insights, that's a huge place, I think, for it. And then as marketers, right, we're always creating content. We're constantly transforming it to different content types. So like so many others, we're seeing it in that content space, right? How do you have that webinar and then leverage AI to get the blog and the white paper and everything else out of it? So that's where we're really seeing it. And then I think that next step for us is really not just the efficiency we're getting out of it, but okay, now we've had efficiency. So how do we use that extra time to focus on strategic work and decisions and leverage that benefit of AI, which is hugely helpful. So I think that's our biggest use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, now, if you're thinking about the agentic AI within your organization today, I'm curious, we hear a lot in the market right now. They're like, don't just bring things on just for the sake of bringing them on. Like first find the problem that you're trying to solve for. And it seems so simple, but it is really important to be like, okay, like this is the use case or this is the manual, like volume heavy tasks that we're trying to solve for. So I'm curious, when you're looking at your agentic AI, like what are the biggest problems that you're initially trying to solve for when you're looking at what you're utilizing within your organization?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I think we're trying to solve for things where we have limited bandwidth or capacity, right? Like if you use SDRs or BDRs, right, they work a set number of hours in a set time zone and you might not have a global organization to cover your website chat all the time, right? But you can leverage AI and have 24 seven coverage on there. And it's amazing, right? Like that's a place for AI to be immensely helpful. So I think that's a great example. But also just in our MarTech, right? Where can we look at repeated use cases, right? Whether it's like pulling data and insights in and transforming into something really digestible that we can serve up on every account or every contact. So our sales team knows what they're doing or what they should talk about when they pick up the phone, right? Like those are great examples of where you can use AI and it saves time, but also is more impactful for the business.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. Is there anything unexpected that agentic marketing or really bringing agentic AI into your team that helped unlock for your team that you weren't anticipating?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, you know, it's funny. My team and I were talking about this recently and we were talking about how there's a lot more increased collaboration because we're going back to, you're being an agentic marketer, right? So you're training the AI. And so we're seeing our team work more across the business than they did before, right? Before you might always work with just your campaign managers in your MarTech automation platform to send emails and build nurtures and things like that. But now, you know, you're training AI who's talking about your products or helping with customer support issues or things like that. And so we're having just greater collaboration across the business there. So I think that's really exciting and great for people who, you know, in operations who are typically behind the scenes to get to make some new connections.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, that's amazing. Now, the last one I have particularly about your team in agentic marketing, I always like to ask is about metrics that you're looking for. Just in general, your marketing team, like what metrics matter most to you? And then most importantly, when you are bringing on agentic marketing or agentic AI, what are you looking for? Like where's the lift happening? Like what metrics are you watching to make sure like, yes, this is working? Or is there anything else that you are particularly tracking to know that there is actual performance happening?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, we're a very, very data driven marketing team. I've talked a lot before in my career about attribution, and that continues to be our biggest metric. So it's been really interesting to see how we can tie in AI support into measuring attribution from a marketing viewpoint. And so that's our biggest metric, right? Is how much revenue are we getting from a specific channel? So we're starting to look at AI as channels, right? Where are we leveraging an agentic marketer to help us do something and where does that lead to revenue costs? So looking at volume and the conversions as well while we're continuously training our agent too is a big benefit too, right? We want to be able to make sure that what they're giving back is accurate. So how many times do we have to go back and retrain is another metric we're looking at as well.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Amazing. Okay, now I want to shift and look a little bit forward and just get your take. Because, obviously, I think that some of the stuff you shared about Jill is is really incredible, and a lot of teams are looking for that ability to scale without having to raise headcount.
So if you were advising another marketing leader on where they should start with adopting AI, even if it's not like Jill or that version of agentic marketing, I'm curious your take as a leader who is obviously very much leaned into AI. Where would you tell them to start?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I would say probably start just general education on why you want to bring AI into the fold, how it's going to help your team, what opportunities is it gonna bring, what gaps is it gonna close. And then once you have that, maybe you get a lot less pushback on adopting it. And then from there, really define what that success metric will look like by bringing the the AI tool inbound so that you know upfront what you need to achieve in order to show that ROI.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep. I totally agree. I think one of the things I know I misjudged in this process is I'm sure I don't know if it's the same for you at Brightly Software, but if it is for, like, our listeners, but there's a big push, like, tops down for how are you using AI? How are you adopting AI? So that upwards communication wasn't as hard of saying, like, oh, we're using AI. It was convincing the team and the downward communication of why this is worthwhile for you because it is a new process. It does take a lot time. So I like where you, like, anchor that in the why we're doing this, what this is gonna impact, really help not only, like, leadership who are pushing you to do it, but also help me to get the rest of the team on board with why this is, like, an imperative for our team. And it's not just because, oh, our board told us to do it. It's like, no. These they're, like, actual metrics that this is going to impact, and let's anchor in that and get people bought into that process. So I I totally agree.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah. And in in a b to b mark marketing organization, we need to be able to have sales in alignment with everything that we're doing because we are joined at the hip. So we want them to be brought in and bought in at the front too so that we can share those common pipeline goals. So totally. They were they were very receptive and also very, very much loved, Jill.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yes. Usually for sales, if it's gonna help them close more deals, it's pretty easy to get. And once you can prove that, they get on board.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Improve it. Yeah.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Now from a buyer expectation standpoint, do you think there's anything that we are really underestimating as marketers? Like, we we talk a lot about buyers expect, like, personalization, but I think even what personalization is over time has, like, really changed. So from your take as someone adopting AI pretty frequently and, you know, you mentioned you're in the back end of of your Gentec marketing platform and with Jill, and you're looking at how buyers are interacting with your site, what do you think we're underestimating that you would flag to marketers like, hey. You you need to stay on top of this?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I mean, I think you you you called it out personalization, but how can you get the right personalization at the right time? So right now, prior to AI, it's it's a very generic outreach. Using AI, it's still personalized, but is it personalized to the benefit of the buyer? Are they feeling that it's a one to one email even though it's being generated via AI? And also the immediate follow-up. You know, someone who form fills to they will not talk to a sales rep who waits five days to reach out and to complete that meeting. Like, they want it within two seconds. So I think just making sure that there's that tool that you can use to really hone in on getting the right personalization and time to lead is key, and that's obviously what we're really leveraging Qualified for.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. I think the instant gratification and instant follow-up is so important.
And I know, obviously, working with Qualified every single day as, like, an end user, and I get to pilot it, but I've just become so accustomed to, like, yeah. If I'm gonna fill out a form, someone's gonna follow-up with me, or I can get my questions answered right away. And I know in my personal life, I'll go, you know, if I'm looking for something online and if I don't get if I fill out a form and ask someone, like, we're doing some work in our house, I was looking for, like, a plumber, and they didn't get back to me right away. I'm like, what is the like, I've been trained now to expect that instant gratification. And when you don't have it, and I'm like, man but I think that is happening to all of our buyers now, whether it's from, like, a b to c standpoint and, like, the one click to purchase. Like, we've all just gotten so trained to expect that instant response and gratification. And when you don't get it, like, man, we lose interest fast.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Or you lose trust that they're, you know, there to deliver because they're not putting you first.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep.
Yeah. Totally. Now looking ahead in the next twelve months, what do you think the single biggest change for b two b marketing will be?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I guess I could say, you know, probably twelve months from now, everyone will use AI in marketing. So how are you going to use it in the correct way to differentiate yourself from your competitors by really removing that friction from the buyer experience and making that human experience from a client to client perspective better. So I think that is the change for the next twelve months.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep. And if everyone is going to be using AI in the next twelve months, I feel like there is potentially a skill gap. From like, if you're listening to this and you're like, man, if everyone needs to be using AI, my whole team, whether myself or, you know, my direct reports or whatever is. If you could give advice, Whitney, to any of those people who are listening that are a little bit nervous that they're going to be expected in the next twelve months to be utilizing AI across the board, do you think there are particular skills that we can be focusing on to make sure we are prepped for that shift in the next twelve months?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I think at least in my team, we are really focused on, I guess you can call it orchestration. We have a lot of different platforms that offer various AI tools. So how are we going to integrate that across the whole marketing team, the sales team, our sales operations team so that we can really align that tech stack, really clean that data, design intentional handoffs between those systems so that they're talking. We're not overriding each other. We're not duplicating efforts. Even include the human handoff there so that you're leveraging all of the tools you have at your disposal to really maximize your ROI.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. And now my last question before we move into my favorite section, which is our lightning round.
Besides this, like, agentic marketing inbound pipeline, are there any other emerging agentic use cases or, like, AI agents that you think are going to be impactful for marketing in the coming twelve months?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Yeah, I mean, living in operations, right? We don't really thrive in the flashy use cases. We're really more in the operational ones, but so much value in monitoring performance and surfacing insights. I think with the amount of data we can collect as marketers right now, it's impossible as a person to leverage the data that we get and get insights out of it and then keep up with the data that's coming in, right? The minute you pull something from a system that's out of date. So leveraging those agents to continually monitor that and surface it is a huge use case that I find really valuable. I think as businesses will start to see that be more important and time-saving when it comes to QBRs and business reviews and all of the things that take up so much time for everyone, those agents will be really, really valuable. I think too, autonomous testing and optimization across channels, that's a big one. And then to my point, how do you string those together? So it's, we tested in this one place and now we're connecting it here. How can we work those two together to optimize and iterate and start moving from channels specific AI agents to more omni-channel agents? I think that's a really interesting next phase as we grow as marketers. And then I think another one is intelligent routing prioritization based on intent and behavior. Current systems really follow that if then, they're very statement-based. So how do we progress that to leverage AI where we can start to say they're interested in this, so that changes how we route them or prioritize them. So I'm really excited about that use case. I think there's a lot of value there. We're trying to constantly surface high quality leads or opportunities or get to those buyers or the buyers who are a little bit more motivated than others. I think that will be a really impactful use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. Okay, I'd like to wrap things up. I have a couple, we call them lightning round questions. So, like, quick questions, quick answers. First one is, other than ChatGPT, because that tends to be most everyone's answer, what was the first AI tool that you started experimenting with?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Honestly, Qualified, which is really funny. But it was really one of the first places that it clicked for me as a MOPs leader that our future is training and optimizing and leveraging AI. In my previous roles, it was starting to train the AI SDR and progress that forward. And it was really interesting having to go work with our product team to get specific answers to make sure we're feeding it the right information, pulling that and giving it back and saying, like, well, this didn't seem quite right. Can you score this? Can we correct it? Can we train it better? It was really the first glimpse for me of, like, oh, this is what an agentic marketer does and this is what our future is going to look like.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Oh God, agentic or AI. I mean, I feel like they're everywhere. You cannot escape it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You cannot escape it.
I think it's so funny. I'll scroll LinkedIn and, like, every ad that I get is some agentic or AI, which, like, we're just as guilty of it. I get it. But I'm like, it has permeated everything. It is everywhere.
Okay, one marketer to follow who's ahead of the curve on AI.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I'm really fascinated by Amelia Lerutte, the Chief AI Officer at SaaStr. I think it's really fascinating to see how she's running marketing, and I think it's a really interesting glimpse of what our life as marketers will really look like soon. So I love following them and seeing what they're doing and hearing how she's keeping up with her agents. Yeah, the part, she recently did a LinkedIn post and she was talking about how instead of managing people, she manages her agents. And it's still the 30 minutes every day or every week to optimize them and check in on them, but it's an AI agent instead of a human. And I was like, wow, that's crazy, but really interesting. I think a great glimpse of the future.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I think Jason and Amelia are great follows for just anything agentic. And I feel like they're always sharing actual statistics and how things are performing, which I feel like is a rare glimpse. So I second that. I think both Amelia and Jason are great follows if you're looking for real world use cases on AI and how the future of marketing and org structures will be, because I feel like Amelia is really pioneering that.
If you could automate one part of your life outside of work with AI, what would it be?
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
God, I would love to automate laundry or maybe have it clean the kitchen after a meal. It can all kind of load and empty the dishwasher and wash all the pots and pans.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. I'm like, we have so much AI for manual work, like the whole podcast we talked about, if it's manual work. And I'm like, but what about the manual work in my day-to-day, which is like laundry, dishes? Really need AI for that.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
I know, I would love that. I don't know how that works, but I would really say yes. I know. I feel like we're already all seeing it with our taxes and finance and you can use it in your budgeting tool and things like that, and it's like, oh, that's great, love that. But I really would like someone to wash my pots and pans.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep.
100%. I would like someone to fold the thousands of baby clothes that I have. That would be fantastic. Well, Whitney, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. It was so great having you.
Whitney Rosa – Brightly Software
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
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