This episode of The Agentic Marketer features Sydney Sloan, CMO at G2, the world’s largest B2B software marketplace helping millions of buyers make smarter software decisions. Sydney shares how G2 is rethinking inbound for the LLM era, where buyers are more qualified, traffic is lower, and speed to engagement can make or break the deal.

Sydney walks through how her team is using agentic AI to remove friction from the buyer journey, redesign inbound around real-time intent, and experiment with AI-powered workflows across content, product marketing, and go-to-market. She also breaks down why every organization needs a “go-to-market architect” to design AI strategy, avoid agent sprawl, and guide teams through the shift from human-in-the-loop to human-in-the-lead.

Key Takeaways:

• Start your agentic journey with inbound: With 50% of buyers starting their journey on LLMs, Sydney explains why G2 began by redesigning inbound to prioritize speed, cutting out long cadences and making it easier for high-intent visitors to book meetings in minutes, not days.
  
  
• Inbound is now a speed game: Even with less traffic, the buyers who do arrive are more qualified. Sydney shares how agentic AI helps G2 engage instantly, follow up automatically, and make sure the team that responds first is the team that wins.
  
  
• Design AI use cases from scratch, not from legacy: Instead of retrofitting old systems, Sydney advocates “starting fresh”: picking specific use cases, containerizing agents around clear tasks, avoiding over-engineering, and moving beyond endless experimentation to production value.
  
  
• New roles: from go-to-market engineer to go-to-market architect: Sydney outlines emerging roles focused on designing AI strategy, governance, and workflows. She also unpacks how leaders need to upskill teams to manage agents, not just people, and prepare for a workforce that’s increasingly AI-native.
  
  
• AI for content, personas, and brand consistency.
  From AI-powered personas and LLM-specific content variants to agents that review copy for tone, accuracy, and compliance, Sydney shows how G2 uses AI to keep messaging on-brand and high-performing across every channel.
  
  
• Leading in the AI era means going first: Sydney shares how she personally uses AI (from strategy docs to a digital twin) and why CMOs need to lead by example, run hands-on experiments, and challenge their teams to imagine what they can retire a year from now, including traditional marketing automation.

Transcript

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Sydney, thank you so much for joining me on The Agentic Marketer. Before we dive in today, I'd love for you just to introduce yourself and tell us what you're doing over at G2.

Sydney Sloan – G2
Hello, I'm Sydney Sloan, the CMO — Chief Market Officer actually — at G2. And yeah, I've been over there the last about year and a half, been through a lot of change, exciting times for us marketers. So happy to be here, Sarah.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Amazing. So first thing, obviously the podcast is The Agentic Marketer. Sydney, how are you defining agentic marketing? Like what does that mean to you and the team over at G2?

Sydney Sloan – G2
Hmm. That's a great question. I think we're all in this journey together, and there's like phases that we're going through. And I think most of us have tackled phase one, which is just getting our teams kind of comfortable and familiar with using AI just in the day-to-day work that we do. And then I think the next level is really starting to figure out: which workflows can I apply agentic to, and what role does the agent play versus what my humans play? And do I build it? Do I buy it?

So I think one of the use cases that we have tackled first at G2 is really thinking about the inbound process, because we know that 50% of buyers are starting their journey on LLMs. And so that's shifting in terms of by the time they get to your website, they are highly qualified and ready to talk to somebody.

And so I'm like, we cannot wait and have this 15-step cadence to go book the meeting when you know they're on the site. Speed is such an important part of the entire buyer journey now. Like, who can get to them first matters more than ever. It's always mattered — it matters more than ever. And while we have less traffic coming to our sites, they’re higher qualified. And so that’s, to me, I'm like, if you're going to start anywhere, start there.

And really get that down to minutes from the time they're on your site to actually booking the meeting. And then, if they don't, then we've added in all those use cases of having an agent follow up on them. So we're going to more and more use cases now in terms of building. Yeah, that's where we started. That's where I'd start outside of making sure everybody knows how to use AI in their day-to-day.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, that makes total sense. You kind of mentioned there's a couple different use cases. I feel like you and the team over at G2 have done a really good job of this, so I'd love to share with the audience. I feel like a lot of people are still in the experimentation phase. Like, it's really easy with AI right now — it's such a trend — we're testing a lot of things, but sometimes it gets shelved because we're not finding value. But you guys have really found a lot of value experimenting with AI and agentic anything.

So if someone's listening to this, what would be your recommendation if they're looking to make that leap from experimenting with AI to actually leading with it and working it into their entire organization and their workflows?

Sydney Sloan – G2
We spent five months on the road together talking to our joint customers during the AI in Action Roadshow. And my point of view is: start fresh. Like, if you could imagine designing from scratch — ignore all the tech, the tech baggage, whatever that you have — and just say, I'm going to look at this use case. And there's many of them, depending if you're PLG or sales-led, and really designing for that particular use case and testing, iterating. You're not necessarily going to get it right the first time out.

I think the other thing is: don't over-architect it. This is some information that we also just released in our AI agent builder report that G2 just put out in October. There's a lot of people building, they're getting value, but I think containerizing the agentic — you know, when… It's like, figure out the task, the function, start there. There are very few people that have gotten to the sophistication levels where you've got like eight steps in the workflow and human in the loop.

And we're talking about this really cool thing called human in the lead, which is like — that's the next part. So for human in the loop, you're putting those checkpoints in place where the risk-over-speed equation is where you want it to be. And as soon as you have enough conviction that the agents can do it well enough, then you're willing to take the humans out of the loop, and then the humans go in the lead. And so they're leading and managing a collection of agents that are now doing that type of work that the agents are good at. And they're coaching them.

And it's so interesting because now you have to teach those leaders new skills. You can't just take somebody that was a great IC and expect them to manage people, and you can't take a great IC and expect them to manage agents. There's things that we're going to have to do in terms of educating and scaling up our teams and our people to be able to take on that role. So I think it's an evolution. Yeah. We're not there. We're not there yet with that. I'll say that's… yeah.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. You know, we're just definitely not there yet. We were just having a conversation with Matt Hines and Sangram over at GTM Partners. They joined us for a summit recently and they were talking about — you mentioned you're going to have to up-level your skills for AI. And Sangram had this really interesting point. He was like, this is the first time ever in history where there's five different generations working in the business at the same time. And he was talking about like…

Sydney Sloan – G2
Mm. Yeah.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
We've always talked about humans being replaced with AI, and is there concern around that? And what him and Matt were pointing out is: we'll have this generation that's now joining the workforce where they're very AI-native. They're not learning a new skill — they're coming very AI-competent already. And will entry-level roles be looking differently? Is that more of an AI management role versus the normal entry-level IC roles?

So I really like that human-from-the-loop to human-led, because I do feel like, to your point, we're getting there. We're not quite there yet, but it feels like that is the next evolution, and the next generation entering that workforce might be more primed for that, which is really interesting. Now…

Sydney Sloan – G2
It will be interesting. It depends on how they've used it. If they've been using this for their personal… There is still something different when you enter the workforce and understand what that is, which is why I'm an advocate for — we talk a lot about go-to-market engineers. I think there needs to actually be a go-to-market architect. And so where the architect is responsible for designing: what is the approach that your company wants to use as it comes to the use of AI?

How should agents be built and managed? What is the governance? Where are the guardrails? What are the best practices? Who manages? How do you keep track of them? Right? Like, you can't set it and forget it. That's why it still needs to be managed.

Unlike nurturers — that was like, built it once and then it just ran forever — that's not the era that we're in. We have to be learning, adapting, and learning and adapting to agents as they continue to evolve. So I think that architect role is super important. And then the engineers can kind of get into the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day, or whatever you want to call the roles of the future.

It's a passion area of mine. So, you know, I plan on writing up some LinkedIn posts in the future about what I'm seeing about different roles, how job descriptions should change, how they evolve, what skills, how do you get those skills. So that's, I think, where we're at.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. And so if you're listening to this, go follow Sydney on LinkedIn, because it sounds like you're about to share some knowledge. And I like the idea of being an architect first, because I feel like — going back to the last question about adoption and experimentation moving to leading — if you don't have someone architecting it from a bigger picture and you just have these individual engineers, I feel like that's where we end up lost in the sea of experimentation, because it's not getting widely adopted.

There is no one overseeing a larger strategy or architecture. So I really like that. I feel like that's something that definitely gets overlooked. Now…

Sydney Sloan – G2
Yep. It does. I mean, if you've been in this world before there was SaaS, like I have, that was how we did it before, right? IT teams built things. You had to have an architecture. People had to design things. You had people that were responsible for building it versus managing it.

There was a gap because there were business-level knowledge and the IT didn't have context. So then they moved an IT person into your department so they had more context for what it was that you would do. There were team supporting marketing and team supporting sales.

And then we got SaaS, which was basically our workflows automated into cloud-based platforms. That's all it really is, right?

And so now we're saying, well, let's reevaluate that and go build. But I think another role of that architect is also to determine: do we have platforms that do this? Is it better to use the agentic capabilities in the platform? Do we want to have a horizontal AI builder technology — which I think everybody will? That's a new category that G2 has as well. So like Relevance or Ricardo or like an 8N, whichever platform they're going to standardize on.

And then there'll be expertise in how to use those platforms. And then there's still ChatGPT or your agent of choice. And so those decisions need to be made in a thoughtful way. And so I do think that the architect can help with making those decisions.

Or they deputize people inside the business units that are responsible for that, but there's still a federation in terms of how that's managed, the decisions that are made, to keep from the agent sprawl that could happen if they didn't do it well.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. Now, you touched on this a little bit earlier, but I want to double-click on it a little bit. Where is AI most visibly showing up in your team today from a marketing perspective? Like, where are you seeing the most value? Are there particular areas within your org where it's made a bigger impact? And alternatively, are there areas where it just hasn't really touched yet?

Sydney Sloan – G2
Yeah, I think it's different for every team because it really depends on the people that embrace it. And so I think our content team was quick to embrace, and we built gems — we built specific — and then we moved them over to chats. And so I think we built up and we're looking at other platforms in case we want to go that direction in the future.

But that's been really helpful in having a single voice, making sure that things are meeting our brand guidelines — ideation — all the use cases that you would hear with content. The other team that has been really forward was our product marketing team. I'm a big fan of using AI for personas, persona development, going deep, always learning. And then we test everything against our personas.

And one of the things that I've been recommending to a lot of our customers is also create the LLMs as personas. So you have your buyer personas, but you can also have a ChatGPT persona. So when you're creating content, you're saying: how's it going to resonate with — let's say I'm going after product marketing — product marketing buyer. And then I'm also going to say, how does this resonate with ChatGPT? Are there things that I should change in terms of tone, word choice, to make sure that it also… content performs.

And so I can see us having variations of core content for: this is designated for an email-based communication or a webinar-based communication; and then this is focused on answer engines and LLM presence — all from the same core document, if that makes sense.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, that does make sense. Now, on that same note, I think a lot of AI — we're talking about performance and ops. And obviously, if you're adopting an AI tool, you want to make sure you're getting ROI from it. But I'm curious to get your take on: how is AI going to help from a storytelling and brand-building perspective? Because you kind of just touched on it there. Content seems to be the first area of an org that's really adopting AI.

Do you think it's going to start making an impact on how brands are doing that storytelling and building their brands? Or do you think it's going to be kind of business as normal and now this AI is assisting us or running co-pilot? What's your take on that?

Sydney Sloan – G2
Yeah. Well, I think this is one of the first areas. Jasper and Rytr have been around for a while — before the AI boom happened, right? We already had platforms out there that were helping with content.

And I love hearing things like: I did a session at HubSpot Inbound with the CMO from Deloitte, and her best practice use case was the agents that were reviewing emails before they got sent to ensure from a fiduciary perspective or these highly regulated industries that it was in the right tone, voice, didn’t say anything that wasn’t supposed to be said in an email. They have 400,000 people. So just imagine what that can do at scale.

Now try to apply that to every communication that’s coming out of your company. So we're looking at content from: I'm writing a blog, I'm writing this content piece or whatever. Imagine if you haven't yet built one that's just a fact-checker, or the thing that it passes through the content.

Right now we have that being a human evaluating the agentic content. And I think you could actually do the opposite way where you're having it be your proofreader or your copy editor — whatever that is — that just makes sure: yep, good to go. Or: hey, you missed this super valuable point that you could have added to your email that you forgot to add.

So it's how it can be applied and where it's inserted into the workflows that make the most sense for the companies, which then goes back to your question. Then you know we're on brand. We know that we answer questions in the same way. We position certain capabilities or uniquenesses in the same way. We use our data points in the same way — which is really hard to do at scale with people.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I remember early days of ChatGPT and everyone’s kind of going wild and uploading things into it and helping with content and writing. And then I still remember a ping from our security in our general-wide Slack that was like: you can't just upload anything into ChatGPT to help you write. And there was a bunch of people in market that were like: okay.

It is helping us. But then I remember interviewing Jasper. I had a different podcast called Go To Market AI, and they were showing examples of how Jasper is helping maintain that brand consistently. And it's so good, because if you have this massive organization with a bunch of people writing about different product lines and different stories, being able to maintain that as a leader is incredibly difficult. So these AI tools that are helping with that, I think, are speeding things up so much.

Which leads to my next question: you're a CMO, you're leading in an AI era. How does that look different? Do you have to lead differently in this era of AI? And if someone is listening to this and they're a CMO, what would be your recommendations to them to be leading first in this AI era?

Sydney Sloan – G2
Well, I think it's an exciting time when you get to start things from scratch. And especially in this era, I think we have to be leading by example. I always believe that, especially if you're expecting your teams to be able to use AI to help with strat— like, I've had mine do strategy documents, I've been building my digital twin. I, you know, I help — it helps me write emails, everything. It just has made me so much more productive.

But then also championing the next phase. If it's not happening, I have to make it happen. It's like inventorying the use cases — who's building it? How are we getting there? And getting people over the fear of AI — it's real. In terms of like, if I build this, then what's my role? Helping coach the mindshift of what this means in terms of your personal productivity and your ability to take on new things and be more strategic, which is what we all want to do. We don't want to do the same repetitive tasks over and over.

And so I think there's a bit of coaching there as well, and the art of the possible. The last thing I would say that I think is one of the most successful things that I've seen my peers do too is: taking the team offsite and doing a full couple-day hackathon where everybody learns, builds, shares together and gets over their fears, concerns, and figures out how to collaborate with AI.

So it's fundamentally the biggest shift — and I'm saying things we already know, right? Like, it's fundamentally the biggest shift. I was here for the intranet — the introduction of the intranet. When I started, we didn't have a website. So I've been doing this for a while. And, you know, the introduction of CRMs and all of it. And this is the most exciting and dramatic shift that I've ever experienced.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, I really like your example of leading with it first. I do think — again, like summit this week — we've talked to a couple different leaders, and I can't remember exactly who it was, but they were saying that they were on a panel at Inbound, and they asked — it was like Fortune 500, like large brands, you know, multi-thousand — CMO, CEOs — like: how much time are you putting in a day to AI? And it was like 50% or more that they were like: it's so new. We want to be leading first. We're in there hands-on.

I think that's such an important thing, because you can't expect your team to do it if you're not doing it first. I really love that advice from you: lead from the front, be doing it, because that's going to set the precedence for the entire team.

Sydney Sloan – G2
Yeah. Yeah. And I think the other thing that was just kind of a game-changer for me is I changed my Chrome to start with GPT. So that's where everything starts. That was like a forcing function for me. And so I no longer search — I just ask GPT.

I have a hilarious story. So I was with my son, driving in LA to go to the airport, and we were passing this… where I used to live when I was… to start college. And I was like: oh, there's this, you know, famous thing that happened here. I'm not going to mention it, but I was — I think it's this house, I think it's this house.

And then I just got on GPT and talked to Rain, who's my digital twin, and I was like: hey, what is the address for the thing that happened here in this time? And she was like: this. And he's like: what was that? Like, mom has new tricks. Like, dude, that's GPT. Come on now.

So yeah, that's how to impress your kids.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That is pretty good. On the flip side, I would say I grew up in a very small town. It's not the most tech-forward town by any stretch of the imagination. And I was talking to my mom the other day, and she mentioned using ChatGPT, and it blew my mind. I was like: remember not that long ago, I don't even know that you could check your voicemail. Now you're telling me you're using GPT to search?

It really was a shift in mindset for me. I was like: oh, this really is going to be the future of search. And if my own mother — who not too long ago could hardly use her cell phone — is using ChatGPT to search, like, this is really where we're all going.

Okay, so the last question before we go into the lightning round, which is going to be quick hits. But I know it's hard to say crystal ball, looking ahead — but a year from now, is there something that you think B2B organizations are still going to be getting wrong with AI, and what should we be doing about it now to not get there?

Sydney Sloan – G2
A year from now, I think what people will be doing wrong is still over-testing. You know, I think that every day matters in getting yourself on that path to phase two that I was talking about — where you have structure, process, guardrails, governance, and people are building.

My big challenges to my team are like: what do I get to retire a year from now? I don't want us to be using marketing automation — and we use a lot of marketing automation, both for our buyer side and seller side of G2. What does that look like? Tell me how you're going to design yourself off our marketing automation platform.

And I bet a hundred dollars — of all my hundred dollars — that there are many CMOs saying that today. And so, like, if you're not thinking that big and bold, I think you really need to. And I've been in plenty of rooms full of CMOs — and like public-company ones — and they're like: oh, we can't move that fast. And I'm like: yeah, you can. Start with the division. Prove it out in the division.

No, maybe you can't do it across all your five product lines or business units. But you can lead by example and prove it quickly and then fast-follow. So yeah.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep. Yeah. I just did a session with Kim, the CMO at Zoom, and Jessica, who's the VP of Marketing at NinjaCat, which are two very different companies as far as where they're at. And I was like: okay, what would you — you know, as an enterprise company, Kim at Zoom — what would you like to adopt that you think a more mid-market company like NinjaCat is doing?

And that was her thing. She was like: speed. They have the ability to move so fast. There's not a lot of red tape. And she was like: I think that's imperative. I think we're going to have to move really, really quick in this age of AI and be testing or we're going to get left behind. And that's something smaller companies already are doing really well.

So I like your take that you're like: even if you're at a large company, you’ve got to move fast. You can’t be waiting around and then trying to wait for that red tape to get cut open for you. You’ve got to do it.

Sydney Sloan – G2
Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, so the last part of this podcast is our lightning round. So quick questions, quick answers. To get things started: what was the first AI tool that you tested as a marketer that wasn't ChatGPT? Because I feel like that's kind of everyone's given.

Sydney Sloan – G2
Gemini. It was Gemini. We had Google Workspace, and so it was included. And that's where we started, and that's what I first used. And it was still coding — you still had the hashtag context. It was harder.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Amazing. Okay, most overrated buzzword that you hear in martech right now. Is it agentic? Is it AI?

Sydney Sloan – G2
AI? Hello? That's easy. I was just texting somebody — I was texting JamCon, so I'll give a shoutout to my friend Jam — and I'm like: I got to go to a podcast. Blah blah blah, AI. Blah blah AI. Blah. Yeah, I know.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
And Jam's like: yeah, I know. Okay. One marketer who you would recommend people follow, who you think is ahead of the curve on AI.

Sydney Sloan – G2
Ooh. I have been a fan of Francois Dufour — D-U-F-O-U-R. He was at Twilio. He's off on his own and is doing a newsletter. So I learn the most from him. He kind of does a summary of what he's learned for the week and gives actionable, practical tips. So I've learned the most from him.

But I think that Kyle Poirier is great. Who else do I follow… Branded Redliner has been doing some cool things. I have to give a shoutout to Christina McMillan — I love her content recently. She's really getting deep on that. So I'll give you a few. Yeah.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Thank you. I'm going to go follow all of them. Okay, last question: if you could use AI to automate one part of your life outside of work, what would it be?

Sydney Sloan – G2
My easy answer is travel — but I already use it for that. If AI could figure out how to get me to the gym every day, that would be great. That's my answer.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You know what? I like that. I feel like it's a lot more interesting, because I do feel like not that long ago it wasn't doable and people had that answer on the podcast. And now we're like: wait, you can actually use AI to automate your travel a little bit easier.

Sydney Sloan – G2
Yes.

Sydney Sloan – G2
100%. I haven't used the booking feature yet, but it does the entire itinerary plan, does evaluations, tells me which airline to book. Yeah, that's my power use case.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Amazing. Well, Sydney, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It was great to have you, and thank you for sharing all of your insights.

Sydney Sloan – G2
Thank you.