This episode features an interview with William Tyree, CMO at IntelligenceBank, a leading marketing and compliance platform that gives teams one place to manage, store, create, and share brand-safe and legally compliant content.

William shares how Intelligence Bank is using agentic AI and Piper the AI SDR, to remove friction from the buyer journey and make it easier for prospects to engage, get answers instantly, and book meetings. He talks about what it takes to bring AI agents into a marketing organization, the cultural shifts required to build trust, and how his team balances innovation with compliance in highly regulated industries.

Key Takeaways:

• AI agents remove friction in the buyer journey. By automating lead response and live buyer engagement, Intelligence Bank makes it easier and faster for prospects to connect with sales.
  
  
• Change management is essential. William explains how his team addressed concerns around AI adoption by rolling out agents gradually, building trust, and proving value with data.
  
  
• Agentic marketing empowers AEs. With Piper the AI SDR handling initial buyer interactions, account executives can focus on higher-value conversations and customer experience.
  
  
• AI use cases go beyond pipeline. From compliance monitoring to content review, William highlights emerging opportunities where AI agents can add scale, speed, and consistency.

Transcript

Claire Ebben – Qualified

William, 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 to learn a little bit more about how you're using AI agents to hit your pipeline targets. Before we dive in, can you just tell us a little bit about you and the work that you're doing at IntelligenceBank?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

Sure, yeah. Thanks, it's so great to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm CMO of IntelligenceBank. We are a platform that gives marketing and compliance teams one place to manage, store, create, share content that's brand and legally compliant. Our customers are either marketing teams or marketing compliance teams.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

With us at Qualified, we love marketers. So let's kick this off. Just first thing first, how do you define agentic marketing? What does that term evoke for you?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

Okay, yeah, and I'll start by saying that I know that there's no right definition of that. I was with a bunch of marketing leaders this morning who were all talking about it. I think everybody's thinking about it the same way, but the way I'm thinking about it is most of the AI that we're using in our tech stack, with the exception of LLMs, they are powerful. They are deterministic. We kind of think about them as artificial interns.

Because if you think about what marketing interns did a few years ago, it's mostly that kind of grunt work, and they do it really fast and really well. I think of agentic marketing as being a level above that, which is something that can do very specific tasks on our behalf based on rules and guidelines that we put in place, but actually make decisions about what the best route is in real time.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

The artificial interns are getting a bit of a promotion to agentic work today. Amazing. So where for you does agentic AI show up most visibly for you in your team today? And I guess, where are you seeing the most value in this sort of new approach?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

Yeah, look, I'm really optimistic about a bunch of solutions on the market. I think that, probably no surprise to you, the place where we're getting the most value is actually in Piper, the AI SDR, who we've named Raye. And we're using her to answer live buyer questions on the website, helping buyers and customers book meetings, and automatically responding to emails based on the action that inbound buyers took.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

I guess diving into that a little bit, or just double-clicking there, the initial value, I guess, of bringing Piper on, bringing Raye onto the team—what did the world look like at IntelligenceBank before that, and how has it shifted things around or unlocked value for your team?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

Yeah, it's really changed. I've been a Qualified customer for a long time, as a Qualified customer at my last company as well before Piper existed. And I think the way, so both here and previously, our teams used to use, I'd say our sellers really used Qualified as a way to see who was on a website, maybe reach out and have live conversations with those people or respond to inbound questions.

You know, also direct bookings, so bypassing the traditional kind of gatekeepers to get meetings booked, things like that. This is really different from that. So this is really then the AEs being focused on the things that they do best, while Piper is basically doing all that other live stuff that AEs used to have to interrupt their workflow to go do.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

Yeah, yeah, it is. It's really just taking on all of those first steps in that qualification process that used to be a ton of either passing off between SDRs and AEs of who's responsible for that, or the marketing team trying to nurture leads. What we're seeing across our customer base is just simplifying the whole entire process. So that's awesome to hear.

Pulling back the curtain, I guess, on the transition of moving into this new agentic marketing world, how do you approach initially convincing people internally to adopt agents? And how are you getting your team on board, I guess, with this agentic strategy across your entire tech stack?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

Yeah, I think here's kind of the way we were thinking about it. My goal, my overriding goal as a marketer, is always just to make IntelligenceBank the easiest company to buy from. Because, I mean, selling software is hard, but actually buying is even harder, believe it or not. And so, just to remove all friction, make it very transparent, make it easy for people to get answers to questions they have really, really fast.

And I think, you know, just when I looked previously at our KPIs in terms of how well we're doing in a few areas, I knew we weren't doing that. So for example, when I looked at people who—even though we sell globally—somebody's, you know, you can't always have a person live and available. It's very difficult to do, even for huge companies out there. So I was just looking at the percentage of chats that we responded to. The numbers were not great.

I was also just looking at lead response times, and that's a really, really old SaaS metric to look at. Just looking at those two things, for me the hypothesis was, if we just did those two things better and we didn't do anything else better, how well could we do? And so I think that's the way I approached the conversation with the rest of the team.

And I think with any new technology, there's always natural concerns. Some worried that AI might hurt conversion quality. Others felt like sellers should really rely on their expertise and knowledge more than technology before going there. But I thought those were really good concerns. And I think what it did is it pushed us during deployment to actually really raise the bar.

So we probably rolled it out maybe a little more slowly than we would roll other things out incrementally. But I think being really careful and gradual about it bought us not only credibility but also trust and confidence.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

I love that. Yeah, I mean, I think getting that alignment internally of just where you can turn the dial up on things like lead response time, or just the fact that buyers are coming to the website all the time and they just want an instant response or someone to engage with. Even just that incremental improvement can have so much down-funnel impact.

So yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Was there anything you had to sunset—processes or things you had to shift around—in approaching this? Because I know a lot of folks looking at agentic marketing and moving to this new strategy have a lot of questions about how to structure SDR/BDR teams, or what this means for how they get credited on their quota, things like that. What's your point of view on that as a CMO?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

Yeah, I mean, there were definitely a few things we had to think about. I'd say just something that would be very marketing-centric would be we definitely started changing our approach on lead and contact nurturing. So people come in, they do certain behaviors. You know, is that then the job of more of a traditional kind of rules-based marketing engine to get back at, or are there certain situations where that's maybe not the best approach?

So there were definitely a few things to think about like that. We didn't have anything from a sales compensation perspective to worry about, which was great. But I'd say for the most part, it was just about the conversation in terms of giving account executives time back.

You know, and mostly that was met with open arms. We definitely did have some people who loved—I would say, like, old-school Qualified—and said, "No, I love it when I see my prospects hit the site and I go and do that." And then I think for that, it's like, okay, we can accommodate that.

Even with the email lead response, for example, which comes from a different place functionally, there's a manual takeover for that. You can do it. So I think it's a little bit of giving people the option to do either. But for the most part, once AEs started realizing, "Okay, now I can use all my time to deliver a better customer experience or be more helpful to our buyers and move deals forward," the transition was really fast.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Seeing the data and the actual results is always helpful there. I want to talk and switch gears a little bit about just your perspective on this AI shift. You spoke on another podcast very recently about the acceleration that AI offers to marketing workflows.

What are some of the most compelling use cases for AI agents that you see emerging right now? This could be outside of Qualified and Piper too. What do you hope to see more of soon?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

Yeah, I think, you know, we sell to marketing and marketing compliance teams, especially in highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and education. We've seen this big demand for agents that automatically detect potential issues with brand and legal compliance.

It could be everything from, like, there was an insurance company about a month ago that said, "We started using this in a way we didn’t even anticipate," which was using an agent from IntelligenceBank to detect when the tone of the copy wasn’t correct, or looking at very specific regulations from a certain governing body. Things like that.

And I think that’s interesting because there are times when deterministic AI is really the best solution. You want to make sure there’s a set of inputs that come in, and it’s absolutely doing the same exact thing on the outside every time. But I think what's interesting then is looking at the cases where having something that’s LLM-based and agentic really needs that context and reasoning to say, "Okay, I don’t know exactly what you want to do with this."

Like for content review, it might say, "You might want to look at this because this sounds a little off," as opposed to just doing the action. So I think it’s knowing when to blend both.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what's so exciting about this whole new world is that obviously agents are able to reason and make decisions just like a human would, but in many ways they’re able to do that at greater scale.

Down the road, having an agent that can say, "Hey, here are all the conversations I've been having on the website today. I’ve gotten a lot of questions on this; let’s create some content around it." It becomes more of an actual person on the marketing team. There are a lot of potential directions it can go right now, which is really exciting.

What’s something that you think most B2B marketing orgs might still get wrong about AI a year from now?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

I think expectations will still be out of line with reality, probably. Some things are repeatable and scalable and go really well, but you see so many people on LinkedIn saying, "I just used this new thing to create an AI agent in 10 minutes, and here’s all the things it can do."

You see hundreds of people saying, "That’s awesome, send me the DM," whatever. But it’s like, okay, sure, I’m sure you did create that, but is it scalable? Is it repeatable? Does it have enterprise security? What are you really going to do with that?

And I think, unfortunately, people who are not operators in this stuff every single day see that, and it makes expectations really crazy. Marketing is in an interesting place right now—it’s the most exciting time ever to be doing what we do. We can surprise people by delivering so much value.

On the other hand, because of all that hyperbole, there are so many expectations coming in. We just have to be really great communicators and educators while staying open to the possibilities that the next leap might be here.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

Yeah, it’s true. It’s very overwhelming to be a marketer right now because there’s so much potential, and so many use cases. In every part of the martech stack there’s something new being thrown at you. It’s hard to take a step back and say, "Okay, where should I start to be the most effective?" I feel that in product marketing all the time. Every day I get an email about some new agent that’s going to help me 3x my output.

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

Yeah.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

All right, a couple of rapid-fire questions for you about AI. Other than ChatGPT, what was one of the first AI tools you experimented with?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

Probably by the strictest definition of the term, I would say AI account scoring. I think the initial dream was that it would be better than rule-based lead and account scoring. At that time, it wasn’t. Now, it took a little patience, but I think it finally got there.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

Yeah, yeah. All right, what’s the most overrated buzzword in martech right now?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

I would say performance marketing. Because it sounds really good, but the fact is most of the people who are doing it are probably doing mostly the same thing that people with demand gen or growth marketing titles are doing.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

Right. Yeah, it's a way to differentiate for sure, but it’s a big umbrella. All right, who’s one marketer to follow who you think is ahead of the curve on AI?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

Okay, I would go with a name that’s been around for a long time. There’s a guy named Rand Fishkin who is known in the SEO world, but he’s much more than that now. I think he really has a reasonable perspective. I love following him because he acknowledges how important everything that’s happening is, but he also uses data to rein in the hyperbolic stuff and focus on what really matters.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

Yeah, I really like folks on LinkedIn who are sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly with all of their AI experimentation for sure. And then if you could automate one part of your life outside of work with AI, what would it be?

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

It would definitely be food prep, because I love to cook. As long as the robot sous chef would not actually freak out and kill me—there are a lot of knives in the kitchen—it could be a while, but I would take that any day.

Claire Ebben – Qualified

That’s a huge one for me. I already feel like so much of my week is better now because I can at least use ChatGPT to create my meal plan for the week and calculate all the calories and macros in my meals. That’s already a lifesaver, but to cook for me would be truly magical. That’s the dream. That’s the promise of AI, really. It’s none of this agentic marketing stuff.

Well, William, thank you so much for taking the time to be on The Agentic Marketer today. We really appreciate it. Thank you for sharing all of your insights.

William Tyree – IntelligenceBank

Thanks for having me. It was great.