TRANSCRIPT

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
All right. We are ready for our last session of the day. We’ve got Building Tomorrow’s Teams with AI Focused Marketing Roles. I’m so excited for this panel. I’ve got Levi Worts, who’s a Senior AI Marketing Strategist at SUSE, joining me, and Sarah Sehgal, who’s the Director of Growth Marketing Operations at OpenSesame. Levi, Sarah, welcome. I’m so excited to jump into this.

Okay. So this whole panel is gonna be really focused on the future of marketing organizations. We’re starting to hear a lot more about specific roles like yours, Levi, who are very much grounded in AI and are AI focused, or people hiring for AI specific roles, Sarah, which I know you’re going through right now at OpenSesame.

So to kick things off, I’d love to just chat with both of you about how these AI focused roles are reshaping your current marketing organization. What changes are you seeing today in your team structures and responsibilities? So to kick things off, Levi, I’d love to hear from you first.

Levi Worts – SUSE
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we should really kinda break this down between maybe the different types of organizations. I’m coming from an enterprise organization, so I can speak to that pretty closely.

But I think there’s things to consider for mid market and startups, and there’ll be a lot of different approaches based on those different org setups and where they’re at. So this may not apply for all, but I’d like to kinda touch on what I’ve heard at least in the other two, right, which is startups and mid market.

What is kinda interesting about startups is the newer ones are becoming AI native, so they’re really integrating. It’s like top and bottom coming together and bringing AI throughout the entire organization, which is really unique.

They’re just—the timing’s right, I guess, for them.

And then, conversely, right, like, say, the enterprise is very large. It’s been around usually for a long time, lots of defined processes, governance, all of this stuff that can very much push back against this idea of integrating AI into an org and, like, what are those roles? How do we use it? All those questions that come from it.

So what I’m seeing is, at the enterprise at least, that there’s a lot of pressure from boards to the C-suite saying, like, use AI. Use AI. Implement it more.

And I think what’s kind of hard about this place—this where we’re at in this point in time—is nobody really knows what that means, right? So what I’ve seen and heard a lot of people mention is that it kinda keeps getting cascaded down, right?

And people keep saying, “Use AI. Do something with AI.” And it ends up kind of hitting more of the bottom, and the bottom is the one that are executing and creating and piloting and figuring out these things, and then building that kind of backup to the top.

So we’re in that kind of strange place where it’s driven from the bottom with interest from the top, and those are kinda colliding right now. So it’s kind of interesting to see how roles are trying to kind of form, right, at the enterprise level.

It’s pretty entrenched, right? It’s very structured that way that it kind of resists that. But it’s the future, right?

So with me specifically, it started because I ran a pilot right as GenAI became more available. I ran a pilot based around that, which showed kind of action and interest, and it was successful—which that report just came out recently, like, ninety five percent of pilots failed, and pretty successful pilots.

So I guess I’m doing something, right?

But those early actions allowed that space for at least my company to say, “Hey, this is really important. We need to build these—at least one role—in,” and then I think there’ll be, in the future, many more that find their way there.

So it’s an interesting place to be. I think in the mid market, they probably have the most advantage because they have the capital. They have the kind of positioning of brand, but they’re not so entrenched. So they kinda have that ability of, like, they could rethink their org easier than, say, the enterprise and really compete heavily using that AI approach.

So yeah, some things.

But if you’re a startup that’s not AI native, you better really be rethinking how you’re gonna approach it because, unfortunately, I think there’s massive competition coming your way.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. On it.

I keep thinking about—you hit such a good point of, is this something that every person in your team is starting to use? I think it’s coming top down. You’re hearing from boards and C-suite, like, you need to be using AI.

And I, as a leader, I’m trying to think of the same things where I’m like, okay, am I encouraging every person on my team to start integrating AI into the role? Which I think the answer is obviously yes.

But have you reached the point where, well, that’s a whole new skill. That is an incredibly—like, I try to lead from the front. I’m trying to build agents right now, and I’m like, man, this is like—it takes a lot of knowledge that a lot of us don’t have and haven’t had time to learn if you’re in a very high growth role and you have a lot of responsibilities.

So then I’m like, okay, when does that become a full time role for someone versus me asking everyone on my team to learn a whole new skill and incorporate into their day to day?

So, Sarah, I’m curious to get your thoughts on org changes and how you’re thinking about AI focused roles in general.

Sarah Sehgal – OpenSesame
Yeah. This is actually really interesting.

So a little bit about where I work. So OpenSesame, we are really focused in learning and development, professional development space, and skill building.

And, you know, I feel like I’m not a marketer if I don’t come to a webinar with some metrics or some numbers, right? But we’ve actually been super heavily involved in this because, you know, I look at it from a marketing lens, but this is really an entire organizational impact, right? We think about the whole org.

And some of the stats we’ve been pulling for our own org when we’re thinking about how we’re positioning—one of them is that, or two of them together, really interesting, and this is from between a McKinsey report earlier this year and a World Economic Forum Future Jobs Report—is that ninety percent of CEOs don’t think that they have a workforce that’s AI powered, and forty percent of leaders know that there is a skills gap when it comes to AI adoption.

And I feel like those go exactly, Levi, to what you said. Like, I experience for myself. We get a lot of pressure and a lot of excitement from our C-suite and our leadership of, like, “Use AI. Let’s maximize this. We have an enterprise chat. Let’s use it.”

And then the real reality is, okay, but how? Right? Like, how—cool. Do you want me to just, like, ChatGPT everything? Like, what do you mean?

And I think that’s where it’s right now. We’re considered mid market, and I love what you said, Levi, about, like, we do have a little bit of the sweet spot of we have some willingness and openness to try new things. We have some capital where we’re able to invest in tech some. But there still has to be—like, it’s not just implementing a tool. It’s not just adding on a role. This is impacting how marketing and go to market overall are evolving, and how do you do it in a way that you’re not just using AI for the sake of AI.

And I think right now, it’s still really more of a conversation than actual action. I think there’s more talk about it than action because people don’t know where to start.

And what we’ve really been doing, as we get into more about the idea of this role that we’re trying to create and just this gap we’re trying to fill, is: all right, let’s cut out “use AI.” Let’s try new things. Let’s just look at what are we doing today that we can either drive efficiency or drive effectiveness better, right? And that’s where we can try to figure out where can AI come into play—yes, in some of the current roles and identifying how we can upscale our team.

But if there are certain areas—like what we’re gonna be trying to focus in on is motion that is pretty repeatable and pretty standard—okay, that’s usually an area that is good for AI. And how can we pinpoint something that’s already happening rather than trying to create net new in a way, and evolve that to create a role or create a new function.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep.

Now I wanna kinda double click on that a little bit, because I know before we did this session, you and I were chatting about you’re starting a pilot program at OpenSesame about an AI focused role because of what you just talked about. Like, you’ve reached the point where we do think there are areas within the organization that are repeatable enough that we can start to use AI to scale them, but who’s owning that function?

So can you walk me through how OpenSesame came to this decision to pilot an AI focused role, and what even is that role?

Sarah Sehgal – OpenSesame
Yeah. So let me weigh that machine back in June, which was like forever ago, right? I feel like that’s how B2B tech is. June feels like ages ago.

But back in June, I work really closely with our sales team and our ops team, and we’ve had changes and going through a lot of different adjustments.

But one thing we identified is that we—we use Qualified. Our chat. That was one of the first areas we’ve used AI in part of our go to market functions, and just really from the chat on our website and a little bit of it.

And what we identified with that, and we’re looking through our entire go to market funnel, is basically we have two funnels, like most, right? We have inbound hand raisers, and we have other people come in, you know, in QLs and even, like, engaged accounts that both of them our SDR team is working today.

And with working—like, talking to sales and listening to sales and hearing that, you know, like, we know human touch points and the human experience are key and super valuable, and that’s where uniqueness comes in. But that uniqueness of how you have to adjust and change things is typically on the outbound side because inbound is pretty repeatable—super important, highly important. That’s where the majority of our marketing revenue and pipeline comes from. But the process itself is fairly repeatable, right? Someone comes in, they need to be qualified, and then they can go over to a rep.

So that’s what we identified of, all right, if there is a repeatable process that we’re already going through, it takes time, it’s taking effort—are there ways that we can apply AI to that and still get the same or better results with less input, right? Less human hours. And those human hours can go to be more value driven efforts.

So that’s where it started of, like, all right, how do we actually drive efficiency? How can we potentially scale this? And trying to do it from a test and learn model.

So we’re very much in the middle of it. And, frankly, we’re at a point where this has evolved and changed. We had an idea a month ago of what this role would be. It was gonna be an inbound automation SDR. That may still be the case. It may not be, as we dig in more and identify, oh, wow, maybe a phone call is super important for our inbound flow. Maybe it’s not. Maybe we need to segment out our audience a little bit more.

So we’re very much in a test and learn still and adjustment. But putting that role on paper and getting sales, marketing, our ops to align that we know we need to do something here has already been the biggest driver of getting us to be able to move forward and get some type of movement here.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. And I think something that’s really interesting about that is both Levi—my next question is for you, and it’s gonna be sort of around your transition into your role—but you both have mentioned pilots. Levi, your role kinda started as a pilot program. And, Sarah, you’re talking about this role that you’re hiring for being a pilot.

And it’s so interesting to me because a traditional marketing role, you don’t hire on a pilot basis. You don’t think about any other role on a pilot basis. You think, like, okay, we’re gonna hire an ops person or we’re gonna hire this person, and those roles are pretty set in stone with slight variations.

But now we’re in this new world where we’re like, okay, these are brand new roles that no one has ever hired before. We’ve never built them out before. So piloting them and testing them and learning does feel like the right thing to do. That’s really scary.

So I’m curious, Levi, you moved from a traditional marketing role. You piloted out an AI specific role. What prompted you to make that decision? I’m just curious to talk about your journey from moving between those two roles, because that must have been pretty nerve wracking.

Levi Worts – SUSE
Yeah. I mean, fair question. I think I would note, though, I don’t know if I’ve ever been in, like, a traditional secure marketing role.

What is a traditional role these days?

Because when I got my degree, it was in professional writing. Everybody’s like, what are you gonna do with that, right? I’m like, have you heard of the internet?

And then I got into chatbots, right? And everybody’s like, what are you doing there? There’s nothing there. I’m like, oh, I don’t know. I think it’s kind of the future, right?

So every choice I’ve ever made in my career has always been: I see the potential, and I can on it, right?

And there’s potential in all these roles, obviously. And I think we’re in a really interesting time that you can take any traditional role and actually kind of flip it up on its head and think of, like, how can this be empowered by AI.

And that’s a really fun time to be there. But it also requires that kind of interest in doing so, right? And I’m not asking everybody should or has to do that. I think it’s not fair to ask everybody to do that. We can talk about that later.

But for me, it was always been a little bit of intuition—trying to read where the market’s going, right? Like, what’s happening. And then a touch of passion too.

I don’t wanna say because I think we’ve overdone that—like, follow your passion, right? But you have to be kind of interested at least, engaged and curious as to what this could become.

Yep. And that’s mostly what’s driven me. And so I think this is kind of what has driven my interest in evolving into this space.

Certainly, when we talked about that pilot, right, that had nothing to do with my current role. There’s maybe a little crossover, but I just was really interested in it, saw an opportunity, jumped on it, said, hey, let’s do this. Let’s pilot this thing.

At the time—which is kinda funny because it was over three years ago—it was a hybrid search. It was AI answering questions but producing search results, so you could drive right to where that particular question you had asked would be in content or in a web page or something like that.

And now it’s everywhere, right? Like, Google’s it, ChatGPT. These are common things now. So it’s kinda funny that that pilot was hinting at the future of search.

But yeah, it’s always good, I think, to take risks. You cannot always be in the safe place. So if you’re interested in AI, it starts with taking that first step.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. And I would say one of the things from a leadership standpoint that I’ve noticed with AI specific roles—because we have a few at Qualified—we have both inbound and outbound heavy focus, but they are like, this is all they do is manage AI. It has opened up a new opportunity internally for someone who was maybe in a traditional marketing path that they didn’t wanna continue to follow.

So for us, you know, we might have had SDRs that weren’t necessarily interested in moving into the traditional next step, which is you’re an AE. And then for an AE, you go into, like, your mid market, then you go up to enterprise, and that is just that path that we’ve seen.

But there were people that joined in an SDR role that were like, that’s not really the path I see for myself now that I’m here, and I’m not really sure what the next steps are.

And it is exciting as we talk about this—like, is it AI replacing roles? Is it adding roles? Whatever it is—for us, we’ve seen it add roles and give opportunity to people who might not be looking for a traditional path.

And they’re like, I see an area of opportunity here. It’s cutting edge. I think it’s going to start to be imperative for every organization to have someone that is very AI focused.

So it was exciting as a leader for me to see opportunity open up for those people that we might not have otherwise had.

So I like hearing you say that you kind of—you saw that area of opportunity. You jumped on it. I think for people listening to this, that’s such good advice of like, hey, if you see that area of opportunity, there might be a new path you didn’t know about before.

Sarah Sehgal – OpenSesame
I’d even add to that, Sarah. I love that example—what you just shared, Sarah—of not the traditional path. That was one of the considerations when we specifically view one of this as SDR in the title because, hey, we have a great SDR team. Some have actually been here for a couple of years, and it’s like, okay, how do we actually create a potentially new path that they’re gonna be passionate and excited about?

On the flip side of that too, though, is if you are passionate, if you do have some type of excitement—I feel like some of us marketers, like, the level of passion in your job is higher in B2B marketing than probably some other roles—but there’s a lot of people that geek out over what we’re doing.

But if you are, surface that to your leadership too, right? Because I think there is such a—this is such an interesting ambiguous area that there is interest from leadership to use it, but leaders are afraid to say, we don’t know how, right? We don’t know how we want you to use it.

So if you’re passionate, raise your hand. Say, like, hey, this is something we could be doing.

I have a couple of team members who are doing this, and it’s getting a lot of visibility from our leadership because they are piping up to say, I’m gonna do this. Nobody told me to do this, but I know there’s some potential here. Maybe it’s a fail, maybe not.

But I think that’s important for individual contributors and people as well. Don’t wait until the role comes open. Create it.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah.

I’m curious, Kasira—you touched on this a little bit about leadership. They know they want this, but they’re not always the ones to pipe up and say, like, we don’t know.

Sarah, I’ll start with you here. What organizational or cultural barriers do you think either that you’ve seen or you think marketing leaders are going to need to overcome to get these AI centric roles adopted by the entire organization? Because it sounds like leadership might be one of them—hesitancy around leadership, and they’re uncertain whether they should be moving in this direction.

So what barriers do you think we’re going to see, or have you actually seen?

Sarah Sehgal – OpenSesame
I’ll really focus in on two that I’ve seen, and I kind of expected a little bit, but these are—we’re facing right now.

First is ambiguity, right? When you’re creating new roles or trying to identify where the role should be, and you also have to think of career paths for your existing team, growth paths for your existing team—AI has thrown this massive wrench into, well, what does that look like? What can that be?

We talk agents and tools and stuff, but at the end of the day, the business still wants revenue, right? Marketing still has to drive pipeline and brand impact. So the outputs don’t change. It’s just how do we get there?

So being comfortable as a leader with ambiguity—knowing that if you create a job description, outline a pilot, whatever you do, it is likely going to shift and change as you start taking action. But you can’t not take action because of that.

So that’s one we’ve experienced. The job description has changed a little bit. We’re thinking differently about who needs to be involved.

And I think the other one is—and to Levi’s point earlier, this depends on the size of your company and the industry you’re in. We have some financial organizations and government agencies that are very different in their AI journey than we are.

But if you are mid market, SMB—if you’re really a startup or mid market or in an organization that is embracing AI—also being able to set expectations with executive leadership and leadership, like, what can actually happen.

Because I think there is the reality of what we’re doing now and what is assumed and what articles they read and what they hear are often very different.

And the idea of, like, “Oh, AI can fix that,” when it is a million workflows and you still need some coding and things—I think being able to set expectations and being close enough to the ground to confidently tell leadership, actually, here is a path. No, this can’t go that fast—and being able to have examples of why that is.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah.

And, Levi, you mentioned earlier, at SUSE, you’re an enterprise company, which is notoriously known for barriers and red tape. Did you run into any as you were moving to shift into this? You’ve always been in kind of a cutting edge role, but as you moved into this AI specific role, did you hit any barriers from people or anything in your organization that you had to overcome?

Levi Worts – SUSE
Yeah. I mean—and SUSE is also a German company, right? So the governance is extreme. And certainly EMEA and AI is having a huge discussion, right? So it can be very difficult to navigate that as well.

I will say a lot of our pilots run in North America first, right? We use North America to experiment with and bring these things, kind of test them, which gives us a little more flexibility.

But with the intention of, like, we wanna go global with everything we do. And we have gone global with other things, right? But there’s a crawl, walk, run type of approach. Maybe the run will come in many years later.

But the crawl, walk—that’s where we’re at today, and that’s fine. I think there’s real value being generated immediately, and it really depends on where you focus it for the value that you see generated.

But continuing what Sarah was saying, I think there’s a lot of uncertainty, right, which leads to fear, which causes leaders to take a risk adverse approach.

I think we saw this in the beginning when AI was first coming out and leaders kinda pushed back and were like, I don’t know about this stuff. I wanna see more validation.

And in that inaction is a decision, and it will affect the organization.

So if you don’t create these roles, if you’re not enabling employees to evolve into these roles, I think the reality is they’re going to leave, and they’re gonna seek the organizations that are prioritizing it.

So if you fear it and you resist it, unfortunately, it’s going to actually cause probably bigger problems, right? You’re gonna lose your talent who are gonna go seek the places that are less fearful and more interested in what can be created—what they can design with it.

But the barriers have—it’s kind of strange. I don’t wanna say it’s like a barrier, but as I had mentioned in the beginning, the leadership kind of cascading down this direction of, like, figure out, go explore how to use AI in your day to day, in my opinion, is the wrong approach, and I’ve been hearing it everywhere. Lots of direction.

I think there’s some famous emails that have gone out where everybody needs to use AI from a CEO. And for me, I think their heart’s in the right place, but I would caution against that approach because there’s a lot of upskilling, right? It’s a completely different technology than we’re used to.

It’s not like you click check boxes and you do sliders and some basic things and you get consistent outputs, right? People are using natural language, and they’re prompting, and there’s so much that can change and move around with that type of approach that they should be thinking: how can I enable my employees? How can I build good systems around this?

And so I would just encourage leaders to not be so fast to just cast it down. To really, really dive deeper in. Like, what does this systematic approach look like? What architectures need to change? How do I need to rethink my business to make sure that—

And I think I heard this recently at a meetup. They called it the Hunger Games of AI, right? It’s like whoever makes it to the end, you win, and everybody else is cast aside.

And I don’t think that’s the right approach because you’re really taking a lot of talent and pushing them away on something that they simply could have just been upskilled. Everybody needs to learn different ways. We’ve known this for a long time. You need those different ways of approaching and engaging and developing those individuals.

It’s always been true. AI doesn’t change anything here. So we should not forget what we’ve learned from the past. It’s still going to apply very much with this new technology.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely.

Now I think we have time for maybe one more question. So, Sarah, I wanna start with you, then, Levi, my guess is you’ll have something you wanna add on to it. But let’s talk measurement.

Talking about new roles that haven’t really existed before—again, when we think traditional marketing roles, we tend to know how we’re gonna measure success for those roles. We know what we’re going to expect from them.

So as we’re thinking about these new AI centric roles, Sarah, specifically, you’re talking about this inbound AI automation SDR. Are you measuring it any differently, or how are you thinking about measuring for this new role to know that that pilot is gonna be successful?

Sarah Sehgal – OpenSesame
Yeah. We put a lot of thought into that piece because there are so many different ways, right? I feel like it’s like—and if you ask ChatGPT, which I like, yeah, there’s all these different fun ways that I can measure it differently.

But I think at the end of the day, the business impact isn’t different. The ultimate goals aren’t different, and I think we can get in our heads a lot of, okay, we’re doing something new, so we have to think of it differently.

And I’m like, not quite. I’m like, how do we just apply this to what we’re already doing? That’s really been my mantra: efficiency and effectiveness. How do we apply AI to what we’re doing already?

So with this pilot, to get a little bit in a degree, we really looked at it from some of the same metrics we already look at our inbound from and outlined: hey, here’s the baseline six weeks prior, and we’ll update that whenever we launch, and then the baseline six weeks after.

And we looked at core conversion rates. So four hour inbound to a meeting booked—that conversion rate—and the time meeting booked to meeting had with the sales rep that was qualified to our SAL—that conversion rate at the time. And the meeting show rate.

Because one of the concerns also is, hey, well, if this is all automated, what if it’s just bringing a lot more junk? So let’s look at our actual meeting show rate to make sure it’s the right people.

So those are some of the biggest ones overall for the business level.

The other aspect is if this is pulling time away from SDRs to be able to put it somewhere else, how much time is that? And that’s a little bit more of—we’re trying to figure that piece out too.

If we were to define how much time are you saying you’re spending on inbound, what is that time savings that this is providing to be able to both continue to execute this while now being able to put effort toward outbound instead?

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep.

Levi, I’m curious from your standpoint. When you moved into this role, was how you measure success vastly different, or what did that look like for you?

Levi Worts – SUSE
Yeah. That’s a good question. I think it almost—it was kind of pilot, right? Like, it’s completely unknown.

It’s very interesting to be in a strategist role essentially for the entire CMO org when it’s changing so fast and adjusting so much.

For me, I simplified it by saying, well, here’s the structure that we should be looking at. Here’s the three pillars of our AI that we should consider.

And then simply defining, like, okay, so what do we do in these three pillars? And I’ll share that. It’s pretty straightforward. It’s content, engagement, and data.

Each one is somewhat self explanatory. Content, obviously, generation—traditional— I have to say traditional generative AI. It’s like three years old. We can say it’s traditional at this point. It’s old school.

There’s so many solutions and ways to generate content now, so that one’s pretty straightforward.

Engagement is very much embedded in Qualified because Qualified bringing AI SDR technology to the forefront. We were literally just like, how do we engage the massive amount of inbound that we have that we don’t have enough sellers to do so? And so the AI SDR was that huge gap stop gap measure. We had a big gap. It filled that role exceptionally. So that one’s really easy to measure success.

Content, a little bit harder, but still pretty straightforward—speed to content generation. Can you scale your content to different personas and industries where it may have been very difficult for a smaller team to do that in the past? Now you have these tools to create mass amounts of derivative content.

It does come with its own problems, like managing all that content, which I don’t think anybody thought of when they’re like, hey, we can just create everything. It’s like, yeah, but now what? Manage them. All those different versions.

So new problems are created sometimes with solutions.

And then on the data side, I think that that was probably the hardest and most obscure, but I think we’re moving forward with some really cool solutions and seeing this evolve in the market pretty rapidly.

So each of them has their own niche success that we’re looking at, but some are very obvious. Some aren’t so obvious.

For example, on data, how do you ingest data and understand what are causal factors in a campaign being successful, and then reduce the time it takes you to spin up a campaign from a month to a week? That’s a huge success metric if you can do that.

So some examples of ways we’re kinda looking at it.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. That’s amazing.

Well, Sarah, Levi, thank you so much for joining us at The Agentic Marketing Summit. It was so great to chat with you about this topic. I think leaders—it’s very top of mind for them—so I really appreciate your time.

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