Marketing doesn’t stop at the sale with AI
Discover how agentic AI is reshaping modern marketing as Emplifi CMO Susan Ganeshan shares insights on lifecycle engagement, scaling teams, and reducing churn.
Sarah Casteel
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Discover how agentic AI is reshaping modern marketing as Emplifi CMO Susan Ganeshan shares insights on lifecycle engagement, scaling teams, and reducing churn.
This episode features an interview with Susan Ganeshan, CMO at Emplifi.
Susan shares how Emplifi is using agentic AI to drive global coverage, re-engage high intent website visitors, support BDR teams across regions, and dramatically increase opportunity creation while reducing operational strain. She breaks down her approach to building an AI first marketing organization, why scale is impossible without AI, and how marketers must adapt as LLMs increasingly reshape buyer behavior and website traffic patterns.
Key Takeaways
Transcript
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, 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 how you are using AI agents to hit your pipeline targets. But before we dive into the show, Susan, can you just tell me a little bit about yourself and the work that you're doing over at Emplifi?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Absolutely. Thank you, Sarah, so much for having me on this podcast. I'm super excited to be here. Look, there's nothing that jazzes me more than sharing lessons learned and swapping ideas with other marketers. That's basically how I've always structured my career. I'm a five-time CMO. All software companies — very different beasts, very different kinds of software. It's everything from IT to finance and government.
I've worked in companies that span from 10 million and scaled all the way up to 400 million, done some IPOs along the way. Qualified has been my partner through three of those five companies, happy to say. These days I'm at a company called Emplifi, and we are social media marketing, social media commerce, and social media care. And it's a unified platform that uses AI to engage, connect, and convert audiences into buyers.
We are really proud to be recognized as a Forrester Leader in their Social Media Platforms Wave. And honestly, what excites me the most about today's world of AI is that it just opens up so many possibilities in marketing. And so I'm so happy to be here and talk with you about that.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. Your point of sharing and sharing with all of your peers — that's one of the reasons we started this podcast, especially right now with agentic and agentic AI and agentic marketing. It still feels so new and fresh that I know I myself have been leaning on peers and other people within the industry to just try to expand my knowledge. So I'm so glad that you're here to share with us because you're doing some amazing things both in your career and at Emplifi.
So to kick things off, Susan, how do you define agentic marketing? What does that mean to you and your team over there at Emplifi?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, well, I think it will help give you a little bit of a glimpse into my mindset if I talk to you first about my marketing philosophy. So I've long said there's no silver bullet in marketing. There never has been. You have to do everything right. You have to be on every channel, every tactic, every region. And it's a tall order because most of us don't have enough marketers and enough budget, right?
Whether you're five marketers or 50 marketers, it never feels like enough. So if you take our experience with Qualified — since the launch, we've had 2.8 million web visitors, and Qualified has helped us book nearly 2,000 meetings. I can't hire a big enough BDR team to do that. It's just not possible.
Additionally, we're also using another side of Qualified — the AI assistant. You guys call her Piper; we call her Emmy. She's become an indispensable part of our team. She doesn't sleep, she never takes PTO, and she just manages to make all of this look really easy. And that's what's giving us scale without burnout. So to me, agentic marketing is that ability to scale.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep, yeah. I think that's so true. And to your point, if there are no silver bullets, that just rings so true to me. Because if there was, our jobs wouldn't be nearly as hard as they are, because we would have something that we could just lean on. But it is about doing all the things right.
And I think what you mentioned about scale — Emmy never taking any vacations, never sleeping. We hear from a lot of people as we look at agentic AI, even beyond just our own product, that scale is so hard. We don't have the budgets. We don't have the headcount. You can't simply hire a team big enough to handle all the website traffic that you're getting, which is a problem a lot of marketers have.
So it's really great to hear that that's how you're looking at it. Like, we can use agentic AI. We can use agents to help us scale beyond what we'd normally be able to do with human headcount. So that is, I think, a really good way to look at agentic.
Now, as you were looking at things at Emplifi — how has AI, whether it be Piper or Emmy or any other AI agentic tools that you're using — how has it meaningfully improved marketing performance for you?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Sure. Well, if you look between 2024 and 2025, we've reduced our BDR headcount by about 20%, but we increased our opportunity creation by more than 22%. So that, I think, demonstrates the magic of AI. Emmy alone delivers the output of the equivalent of six full-time BDRs. So think about that for a second.
The fully loaded cost of a BDR — those six would probably be about 700K or more. And you get the bonus of no HR and people management. So I guess I would say, if you have too few BDRs, or if you have a global remit and you have to be available 24/7, you need AI.
If you have too little budget — and if I meet a marketer who tells me they have too much budget, I'm one, jealous, and two, in disbelief. But if you have too little budget to make all the noise in the market that you need to make, you need AI. So let's just get to the bottom of it: none of us can do our jobs without it today.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. I like your point of then you can take money to put towards things. We hear a lot when we talk about AI — that it frees up your time to do things that are higher quality. And for me as a marketer, I'm like, it also frees up more money for me to put toward things that drive interest and traffic.
So it is kind of this self-fulfilling prophecy that if I can put that money toward driving more high-interest traffic to my website — but then I have agentic AI to help me scale as I drive more website traffic — then I can keep putting more at that top of the funnel and driving more pipeline.
Now, as we look at AI and agentic responsibilities and as AI is becoming a more prominent part of our team — Susan, how are you thinking about your role as a marketer changing? Or how are you thinking about your team's roles as marketers changing as they work alongside agentic AI?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I think one of the things we need to recognize is that it is also changing the landscape underfoot. I have met with many of my peers recently who have said that they're seeing declining web traffic. Some of them are reporting 20 to 30% drops. And that's, of course, because of the AI summaries not leading people to your website.
So thankfully, at Emplifi, we've tried to counter that with some smart search engine optimization, strong brand presence across YouTube, Wikipedia, G2 — all those places that the AI engines are getting their information from. And so I think the evolving role of the marketer is that you have to constantly be reading the surf, right? And reading the waves. And then you have to sometimes paddle faster, or you have to catch a wave.
I would love to give one other example. As marketers, sometimes we'll hear somebody make a big claim. Like remember when GDPR came out? Everyone was saying email is dead, right? Going back to my philosophy of "there's no silver bullet" — guess what? We still have to do email. GDPR maybe tried to kill email, but it didn't work. Or TikTok tried to kill ads, but that didn't work.
So the truth is, you have to be available on all of those channels. And those channels don't die; they just evolve. So email is not dead. Now it's agentic. It's personalized, it's precise, and it's one-to-one — instead of being that blast message.
Can you hear my dog in the background?
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I just heard her, but not before.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I'm going to just have you pause for one second. I'm going to close my door.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You're fine. You're good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
So I have my lawn care people who always come on Monday, and of course they come in this one hour.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
The most important question I have to ask is: what kind of dog do you have?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I have two golden doodles.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
So sweet. I know, between dogs and lawn care — all the things. I feel like working from home now, I'm just like, "Yeah, totally. This is normal." We'll cut it out — our producer's done that. We've been here so many times. So don't worry about it.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Of course it's the one time they show up...
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Actually, my favorite was Sean on one episode — he had someone come take down a tree when we were recording. Sean Whiteley. And he was like, "Hey, we're gonna have to reschedule this. I have people literally chopping down a giant oak tree." And I was like, yeah, that is a good reason to reschedule.
Susan, do you want me to go back to the question? Okay, I'm gonna go back and then we'll cut to that one.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Let's start with that one — how the marketer's role is evolving. That sounds good.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, so as we're thinking about agentic AI and how we work as marketers, I'm curious to get your take. How is the role of the marketer evolving as we're working alongside agentic AI and involving it more in our teams? What do our responsibilities as marketers start to look like?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I think first, I want to always say — having done this now for so many years — that marketing has always been evolving, whether it's because of AI or something else. And that's why I love this job so much. You have to be a constant learner.
Anyway, let's talk about some of the things I'm hearing from my peers. My peers are saying that their web traffic is down. Some of them are reporting 20 to 30%. And of course, we've encountered a little bit of that at Emplifi as well. We're countering that by — again, I've talked to my peers, and we believe the recipe is smarter search engine optimization, stronger presence on YouTube, Wikipedia, G2, and all these other places that matter.
Basically, what we've learned is that while the tides have changed, we can catch a different wave or we can paddle a little bit faster to get through those currents.
But I think one of the traps we as marketers shouldn't fall into is extremism. For example, when GDPR came out, people said email is dead, right? And every few years a channel or another is declared dead. They don't die — they just evolve.
Email now is agentic. It's personalized, it's precise, and the best part about it — and the part I love the most — is it's one-to-one. Instead of being these blast emails that may or may not speak to the audience.
One of the things we've been using Emmy for — our agentic email through Qualified — is to support our BDR needs in Brazil. We have an AE in Brazil, a salesperson. We do not have a BDR. Emmy can speak Portuguese even though no one else on my team can. We had some turnover in our BDR team in APAC. We took all the inbound leads and we funneled them to Emmy so she could schedule the meetings for us.
Sometimes we'll run an event and it will be a huge success, and it's too much for the BDRs to follow up on all at one time. And so instead of them just blasting out a generic message to all of those leads that may or may not hit, we take those leads and funnel them to Emmy so she can swoop in and do those custom one-on-one messages.
And then one of my BDR team's least favorite tasks is to schedule meetings for trade shows. And of course, you're spending 35, 50, 100K sometimes on these trade shows. So you need them to produce opportunity. And the only way you're going to get to an opportunity is through a meeting. And to get to the meeting, you need the BDR to schedule it.
How about Emmy? She doesn't get upset. She loves doing it. You just give her the trade show schedule and tell her to go.
So I guess the beauty of this is the always-on flexibility. And we can test, learn, and try new workflows and new use cases very, very quickly. And then Emmy — she just keeps getting smarter and smarter. So it's working for us.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, the learning and testing. I think every marketer I've had on the podcast has said some sort of variation of what you said, Susan — like, hey, website traffic is down. That's universal. I think we're all feeling that, as AI summaries and the LLMs are taking traffic that we normally would have seen.
And I like the way you took that — marketers are evolving now. We get to focus on those problems. Like, do we need to catch a different wave? Do we need to ride that wave faster to figure out how to now bring traffic back up and still hit our pipeline numbers?
But when we're working alongside something like an Emmy or agentic AI, we don't have to worry about those problems. We can focus on these new things that are moving so fast with AI that there's always a new problem — like website traffic declining.
So it is interesting to hear you say that. I appreciate you sharing that insight.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Great.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, so before I jump in, I want to dig into Emmy a little bit more and some of the results that you're seeing — which you've already shared some great insights — but I always like to ask this question. Is there a hot take that you have about AI and marketing right now that you think most marketers would not agree with you on?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So sometimes I actually find most marketers that I've engaged with are on the same page. I think the challenge we have often is… I did see a little blip in that, so hopefully it was just uploading and not in the recording.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You're good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
One of the challenges marketers are faced with is voices across their business telling them to keep their hands off their leads or hands off their customers. Sales will say, “Hey, it's already in the funnel, so I'm talking to them — you don't have to.” Or the CS team will say, “They're a customer now, so I'm responsible for the communication — you don't touch them.”
And I really think that's kind of crazy. It's as crazy as saying the moment you send your kid to college you can stop parenting them. Yeah, right? I have two through college now. I have found that's when they needed me most.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I definitely needed the most parenting when I was in college, yes.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I mean, look, it's the same with our customers. Always be marketing. Always be selling. And use your AI agents to turn pipeline into customers, to turn customers into advocates, and to continue that conversation and keep the connection — so you don't see the churn.
So I would say my hot take is: marketing doesn't stop at the sale. We change the tone and we change maybe a little bit of the frequency, but AI can help with that — and can help us all scale into infinite customer marketing.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. That is actually something we've run into here at Qualified. Now that we have something like Piper that can help with these email touchpoints… You mentioned trade shows; I was laughing through that because I'm like, yeah, we've all been there. They don't want to schedule meetings. They don't want to follow up with event leads. But I spent a bunch of money to be at that trade show and to get those leads, so I obviously want the SDRs or the BDRs to work those.
The idea of not touching them — we've run into it at Qualified, where it's like, okay, this is an owned account by an AE. Are they going to be upset if we follow up with them? If we send them a marketing email? And I'm with you, Susan, where I'm like, no. Why wouldn't we have our AI SDR also send really personalized messaging while our AE is following up with them, or our CSM team is following up with them?
It's our job to market to them and to educate them. And AI helps us do that now in a really personalized, scalable way. I'm not doing this one-off email blast to them. So I do — that was a hot take, but it's one I actually agree with you on.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Awesome.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, now we talked a little bit about Emmy. You've hired her. I loved all of your use cases — especially as you talk about how we've run into similar situations where we have AEs or accounts in different geographies or time zones that we don't have BDRs to support. So I loved all of those examples.
What is — or is there — anything that was unexpected that Emmy helped unlock for your team beyond helping book more meetings and work all of that traffic? Was there something unexpected that took you and the team by surprise when you hired Emmy on?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yes. And I'm so excited about this metric. We took Emmy and asked her to re-engage with people who made it to our website but didn't fill out a form or ask for a demo or take it to the next level. And from that alone, we saw a 12% increase in our meetings scheduled. So — full stop.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, I was like, wait, that's a wrap.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. Look, I think it proves my point about there's no silver bullet in marketing — that you need to be omnipresent. Because think about the way you buy. We're all getting Instagram ads about, say, the latest cool look on clothing or bathing suits or the best travel spots to go to. And you don't click and buy the first time you see that ad.
It takes you some repetition, some looking at how others are doing it, some references. In our case, we help our customers present user-generated content — which is basically, if you're trying to sell makeup, then you put user-generated content out that shows somebody putting that makeup on. And it's a real person who is a peer to people. And then next thing you know, after a while, you get that customer.
But you had to be there and present with them through that entire exchange — and probably sometimes in multiple channels. If you figure out their email, you can email them. If you know they're going to be at a trade show, you can track them down there.
In other words, being omnipresent with them is absolutely essential. And when you take your AI agent and say, “Where aren't I present today?” and put them there, then you get that conversion. And that's all about getting that conversion.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I really like your point about thinking about it from how we buy as humans. Your point about B2C — I have a six-month-old baby now, so I get a ton of recommendations on baby products. And how many times I go look at a product, go to the website, think about it… it takes a little while before I pull the trigger and buy.
And that's for something in B2C. Sales cycles are so much shorter; it's so much quicker. But in B2B — yeah, it's just me and my husband. A buying committee of two. But yes, it's a much smaller decision. But then in B2B, you've got huge price tags, huge buying committees.
So being omnipresent with those people and having AI help you — because no one comes to a B2B website one time, looks, and is like, “Yeah, I'm gonna buy this right now, and I can just pull out an invoice and do it.”
Okay, so it sounds like at Emplifi, you've been doing a lot of work with AI. You have a lot of use cases you're using Emmy for. I think one of the things I hear from peers most often is: it's really hard to make the leap from experimentation into actually utilizing AI. And it sounds like you're doing a great job with this with Emmy.
So what did it take for you and your team to make that leap from experimentation into leading with AI within your marketing organization?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Sure. So we started with specific use cases that we thought were safer. And honestly, we just weren't that worried about it.
You've heard the phrase “fail fast.” It's okay to make a mistake or put Emmy on a case that just doesn't pan out. We have put her on some and it didn't work out. But that doesn't mean we couldn't adjust the scenario or adjust the intelligence that we're feeding in and give it another try.
But when you're experimenting with AI, I want to encourage everyone to think about the entire customer journey. So before they land in your funnel, while they're in your funnel, after they either buy or even go to closed lost. In post-funnel — if you think about every one of those steps — can you get more efficient? Can you bring AI to the task? And then can you bring humans in at the right moment?
For example, we have modified some of the way Emmy talks over time. And once we got comfortable with that, and we saw that the meetings she was getting for us were easily transitioned to BANT-qualified opportunities, it was easy to go live.
Let me also say it from my customer's perspective. At Emplifi, we have more than 50 different use cases that you can implement in our platform that are AI-specific. And what we see is that many of our customers will combine the AI — like say somebody uses it to craft the content of a social post — they may use it partially at first. Maybe just to get the image, but they'll write the caption themselves. Or they'll caption it using AI but they'll find the image themselves.
They might do one or the other job. And then eventually, they switch to trusting the AI enough because it's also learning, right? It's also learning how these captions have been written and rewritten.
So there is a comfort level, but we keep the human involved. And getting back to our team size we talked about earlier — we have small teams. But enabling them to do five, ten, twenty times the work they could normally do just because they're using AI as a kickstart, I think is a dramatic improvement for all of us.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That is a perfect segue. I want to talk a little bit more about use cases. You know, we talked about Emmy and generating pipeline, and you just gave some great examples of things you're seeing within your own Emplifi platform.
What, as a CMO, are some compelling use cases for AI agents that you're seeing emerging in the market right now? And are there any that you wish you were seeing more of — or you hope to see more of soon?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So starting with what we are most recently experimenting with and trying is a use case that combines Qualified with Sixth Sense. And we're a Sixth Sense user — I'm also a three-time Sixth Sense user — but you could use Intensify or Demandbase or G2 or others that are throwing you signals and telling you who might be interested in buying.
Combining that Sixth Sense data together with Perplexity — which we use to research additional people and different personas — together with Qualified in order to reach out to those individuals… I feel like this is going to be one of our most important use cases. It would basically be: we're going to turn signals into opportunities.
And yeah — it's live. We're doing it now. And we'll let you know later how it's panning out.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's amazing. Yeah, I would love to hear how that turns out. Because getting started with one agentic AI use case is kind of like wading into the water. But then when you start talking about orchestration — bringing multiple AI-forward or AI-native tools together to work and orchestrate entire workflows — that's where it starts to get really tricky.
So I love that you guys are on the forefront of that. You're starting to piece together different tools and bringing Perplexity in. I'm excited to hear how that goes.
Now, how do you think — as a CMO — are you leading your team in a different way in this AI-first era? Or do you think CMOs need to lead differently now that we have so much AI within our teams?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I think you do. What I did is I took a step back and looked at where I think my team gets bottlenecked. And it's when you think about how to do B2B marketing — it really does take a village, right? So you've got your creative team, you've got design, you've got writers, you've got operations, you've got analytics — and there are all those handoffs between all of those teams.
So I feel like AI can be that accelerator to speed the collaboration, eliminate some of those bottlenecks — just because now we can do creative design through AI instead of on our own. But it also lets us team up and focus on the higher-level thinking instead of the lower-level administration.
So I think what we all need to remember as CMOs leading in this AI era is: there's this garbage in, garbage out philosophy. And I used to say this about my PR firms all the time. Think about how much we pay PR firms. If you're lucky, it's under a 10K retainer a month. Many people are paying 25, 50K. It's a lot of money.
And the CFO would be the first one to ask me, “Do we really need a PR firm? Can't you just hire someone and do it internally?” And I would always say these words: garbage in, garbage out. Because I worked with some of the best PR firms. And if I was involved in feeding them the strategy from the company, keeping them in tune on our key messages, telling them who our competitors are at that moment and how we differentiate — it always seemed to work really well. We'd get really great results.
And I think we are in that exact same world with AI.
So I was recently talking to a CMO friend of mine who said her team had just fed a whole bunch of data into an AI engine. And in addition to feeding internal data, they fed in their entire website. Well, guess what? The website had pages for discontinued products — because you’ve got customers still on those products. So you can't take the web pages away. But you've got to be smart enough to say, “Okay, I'm not going to feed in the discontinued products because I don't want the AI engine trying to market those or link them somehow to my other products.”
So you have to be really, really smart. You've got to be that person feeding the AI engine with the intelligence you want it to know about — and not feeding it the things you don't want it to know.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's such a good example. When we first rolled out Piper here at Qualified — obviously we're customer number one when I'm testing things — we were like, “Just give her the whole website. Let her read everything. What could go wrong?”
And the unknown use case that came out of training our AI SDR was that I found a bunch of old content on our website that we should not have had on there anymore. And then I got to give the feedback to our product team: we need a way to toggle on and off certain pages on our website.
So it was great for our content manager. I was able to tell our content team: hey, can you take a look at this content and make sure it's up to date? Because it is garbage in, garbage out. I don't want to feed our AI this outdated thing. So it helped me clean up our website, which is great.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
That's right. Sarah, I'm going to ask you to wait one second now because you probably hear the background noise. They're blowing the leaves. I don't know if you can see — we have 100-foot-tall trees in our backyard, and so the leaves have to be blown every week.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
We can wait until they go by. Susan, are you in D.C.? Am I making that up?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, I'm just outside of D.C. about 15 minutes in Vienna, Virginia.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, so you guys are in peak fall right now…
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
It is… the past weekend was just stellar. Gorgeous.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Which is so nice for Halloween. It's always so nice around this time of year to get the peak fall, good weather, color change. It never doesn't feel good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, and with the dogs you're not worried about them getting ticks. The fall foliage here this year — for some reason, I think the more rain you get, the better the foliage. And I feel like we had a lot of rain in the spring, so it really hit hard this year and it's gorgeous.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. We lived in Little Rock for about a year and a half, and the ticks that our dogs would pick up… I keep forgetting about it. You said that and it sent a shiver down my spine. I was like, okay.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I have some stories. I won't go there now.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You traumatized me with that. I don't hear them as bad anymore. Do you want to keep going? Cool.
Okay, I will move on. Susan, I might skip the role that AI is playing in storytelling and brand building and go to the… okay, let's go into the lightning round. Does that work? Awesome.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yep.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, so I want to wrap up this portion here as we talk about AI and the future and our organizations. I'm curious: what do you think is something that B2B orgs are still going to be getting wrong with AI a year from now?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. I have a mantra: people buy from people. They use software, but they trust humans. So if you think AI can replace every human interaction or every part of a sales process, you're missing the whole point. We need to use it to amplify the people we have in place — to give them breathing room, to give them the ability to think bigger, to move faster — but not to replace them.
And going back to my original point: we're all working on these small teams with small budgets. Most teams are already short-staffed. So don't think of AI as taking your job — think of it as making you better at your job. AI is not going to replace us. We're just going to get smarter and better and more productive because of it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep, I totally agree. Okay, to wrap things up, Susan — it's my favorite part of the show. We do a lightning round. Keep it fast. I have four questions I want to run through.
First one: other than ChatGPT — because that was everyone's first foray into AI — what was one of the first AI tools that you experimented with?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I had taken over the BDR team and been working with some consultants in my network who suggested Perplexity. And Perplexity really is that BDR sidekick. They're helping us do what we call three-by-three research — three interesting facts about the people we're trying to sell to in three minutes. So we surface those insights and we surface the people we also want to sell to. And it gives us a really smart conversation starter. So I'm loving Perplexity for that use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I second that. I'm a big Perplexity fan.
Okay — besides AI, because most people would say that — what do you think is the most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
The one I struggle with the most is return on ad spend — especially for the B2B use case. In B2C, you can often connect the click to the purchase. In B2B, I think it's a mirage. Even the people who built attribution models will tell you that every model is going to give you a totally different story. The W-model gives you one story, and the straight-line gives you a different story. Everything is half fiction, half accurate.
So I like to tell my team: let's look at ROAS on pipeline, let's look at ROAS on bookings, but let's not make our decisions on it. For B2B — return on ad spend is overrated. And I'm inviting anyone who disagrees with me to help me learn more.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, that one. If you disagree, tell me your secret. I feel like we've gone through iterations of that here at Qualified, and it's like either I'm showing an insane amount of influence — and then I bring it to my CFO, and they're like, “Yeah, there's no way that's right.” Or it's last-touch, and then it's… I agree with you. That is an overrated buzzword. It's really hard to prove. And if anyone disagrees, please message Susan and me on LinkedIn — I want to know your secrets.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, let's have a podcast on that.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay — who is a marketer you think is ahead of the curve on AI that our listeners should go follow?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Someone I'm certainly following — and I think she's got it all going on, she's totally fearless with AI — is Amanda Cole at Bloomreach. She's built her entire campaign process through CharacterQuilt, which is a new startup that is really creating this AI brain and pushing the limits of what you can do with AI. It's very inspiring. And I think she gives you a glimpse of where we could go with this.
Interestingly, Bloomreach is also an AI-based company — helping B2C brands. I think it's in their DNA, but huge kudos to Amanda.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, Amanda is fabulous. She was one of our 30 2025 agentic marketers to watch for that reason. Okay, last question: if you could automate one part of your life outside of work with AI, what would it be?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
This is a really easy one because I'm in the throes of it. I'm in the thick of a move right now, and it's a cross-country move. And if someone could automate packing and cleaning and unpacking on the other end — I'd give AI a raise and the corner office if they could do that for me.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I love that one. Well, Susan, thank you so much for joining us on The Agentic Marketer. It was so great to get your insights and hear how you guys are doing with Emmy. Thank you so much for joining me.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Thanks, Sarah, for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here.
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Discover how agentic AI is reshaping modern marketing as Emplifi CMO Susan Ganeshan shares insights on lifecycle engagement, scaling teams, and reducing churn.
This episode features an interview with Susan Ganeshan, CMO at Emplifi.
Susan shares how Emplifi is using agentic AI to drive global coverage, re-engage high intent website visitors, support BDR teams across regions, and dramatically increase opportunity creation while reducing operational strain. She breaks down her approach to building an AI first marketing organization, why scale is impossible without AI, and how marketers must adapt as LLMs increasingly reshape buyer behavior and website traffic patterns.
Key Takeaways
Transcript
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, 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 how you are using AI agents to hit your pipeline targets. But before we dive into the show, Susan, can you just tell me a little bit about yourself and the work that you're doing over at Emplifi?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Absolutely. Thank you, Sarah, so much for having me on this podcast. I'm super excited to be here. Look, there's nothing that jazzes me more than sharing lessons learned and swapping ideas with other marketers. That's basically how I've always structured my career. I'm a five-time CMO. All software companies — very different beasts, very different kinds of software. It's everything from IT to finance and government.
I've worked in companies that span from 10 million and scaled all the way up to 400 million, done some IPOs along the way. Qualified has been my partner through three of those five companies, happy to say. These days I'm at a company called Emplifi, and we are social media marketing, social media commerce, and social media care. And it's a unified platform that uses AI to engage, connect, and convert audiences into buyers.
We are really proud to be recognized as a Forrester Leader in their Social Media Platforms Wave. And honestly, what excites me the most about today's world of AI is that it just opens up so many possibilities in marketing. And so I'm so happy to be here and talk with you about that.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. Your point of sharing and sharing with all of your peers — that's one of the reasons we started this podcast, especially right now with agentic and agentic AI and agentic marketing. It still feels so new and fresh that I know I myself have been leaning on peers and other people within the industry to just try to expand my knowledge. So I'm so glad that you're here to share with us because you're doing some amazing things both in your career and at Emplifi.
So to kick things off, Susan, how do you define agentic marketing? What does that mean to you and your team over there at Emplifi?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, well, I think it will help give you a little bit of a glimpse into my mindset if I talk to you first about my marketing philosophy. So I've long said there's no silver bullet in marketing. There never has been. You have to do everything right. You have to be on every channel, every tactic, every region. And it's a tall order because most of us don't have enough marketers and enough budget, right?
Whether you're five marketers or 50 marketers, it never feels like enough. So if you take our experience with Qualified — since the launch, we've had 2.8 million web visitors, and Qualified has helped us book nearly 2,000 meetings. I can't hire a big enough BDR team to do that. It's just not possible.
Additionally, we're also using another side of Qualified — the AI assistant. You guys call her Piper; we call her Emmy. She's become an indispensable part of our team. She doesn't sleep, she never takes PTO, and she just manages to make all of this look really easy. And that's what's giving us scale without burnout. So to me, agentic marketing is that ability to scale.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep, yeah. I think that's so true. And to your point, if there are no silver bullets, that just rings so true to me. Because if there was, our jobs wouldn't be nearly as hard as they are, because we would have something that we could just lean on. But it is about doing all the things right.
And I think what you mentioned about scale — Emmy never taking any vacations, never sleeping. We hear from a lot of people as we look at agentic AI, even beyond just our own product, that scale is so hard. We don't have the budgets. We don't have the headcount. You can't simply hire a team big enough to handle all the website traffic that you're getting, which is a problem a lot of marketers have.
So it's really great to hear that that's how you're looking at it. Like, we can use agentic AI. We can use agents to help us scale beyond what we'd normally be able to do with human headcount. So that is, I think, a really good way to look at agentic.
Now, as you were looking at things at Emplifi — how has AI, whether it be Piper or Emmy or any other AI agentic tools that you're using — how has it meaningfully improved marketing performance for you?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Sure. Well, if you look between 2024 and 2025, we've reduced our BDR headcount by about 20%, but we increased our opportunity creation by more than 22%. So that, I think, demonstrates the magic of AI. Emmy alone delivers the output of the equivalent of six full-time BDRs. So think about that for a second.
The fully loaded cost of a BDR — those six would probably be about 700K or more. And you get the bonus of no HR and people management. So I guess I would say, if you have too few BDRs, or if you have a global remit and you have to be available 24/7, you need AI.
If you have too little budget — and if I meet a marketer who tells me they have too much budget, I'm one, jealous, and two, in disbelief. But if you have too little budget to make all the noise in the market that you need to make, you need AI. So let's just get to the bottom of it: none of us can do our jobs without it today.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. I like your point of then you can take money to put towards things. We hear a lot when we talk about AI — that it frees up your time to do things that are higher quality. And for me as a marketer, I'm like, it also frees up more money for me to put toward things that drive interest and traffic.
So it is kind of this self-fulfilling prophecy that if I can put that money toward driving more high-interest traffic to my website — but then I have agentic AI to help me scale as I drive more website traffic — then I can keep putting more at that top of the funnel and driving more pipeline.
Now, as we look at AI and agentic responsibilities and as AI is becoming a more prominent part of our team — Susan, how are you thinking about your role as a marketer changing? Or how are you thinking about your team's roles as marketers changing as they work alongside agentic AI?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I think one of the things we need to recognize is that it is also changing the landscape underfoot. I have met with many of my peers recently who have said that they're seeing declining web traffic. Some of them are reporting 20 to 30% drops. And that's, of course, because of the AI summaries not leading people to your website.
So thankfully, at Emplifi, we've tried to counter that with some smart search engine optimization, strong brand presence across YouTube, Wikipedia, G2 — all those places that the AI engines are getting their information from. And so I think the evolving role of the marketer is that you have to constantly be reading the surf, right? And reading the waves. And then you have to sometimes paddle faster, or you have to catch a wave.
I would love to give one other example. As marketers, sometimes we'll hear somebody make a big claim. Like remember when GDPR came out? Everyone was saying email is dead, right? Going back to my philosophy of "there's no silver bullet" — guess what? We still have to do email. GDPR maybe tried to kill email, but it didn't work. Or TikTok tried to kill ads, but that didn't work.
So the truth is, you have to be available on all of those channels. And those channels don't die; they just evolve. So email is not dead. Now it's agentic. It's personalized, it's precise, and it's one-to-one — instead of being that blast message.
Can you hear my dog in the background?
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I just heard her, but not before.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I'm going to just have you pause for one second. I'm going to close my door.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You're fine. You're good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
So I have my lawn care people who always come on Monday, and of course they come in this one hour.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
The most important question I have to ask is: what kind of dog do you have?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I have two golden doodles.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
So sweet. I know, between dogs and lawn care — all the things. I feel like working from home now, I'm just like, "Yeah, totally. This is normal." We'll cut it out — our producer's done that. We've been here so many times. So don't worry about it.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Of course it's the one time they show up...
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Actually, my favorite was Sean on one episode — he had someone come take down a tree when we were recording. Sean Whiteley. And he was like, "Hey, we're gonna have to reschedule this. I have people literally chopping down a giant oak tree." And I was like, yeah, that is a good reason to reschedule.
Susan, do you want me to go back to the question? Okay, I'm gonna go back and then we'll cut to that one.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Let's start with that one — how the marketer's role is evolving. That sounds good.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, so as we're thinking about agentic AI and how we work as marketers, I'm curious to get your take. How is the role of the marketer evolving as we're working alongside agentic AI and involving it more in our teams? What do our responsibilities as marketers start to look like?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I think first, I want to always say — having done this now for so many years — that marketing has always been evolving, whether it's because of AI or something else. And that's why I love this job so much. You have to be a constant learner.
Anyway, let's talk about some of the things I'm hearing from my peers. My peers are saying that their web traffic is down. Some of them are reporting 20 to 30%. And of course, we've encountered a little bit of that at Emplifi as well. We're countering that by — again, I've talked to my peers, and we believe the recipe is smarter search engine optimization, stronger presence on YouTube, Wikipedia, G2, and all these other places that matter.
Basically, what we've learned is that while the tides have changed, we can catch a different wave or we can paddle a little bit faster to get through those currents.
But I think one of the traps we as marketers shouldn't fall into is extremism. For example, when GDPR came out, people said email is dead, right? And every few years a channel or another is declared dead. They don't die — they just evolve.
Email now is agentic. It's personalized, it's precise, and the best part about it — and the part I love the most — is it's one-to-one. Instead of being these blast emails that may or may not speak to the audience.
One of the things we've been using Emmy for — our agentic email through Qualified — is to support our BDR needs in Brazil. We have an AE in Brazil, a salesperson. We do not have a BDR. Emmy can speak Portuguese even though no one else on my team can. We had some turnover in our BDR team in APAC. We took all the inbound leads and we funneled them to Emmy so she could schedule the meetings for us.
Sometimes we'll run an event and it will be a huge success, and it's too much for the BDRs to follow up on all at one time. And so instead of them just blasting out a generic message to all of those leads that may or may not hit, we take those leads and funnel them to Emmy so she can swoop in and do those custom one-on-one messages.
And then one of my BDR team's least favorite tasks is to schedule meetings for trade shows. And of course, you're spending 35, 50, 100K sometimes on these trade shows. So you need them to produce opportunity. And the only way you're going to get to an opportunity is through a meeting. And to get to the meeting, you need the BDR to schedule it.
How about Emmy? She doesn't get upset. She loves doing it. You just give her the trade show schedule and tell her to go.
So I guess the beauty of this is the always-on flexibility. And we can test, learn, and try new workflows and new use cases very, very quickly. And then Emmy — she just keeps getting smarter and smarter. So it's working for us.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, the learning and testing. I think every marketer I've had on the podcast has said some sort of variation of what you said, Susan — like, hey, website traffic is down. That's universal. I think we're all feeling that, as AI summaries and the LLMs are taking traffic that we normally would have seen.
And I like the way you took that — marketers are evolving now. We get to focus on those problems. Like, do we need to catch a different wave? Do we need to ride that wave faster to figure out how to now bring traffic back up and still hit our pipeline numbers?
But when we're working alongside something like an Emmy or agentic AI, we don't have to worry about those problems. We can focus on these new things that are moving so fast with AI that there's always a new problem — like website traffic declining.
So it is interesting to hear you say that. I appreciate you sharing that insight.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Great.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, so before I jump in, I want to dig into Emmy a little bit more and some of the results that you're seeing — which you've already shared some great insights — but I always like to ask this question. Is there a hot take that you have about AI and marketing right now that you think most marketers would not agree with you on?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So sometimes I actually find most marketers that I've engaged with are on the same page. I think the challenge we have often is… I did see a little blip in that, so hopefully it was just uploading and not in the recording.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You're good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
One of the challenges marketers are faced with is voices across their business telling them to keep their hands off their leads or hands off their customers. Sales will say, “Hey, it's already in the funnel, so I'm talking to them — you don't have to.” Or the CS team will say, “They're a customer now, so I'm responsible for the communication — you don't touch them.”
And I really think that's kind of crazy. It's as crazy as saying the moment you send your kid to college you can stop parenting them. Yeah, right? I have two through college now. I have found that's when they needed me most.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I definitely needed the most parenting when I was in college, yes.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I mean, look, it's the same with our customers. Always be marketing. Always be selling. And use your AI agents to turn pipeline into customers, to turn customers into advocates, and to continue that conversation and keep the connection — so you don't see the churn.
So I would say my hot take is: marketing doesn't stop at the sale. We change the tone and we change maybe a little bit of the frequency, but AI can help with that — and can help us all scale into infinite customer marketing.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. That is actually something we've run into here at Qualified. Now that we have something like Piper that can help with these email touchpoints… You mentioned trade shows; I was laughing through that because I'm like, yeah, we've all been there. They don't want to schedule meetings. They don't want to follow up with event leads. But I spent a bunch of money to be at that trade show and to get those leads, so I obviously want the SDRs or the BDRs to work those.
The idea of not touching them — we've run into it at Qualified, where it's like, okay, this is an owned account by an AE. Are they going to be upset if we follow up with them? If we send them a marketing email? And I'm with you, Susan, where I'm like, no. Why wouldn't we have our AI SDR also send really personalized messaging while our AE is following up with them, or our CSM team is following up with them?
It's our job to market to them and to educate them. And AI helps us do that now in a really personalized, scalable way. I'm not doing this one-off email blast to them. So I do — that was a hot take, but it's one I actually agree with you on.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Awesome.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, now we talked a little bit about Emmy. You've hired her. I loved all of your use cases — especially as you talk about how we've run into similar situations where we have AEs or accounts in different geographies or time zones that we don't have BDRs to support. So I loved all of those examples.
What is — or is there — anything that was unexpected that Emmy helped unlock for your team beyond helping book more meetings and work all of that traffic? Was there something unexpected that took you and the team by surprise when you hired Emmy on?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yes. And I'm so excited about this metric. We took Emmy and asked her to re-engage with people who made it to our website but didn't fill out a form or ask for a demo or take it to the next level. And from that alone, we saw a 12% increase in our meetings scheduled. So — full stop.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, I was like, wait, that's a wrap.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. Look, I think it proves my point about there's no silver bullet in marketing — that you need to be omnipresent. Because think about the way you buy. We're all getting Instagram ads about, say, the latest cool look on clothing or bathing suits or the best travel spots to go to. And you don't click and buy the first time you see that ad.
It takes you some repetition, some looking at how others are doing it, some references. In our case, we help our customers present user-generated content — which is basically, if you're trying to sell makeup, then you put user-generated content out that shows somebody putting that makeup on. And it's a real person who is a peer to people. And then next thing you know, after a while, you get that customer.
But you had to be there and present with them through that entire exchange — and probably sometimes in multiple channels. If you figure out their email, you can email them. If you know they're going to be at a trade show, you can track them down there.
In other words, being omnipresent with them is absolutely essential. And when you take your AI agent and say, “Where aren't I present today?” and put them there, then you get that conversion. And that's all about getting that conversion.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I really like your point about thinking about it from how we buy as humans. Your point about B2C — I have a six-month-old baby now, so I get a ton of recommendations on baby products. And how many times I go look at a product, go to the website, think about it… it takes a little while before I pull the trigger and buy.
And that's for something in B2C. Sales cycles are so much shorter; it's so much quicker. But in B2B — yeah, it's just me and my husband. A buying committee of two. But yes, it's a much smaller decision. But then in B2B, you've got huge price tags, huge buying committees.
So being omnipresent with those people and having AI help you — because no one comes to a B2B website one time, looks, and is like, “Yeah, I'm gonna buy this right now, and I can just pull out an invoice and do it.”
Okay, so it sounds like at Emplifi, you've been doing a lot of work with AI. You have a lot of use cases you're using Emmy for. I think one of the things I hear from peers most often is: it's really hard to make the leap from experimentation into actually utilizing AI. And it sounds like you're doing a great job with this with Emmy.
So what did it take for you and your team to make that leap from experimentation into leading with AI within your marketing organization?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Sure. So we started with specific use cases that we thought were safer. And honestly, we just weren't that worried about it.
You've heard the phrase “fail fast.” It's okay to make a mistake or put Emmy on a case that just doesn't pan out. We have put her on some and it didn't work out. But that doesn't mean we couldn't adjust the scenario or adjust the intelligence that we're feeding in and give it another try.
But when you're experimenting with AI, I want to encourage everyone to think about the entire customer journey. So before they land in your funnel, while they're in your funnel, after they either buy or even go to closed lost. In post-funnel — if you think about every one of those steps — can you get more efficient? Can you bring AI to the task? And then can you bring humans in at the right moment?
For example, we have modified some of the way Emmy talks over time. And once we got comfortable with that, and we saw that the meetings she was getting for us were easily transitioned to BANT-qualified opportunities, it was easy to go live.
Let me also say it from my customer's perspective. At Emplifi, we have more than 50 different use cases that you can implement in our platform that are AI-specific. And what we see is that many of our customers will combine the AI — like say somebody uses it to craft the content of a social post — they may use it partially at first. Maybe just to get the image, but they'll write the caption themselves. Or they'll caption it using AI but they'll find the image themselves.
They might do one or the other job. And then eventually, they switch to trusting the AI enough because it's also learning, right? It's also learning how these captions have been written and rewritten.
So there is a comfort level, but we keep the human involved. And getting back to our team size we talked about earlier — we have small teams. But enabling them to do five, ten, twenty times the work they could normally do just because they're using AI as a kickstart, I think is a dramatic improvement for all of us.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That is a perfect segue. I want to talk a little bit more about use cases. You know, we talked about Emmy and generating pipeline, and you just gave some great examples of things you're seeing within your own Emplifi platform.
What, as a CMO, are some compelling use cases for AI agents that you're seeing emerging in the market right now? And are there any that you wish you were seeing more of — or you hope to see more of soon?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So starting with what we are most recently experimenting with and trying is a use case that combines Qualified with Sixth Sense. And we're a Sixth Sense user — I'm also a three-time Sixth Sense user — but you could use Intensify or Demandbase or G2 or others that are throwing you signals and telling you who might be interested in buying.
Combining that Sixth Sense data together with Perplexity — which we use to research additional people and different personas — together with Qualified in order to reach out to those individuals… I feel like this is going to be one of our most important use cases. It would basically be: we're going to turn signals into opportunities.
And yeah — it's live. We're doing it now. And we'll let you know later how it's panning out.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's amazing. Yeah, I would love to hear how that turns out. Because getting started with one agentic AI use case is kind of like wading into the water. But then when you start talking about orchestration — bringing multiple AI-forward or AI-native tools together to work and orchestrate entire workflows — that's where it starts to get really tricky.
So I love that you guys are on the forefront of that. You're starting to piece together different tools and bringing Perplexity in. I'm excited to hear how that goes.
Now, how do you think — as a CMO — are you leading your team in a different way in this AI-first era? Or do you think CMOs need to lead differently now that we have so much AI within our teams?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I think you do. What I did is I took a step back and looked at where I think my team gets bottlenecked. And it's when you think about how to do B2B marketing — it really does take a village, right? So you've got your creative team, you've got design, you've got writers, you've got operations, you've got analytics — and there are all those handoffs between all of those teams.
So I feel like AI can be that accelerator to speed the collaboration, eliminate some of those bottlenecks — just because now we can do creative design through AI instead of on our own. But it also lets us team up and focus on the higher-level thinking instead of the lower-level administration.
So I think what we all need to remember as CMOs leading in this AI era is: there's this garbage in, garbage out philosophy. And I used to say this about my PR firms all the time. Think about how much we pay PR firms. If you're lucky, it's under a 10K retainer a month. Many people are paying 25, 50K. It's a lot of money.
And the CFO would be the first one to ask me, “Do we really need a PR firm? Can't you just hire someone and do it internally?” And I would always say these words: garbage in, garbage out. Because I worked with some of the best PR firms. And if I was involved in feeding them the strategy from the company, keeping them in tune on our key messages, telling them who our competitors are at that moment and how we differentiate — it always seemed to work really well. We'd get really great results.
And I think we are in that exact same world with AI.
So I was recently talking to a CMO friend of mine who said her team had just fed a whole bunch of data into an AI engine. And in addition to feeding internal data, they fed in their entire website. Well, guess what? The website had pages for discontinued products — because you’ve got customers still on those products. So you can't take the web pages away. But you've got to be smart enough to say, “Okay, I'm not going to feed in the discontinued products because I don't want the AI engine trying to market those or link them somehow to my other products.”
So you have to be really, really smart. You've got to be that person feeding the AI engine with the intelligence you want it to know about — and not feeding it the things you don't want it to know.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's such a good example. When we first rolled out Piper here at Qualified — obviously we're customer number one when I'm testing things — we were like, “Just give her the whole website. Let her read everything. What could go wrong?”
And the unknown use case that came out of training our AI SDR was that I found a bunch of old content on our website that we should not have had on there anymore. And then I got to give the feedback to our product team: we need a way to toggle on and off certain pages on our website.
So it was great for our content manager. I was able to tell our content team: hey, can you take a look at this content and make sure it's up to date? Because it is garbage in, garbage out. I don't want to feed our AI this outdated thing. So it helped me clean up our website, which is great.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
That's right. Sarah, I'm going to ask you to wait one second now because you probably hear the background noise. They're blowing the leaves. I don't know if you can see — we have 100-foot-tall trees in our backyard, and so the leaves have to be blown every week.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
We can wait until they go by. Susan, are you in D.C.? Am I making that up?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, I'm just outside of D.C. about 15 minutes in Vienna, Virginia.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, so you guys are in peak fall right now…
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
It is… the past weekend was just stellar. Gorgeous.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Which is so nice for Halloween. It's always so nice around this time of year to get the peak fall, good weather, color change. It never doesn't feel good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, and with the dogs you're not worried about them getting ticks. The fall foliage here this year — for some reason, I think the more rain you get, the better the foliage. And I feel like we had a lot of rain in the spring, so it really hit hard this year and it's gorgeous.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. We lived in Little Rock for about a year and a half, and the ticks that our dogs would pick up… I keep forgetting about it. You said that and it sent a shiver down my spine. I was like, okay.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I have some stories. I won't go there now.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You traumatized me with that. I don't hear them as bad anymore. Do you want to keep going? Cool.
Okay, I will move on. Susan, I might skip the role that AI is playing in storytelling and brand building and go to the… okay, let's go into the lightning round. Does that work? Awesome.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yep.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, so I want to wrap up this portion here as we talk about AI and the future and our organizations. I'm curious: what do you think is something that B2B orgs are still going to be getting wrong with AI a year from now?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. I have a mantra: people buy from people. They use software, but they trust humans. So if you think AI can replace every human interaction or every part of a sales process, you're missing the whole point. We need to use it to amplify the people we have in place — to give them breathing room, to give them the ability to think bigger, to move faster — but not to replace them.
And going back to my original point: we're all working on these small teams with small budgets. Most teams are already short-staffed. So don't think of AI as taking your job — think of it as making you better at your job. AI is not going to replace us. We're just going to get smarter and better and more productive because of it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep, I totally agree. Okay, to wrap things up, Susan — it's my favorite part of the show. We do a lightning round. Keep it fast. I have four questions I want to run through.
First one: other than ChatGPT — because that was everyone's first foray into AI — what was one of the first AI tools that you experimented with?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I had taken over the BDR team and been working with some consultants in my network who suggested Perplexity. And Perplexity really is that BDR sidekick. They're helping us do what we call three-by-three research — three interesting facts about the people we're trying to sell to in three minutes. So we surface those insights and we surface the people we also want to sell to. And it gives us a really smart conversation starter. So I'm loving Perplexity for that use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I second that. I'm a big Perplexity fan.
Okay — besides AI, because most people would say that — what do you think is the most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
The one I struggle with the most is return on ad spend — especially for the B2B use case. In B2C, you can often connect the click to the purchase. In B2B, I think it's a mirage. Even the people who built attribution models will tell you that every model is going to give you a totally different story. The W-model gives you one story, and the straight-line gives you a different story. Everything is half fiction, half accurate.
So I like to tell my team: let's look at ROAS on pipeline, let's look at ROAS on bookings, but let's not make our decisions on it. For B2B — return on ad spend is overrated. And I'm inviting anyone who disagrees with me to help me learn more.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, that one. If you disagree, tell me your secret. I feel like we've gone through iterations of that here at Qualified, and it's like either I'm showing an insane amount of influence — and then I bring it to my CFO, and they're like, “Yeah, there's no way that's right.” Or it's last-touch, and then it's… I agree with you. That is an overrated buzzword. It's really hard to prove. And if anyone disagrees, please message Susan and me on LinkedIn — I want to know your secrets.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, let's have a podcast on that.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay — who is a marketer you think is ahead of the curve on AI that our listeners should go follow?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Someone I'm certainly following — and I think she's got it all going on, she's totally fearless with AI — is Amanda Cole at Bloomreach. She's built her entire campaign process through CharacterQuilt, which is a new startup that is really creating this AI brain and pushing the limits of what you can do with AI. It's very inspiring. And I think she gives you a glimpse of where we could go with this.
Interestingly, Bloomreach is also an AI-based company — helping B2C brands. I think it's in their DNA, but huge kudos to Amanda.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, Amanda is fabulous. She was one of our 30 2025 agentic marketers to watch for that reason. Okay, last question: if you could automate one part of your life outside of work with AI, what would it be?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
This is a really easy one because I'm in the throes of it. I'm in the thick of a move right now, and it's a cross-country move. And if someone could automate packing and cleaning and unpacking on the other end — I'd give AI a raise and the corner office if they could do that for me.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I love that one. Well, Susan, thank you so much for joining us on The Agentic Marketer. It was so great to get your insights and hear how you guys are doing with Emmy. Thank you so much for joining me.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Thanks, Sarah, for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here.
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Discover how agentic AI is reshaping modern marketing as Emplifi CMO Susan Ganeshan shares insights on lifecycle engagement, scaling teams, and reducing churn.
This episode features an interview with Susan Ganeshan, CMO at Emplifi.
Susan shares how Emplifi is using agentic AI to drive global coverage, re-engage high intent website visitors, support BDR teams across regions, and dramatically increase opportunity creation while reducing operational strain. She breaks down her approach to building an AI first marketing organization, why scale is impossible without AI, and how marketers must adapt as LLMs increasingly reshape buyer behavior and website traffic patterns.
Key Takeaways
Transcript
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, 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 how you are using AI agents to hit your pipeline targets. But before we dive into the show, Susan, can you just tell me a little bit about yourself and the work that you're doing over at Emplifi?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Absolutely. Thank you, Sarah, so much for having me on this podcast. I'm super excited to be here. Look, there's nothing that jazzes me more than sharing lessons learned and swapping ideas with other marketers. That's basically how I've always structured my career. I'm a five-time CMO. All software companies — very different beasts, very different kinds of software. It's everything from IT to finance and government.
I've worked in companies that span from 10 million and scaled all the way up to 400 million, done some IPOs along the way. Qualified has been my partner through three of those five companies, happy to say. These days I'm at a company called Emplifi, and we are social media marketing, social media commerce, and social media care. And it's a unified platform that uses AI to engage, connect, and convert audiences into buyers.
We are really proud to be recognized as a Forrester Leader in their Social Media Platforms Wave. And honestly, what excites me the most about today's world of AI is that it just opens up so many possibilities in marketing. And so I'm so happy to be here and talk with you about that.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. Your point of sharing and sharing with all of your peers — that's one of the reasons we started this podcast, especially right now with agentic and agentic AI and agentic marketing. It still feels so new and fresh that I know I myself have been leaning on peers and other people within the industry to just try to expand my knowledge. So I'm so glad that you're here to share with us because you're doing some amazing things both in your career and at Emplifi.
So to kick things off, Susan, how do you define agentic marketing? What does that mean to you and your team over there at Emplifi?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, well, I think it will help give you a little bit of a glimpse into my mindset if I talk to you first about my marketing philosophy. So I've long said there's no silver bullet in marketing. There never has been. You have to do everything right. You have to be on every channel, every tactic, every region. And it's a tall order because most of us don't have enough marketers and enough budget, right?
Whether you're five marketers or 50 marketers, it never feels like enough. So if you take our experience with Qualified — since the launch, we've had 2.8 million web visitors, and Qualified has helped us book nearly 2,000 meetings. I can't hire a big enough BDR team to do that. It's just not possible.
Additionally, we're also using another side of Qualified — the AI assistant. You guys call her Piper; we call her Emmy. She's become an indispensable part of our team. She doesn't sleep, she never takes PTO, and she just manages to make all of this look really easy. And that's what's giving us scale without burnout. So to me, agentic marketing is that ability to scale.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep, yeah. I think that's so true. And to your point, if there are no silver bullets, that just rings so true to me. Because if there was, our jobs wouldn't be nearly as hard as they are, because we would have something that we could just lean on. But it is about doing all the things right.
And I think what you mentioned about scale — Emmy never taking any vacations, never sleeping. We hear from a lot of people as we look at agentic AI, even beyond just our own product, that scale is so hard. We don't have the budgets. We don't have the headcount. You can't simply hire a team big enough to handle all the website traffic that you're getting, which is a problem a lot of marketers have.
So it's really great to hear that that's how you're looking at it. Like, we can use agentic AI. We can use agents to help us scale beyond what we'd normally be able to do with human headcount. So that is, I think, a really good way to look at agentic.
Now, as you were looking at things at Emplifi — how has AI, whether it be Piper or Emmy or any other AI agentic tools that you're using — how has it meaningfully improved marketing performance for you?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Sure. Well, if you look between 2024 and 2025, we've reduced our BDR headcount by about 20%, but we increased our opportunity creation by more than 22%. So that, I think, demonstrates the magic of AI. Emmy alone delivers the output of the equivalent of six full-time BDRs. So think about that for a second.
The fully loaded cost of a BDR — those six would probably be about 700K or more. And you get the bonus of no HR and people management. So I guess I would say, if you have too few BDRs, or if you have a global remit and you have to be available 24/7, you need AI.
If you have too little budget — and if I meet a marketer who tells me they have too much budget, I'm one, jealous, and two, in disbelief. But if you have too little budget to make all the noise in the market that you need to make, you need AI. So let's just get to the bottom of it: none of us can do our jobs without it today.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. I like your point of then you can take money to put towards things. We hear a lot when we talk about AI — that it frees up your time to do things that are higher quality. And for me as a marketer, I'm like, it also frees up more money for me to put toward things that drive interest and traffic.
So it is kind of this self-fulfilling prophecy that if I can put that money toward driving more high-interest traffic to my website — but then I have agentic AI to help me scale as I drive more website traffic — then I can keep putting more at that top of the funnel and driving more pipeline.
Now, as we look at AI and agentic responsibilities and as AI is becoming a more prominent part of our team — Susan, how are you thinking about your role as a marketer changing? Or how are you thinking about your team's roles as marketers changing as they work alongside agentic AI?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I think one of the things we need to recognize is that it is also changing the landscape underfoot. I have met with many of my peers recently who have said that they're seeing declining web traffic. Some of them are reporting 20 to 30% drops. And that's, of course, because of the AI summaries not leading people to your website.
So thankfully, at Emplifi, we've tried to counter that with some smart search engine optimization, strong brand presence across YouTube, Wikipedia, G2 — all those places that the AI engines are getting their information from. And so I think the evolving role of the marketer is that you have to constantly be reading the surf, right? And reading the waves. And then you have to sometimes paddle faster, or you have to catch a wave.
I would love to give one other example. As marketers, sometimes we'll hear somebody make a big claim. Like remember when GDPR came out? Everyone was saying email is dead, right? Going back to my philosophy of "there's no silver bullet" — guess what? We still have to do email. GDPR maybe tried to kill email, but it didn't work. Or TikTok tried to kill ads, but that didn't work.
So the truth is, you have to be available on all of those channels. And those channels don't die; they just evolve. So email is not dead. Now it's agentic. It's personalized, it's precise, and it's one-to-one — instead of being that blast message.
Can you hear my dog in the background?
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I just heard her, but not before.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I'm going to just have you pause for one second. I'm going to close my door.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You're fine. You're good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
So I have my lawn care people who always come on Monday, and of course they come in this one hour.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
The most important question I have to ask is: what kind of dog do you have?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I have two golden doodles.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
So sweet. I know, between dogs and lawn care — all the things. I feel like working from home now, I'm just like, "Yeah, totally. This is normal." We'll cut it out — our producer's done that. We've been here so many times. So don't worry about it.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Of course it's the one time they show up...
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Actually, my favorite was Sean on one episode — he had someone come take down a tree when we were recording. Sean Whiteley. And he was like, "Hey, we're gonna have to reschedule this. I have people literally chopping down a giant oak tree." And I was like, yeah, that is a good reason to reschedule.
Susan, do you want me to go back to the question? Okay, I'm gonna go back and then we'll cut to that one.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Let's start with that one — how the marketer's role is evolving. That sounds good.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, so as we're thinking about agentic AI and how we work as marketers, I'm curious to get your take. How is the role of the marketer evolving as we're working alongside agentic AI and involving it more in our teams? What do our responsibilities as marketers start to look like?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I think first, I want to always say — having done this now for so many years — that marketing has always been evolving, whether it's because of AI or something else. And that's why I love this job so much. You have to be a constant learner.
Anyway, let's talk about some of the things I'm hearing from my peers. My peers are saying that their web traffic is down. Some of them are reporting 20 to 30%. And of course, we've encountered a little bit of that at Emplifi as well. We're countering that by — again, I've talked to my peers, and we believe the recipe is smarter search engine optimization, stronger presence on YouTube, Wikipedia, G2, and all these other places that matter.
Basically, what we've learned is that while the tides have changed, we can catch a different wave or we can paddle a little bit faster to get through those currents.
But I think one of the traps we as marketers shouldn't fall into is extremism. For example, when GDPR came out, people said email is dead, right? And every few years a channel or another is declared dead. They don't die — they just evolve.
Email now is agentic. It's personalized, it's precise, and the best part about it — and the part I love the most — is it's one-to-one. Instead of being these blast emails that may or may not speak to the audience.
One of the things we've been using Emmy for — our agentic email through Qualified — is to support our BDR needs in Brazil. We have an AE in Brazil, a salesperson. We do not have a BDR. Emmy can speak Portuguese even though no one else on my team can. We had some turnover in our BDR team in APAC. We took all the inbound leads and we funneled them to Emmy so she could schedule the meetings for us.
Sometimes we'll run an event and it will be a huge success, and it's too much for the BDRs to follow up on all at one time. And so instead of them just blasting out a generic message to all of those leads that may or may not hit, we take those leads and funnel them to Emmy so she can swoop in and do those custom one-on-one messages.
And then one of my BDR team's least favorite tasks is to schedule meetings for trade shows. And of course, you're spending 35, 50, 100K sometimes on these trade shows. So you need them to produce opportunity. And the only way you're going to get to an opportunity is through a meeting. And to get to the meeting, you need the BDR to schedule it.
How about Emmy? She doesn't get upset. She loves doing it. You just give her the trade show schedule and tell her to go.
So I guess the beauty of this is the always-on flexibility. And we can test, learn, and try new workflows and new use cases very, very quickly. And then Emmy — she just keeps getting smarter and smarter. So it's working for us.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, the learning and testing. I think every marketer I've had on the podcast has said some sort of variation of what you said, Susan — like, hey, website traffic is down. That's universal. I think we're all feeling that, as AI summaries and the LLMs are taking traffic that we normally would have seen.
And I like the way you took that — marketers are evolving now. We get to focus on those problems. Like, do we need to catch a different wave? Do we need to ride that wave faster to figure out how to now bring traffic back up and still hit our pipeline numbers?
But when we're working alongside something like an Emmy or agentic AI, we don't have to worry about those problems. We can focus on these new things that are moving so fast with AI that there's always a new problem — like website traffic declining.
So it is interesting to hear you say that. I appreciate you sharing that insight.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Great.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, so before I jump in, I want to dig into Emmy a little bit more and some of the results that you're seeing — which you've already shared some great insights — but I always like to ask this question. Is there a hot take that you have about AI and marketing right now that you think most marketers would not agree with you on?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So sometimes I actually find most marketers that I've engaged with are on the same page. I think the challenge we have often is… I did see a little blip in that, so hopefully it was just uploading and not in the recording.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You're good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
One of the challenges marketers are faced with is voices across their business telling them to keep their hands off their leads or hands off their customers. Sales will say, “Hey, it's already in the funnel, so I'm talking to them — you don't have to.” Or the CS team will say, “They're a customer now, so I'm responsible for the communication — you don't touch them.”
And I really think that's kind of crazy. It's as crazy as saying the moment you send your kid to college you can stop parenting them. Yeah, right? I have two through college now. I have found that's when they needed me most.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I definitely needed the most parenting when I was in college, yes.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I mean, look, it's the same with our customers. Always be marketing. Always be selling. And use your AI agents to turn pipeline into customers, to turn customers into advocates, and to continue that conversation and keep the connection — so you don't see the churn.
So I would say my hot take is: marketing doesn't stop at the sale. We change the tone and we change maybe a little bit of the frequency, but AI can help with that — and can help us all scale into infinite customer marketing.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. That is actually something we've run into here at Qualified. Now that we have something like Piper that can help with these email touchpoints… You mentioned trade shows; I was laughing through that because I'm like, yeah, we've all been there. They don't want to schedule meetings. They don't want to follow up with event leads. But I spent a bunch of money to be at that trade show and to get those leads, so I obviously want the SDRs or the BDRs to work those.
The idea of not touching them — we've run into it at Qualified, where it's like, okay, this is an owned account by an AE. Are they going to be upset if we follow up with them? If we send them a marketing email? And I'm with you, Susan, where I'm like, no. Why wouldn't we have our AI SDR also send really personalized messaging while our AE is following up with them, or our CSM team is following up with them?
It's our job to market to them and to educate them. And AI helps us do that now in a really personalized, scalable way. I'm not doing this one-off email blast to them. So I do — that was a hot take, but it's one I actually agree with you on.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Awesome.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, now we talked a little bit about Emmy. You've hired her. I loved all of your use cases — especially as you talk about how we've run into similar situations where we have AEs or accounts in different geographies or time zones that we don't have BDRs to support. So I loved all of those examples.
What is — or is there — anything that was unexpected that Emmy helped unlock for your team beyond helping book more meetings and work all of that traffic? Was there something unexpected that took you and the team by surprise when you hired Emmy on?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yes. And I'm so excited about this metric. We took Emmy and asked her to re-engage with people who made it to our website but didn't fill out a form or ask for a demo or take it to the next level. And from that alone, we saw a 12% increase in our meetings scheduled. So — full stop.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, I was like, wait, that's a wrap.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. Look, I think it proves my point about there's no silver bullet in marketing — that you need to be omnipresent. Because think about the way you buy. We're all getting Instagram ads about, say, the latest cool look on clothing or bathing suits or the best travel spots to go to. And you don't click and buy the first time you see that ad.
It takes you some repetition, some looking at how others are doing it, some references. In our case, we help our customers present user-generated content — which is basically, if you're trying to sell makeup, then you put user-generated content out that shows somebody putting that makeup on. And it's a real person who is a peer to people. And then next thing you know, after a while, you get that customer.
But you had to be there and present with them through that entire exchange — and probably sometimes in multiple channels. If you figure out their email, you can email them. If you know they're going to be at a trade show, you can track them down there.
In other words, being omnipresent with them is absolutely essential. And when you take your AI agent and say, “Where aren't I present today?” and put them there, then you get that conversion. And that's all about getting that conversion.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I really like your point about thinking about it from how we buy as humans. Your point about B2C — I have a six-month-old baby now, so I get a ton of recommendations on baby products. And how many times I go look at a product, go to the website, think about it… it takes a little while before I pull the trigger and buy.
And that's for something in B2C. Sales cycles are so much shorter; it's so much quicker. But in B2B — yeah, it's just me and my husband. A buying committee of two. But yes, it's a much smaller decision. But then in B2B, you've got huge price tags, huge buying committees.
So being omnipresent with those people and having AI help you — because no one comes to a B2B website one time, looks, and is like, “Yeah, I'm gonna buy this right now, and I can just pull out an invoice and do it.”
Okay, so it sounds like at Emplifi, you've been doing a lot of work with AI. You have a lot of use cases you're using Emmy for. I think one of the things I hear from peers most often is: it's really hard to make the leap from experimentation into actually utilizing AI. And it sounds like you're doing a great job with this with Emmy.
So what did it take for you and your team to make that leap from experimentation into leading with AI within your marketing organization?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Sure. So we started with specific use cases that we thought were safer. And honestly, we just weren't that worried about it.
You've heard the phrase “fail fast.” It's okay to make a mistake or put Emmy on a case that just doesn't pan out. We have put her on some and it didn't work out. But that doesn't mean we couldn't adjust the scenario or adjust the intelligence that we're feeding in and give it another try.
But when you're experimenting with AI, I want to encourage everyone to think about the entire customer journey. So before they land in your funnel, while they're in your funnel, after they either buy or even go to closed lost. In post-funnel — if you think about every one of those steps — can you get more efficient? Can you bring AI to the task? And then can you bring humans in at the right moment?
For example, we have modified some of the way Emmy talks over time. And once we got comfortable with that, and we saw that the meetings she was getting for us were easily transitioned to BANT-qualified opportunities, it was easy to go live.
Let me also say it from my customer's perspective. At Emplifi, we have more than 50 different use cases that you can implement in our platform that are AI-specific. And what we see is that many of our customers will combine the AI — like say somebody uses it to craft the content of a social post — they may use it partially at first. Maybe just to get the image, but they'll write the caption themselves. Or they'll caption it using AI but they'll find the image themselves.
They might do one or the other job. And then eventually, they switch to trusting the AI enough because it's also learning, right? It's also learning how these captions have been written and rewritten.
So there is a comfort level, but we keep the human involved. And getting back to our team size we talked about earlier — we have small teams. But enabling them to do five, ten, twenty times the work they could normally do just because they're using AI as a kickstart, I think is a dramatic improvement for all of us.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That is a perfect segue. I want to talk a little bit more about use cases. You know, we talked about Emmy and generating pipeline, and you just gave some great examples of things you're seeing within your own Emplifi platform.
What, as a CMO, are some compelling use cases for AI agents that you're seeing emerging in the market right now? And are there any that you wish you were seeing more of — or you hope to see more of soon?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So starting with what we are most recently experimenting with and trying is a use case that combines Qualified with Sixth Sense. And we're a Sixth Sense user — I'm also a three-time Sixth Sense user — but you could use Intensify or Demandbase or G2 or others that are throwing you signals and telling you who might be interested in buying.
Combining that Sixth Sense data together with Perplexity — which we use to research additional people and different personas — together with Qualified in order to reach out to those individuals… I feel like this is going to be one of our most important use cases. It would basically be: we're going to turn signals into opportunities.
And yeah — it's live. We're doing it now. And we'll let you know later how it's panning out.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's amazing. Yeah, I would love to hear how that turns out. Because getting started with one agentic AI use case is kind of like wading into the water. But then when you start talking about orchestration — bringing multiple AI-forward or AI-native tools together to work and orchestrate entire workflows — that's where it starts to get really tricky.
So I love that you guys are on the forefront of that. You're starting to piece together different tools and bringing Perplexity in. I'm excited to hear how that goes.
Now, how do you think — as a CMO — are you leading your team in a different way in this AI-first era? Or do you think CMOs need to lead differently now that we have so much AI within our teams?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I think you do. What I did is I took a step back and looked at where I think my team gets bottlenecked. And it's when you think about how to do B2B marketing — it really does take a village, right? So you've got your creative team, you've got design, you've got writers, you've got operations, you've got analytics — and there are all those handoffs between all of those teams.
So I feel like AI can be that accelerator to speed the collaboration, eliminate some of those bottlenecks — just because now we can do creative design through AI instead of on our own. But it also lets us team up and focus on the higher-level thinking instead of the lower-level administration.
So I think what we all need to remember as CMOs leading in this AI era is: there's this garbage in, garbage out philosophy. And I used to say this about my PR firms all the time. Think about how much we pay PR firms. If you're lucky, it's under a 10K retainer a month. Many people are paying 25, 50K. It's a lot of money.
And the CFO would be the first one to ask me, “Do we really need a PR firm? Can't you just hire someone and do it internally?” And I would always say these words: garbage in, garbage out. Because I worked with some of the best PR firms. And if I was involved in feeding them the strategy from the company, keeping them in tune on our key messages, telling them who our competitors are at that moment and how we differentiate — it always seemed to work really well. We'd get really great results.
And I think we are in that exact same world with AI.
So I was recently talking to a CMO friend of mine who said her team had just fed a whole bunch of data into an AI engine. And in addition to feeding internal data, they fed in their entire website. Well, guess what? The website had pages for discontinued products — because you’ve got customers still on those products. So you can't take the web pages away. But you've got to be smart enough to say, “Okay, I'm not going to feed in the discontinued products because I don't want the AI engine trying to market those or link them somehow to my other products.”
So you have to be really, really smart. You've got to be that person feeding the AI engine with the intelligence you want it to know about — and not feeding it the things you don't want it to know.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's such a good example. When we first rolled out Piper here at Qualified — obviously we're customer number one when I'm testing things — we were like, “Just give her the whole website. Let her read everything. What could go wrong?”
And the unknown use case that came out of training our AI SDR was that I found a bunch of old content on our website that we should not have had on there anymore. And then I got to give the feedback to our product team: we need a way to toggle on and off certain pages on our website.
So it was great for our content manager. I was able to tell our content team: hey, can you take a look at this content and make sure it's up to date? Because it is garbage in, garbage out. I don't want to feed our AI this outdated thing. So it helped me clean up our website, which is great.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
That's right. Sarah, I'm going to ask you to wait one second now because you probably hear the background noise. They're blowing the leaves. I don't know if you can see — we have 100-foot-tall trees in our backyard, and so the leaves have to be blown every week.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
We can wait until they go by. Susan, are you in D.C.? Am I making that up?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, I'm just outside of D.C. about 15 minutes in Vienna, Virginia.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, so you guys are in peak fall right now…
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
It is… the past weekend was just stellar. Gorgeous.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Which is so nice for Halloween. It's always so nice around this time of year to get the peak fall, good weather, color change. It never doesn't feel good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, and with the dogs you're not worried about them getting ticks. The fall foliage here this year — for some reason, I think the more rain you get, the better the foliage. And I feel like we had a lot of rain in the spring, so it really hit hard this year and it's gorgeous.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. We lived in Little Rock for about a year and a half, and the ticks that our dogs would pick up… I keep forgetting about it. You said that and it sent a shiver down my spine. I was like, okay.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I have some stories. I won't go there now.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You traumatized me with that. I don't hear them as bad anymore. Do you want to keep going? Cool.
Okay, I will move on. Susan, I might skip the role that AI is playing in storytelling and brand building and go to the… okay, let's go into the lightning round. Does that work? Awesome.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yep.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, so I want to wrap up this portion here as we talk about AI and the future and our organizations. I'm curious: what do you think is something that B2B orgs are still going to be getting wrong with AI a year from now?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. I have a mantra: people buy from people. They use software, but they trust humans. So if you think AI can replace every human interaction or every part of a sales process, you're missing the whole point. We need to use it to amplify the people we have in place — to give them breathing room, to give them the ability to think bigger, to move faster — but not to replace them.
And going back to my original point: we're all working on these small teams with small budgets. Most teams are already short-staffed. So don't think of AI as taking your job — think of it as making you better at your job. AI is not going to replace us. We're just going to get smarter and better and more productive because of it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep, I totally agree. Okay, to wrap things up, Susan — it's my favorite part of the show. We do a lightning round. Keep it fast. I have four questions I want to run through.
First one: other than ChatGPT — because that was everyone's first foray into AI — what was one of the first AI tools that you experimented with?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I had taken over the BDR team and been working with some consultants in my network who suggested Perplexity. And Perplexity really is that BDR sidekick. They're helping us do what we call three-by-three research — three interesting facts about the people we're trying to sell to in three minutes. So we surface those insights and we surface the people we also want to sell to. And it gives us a really smart conversation starter. So I'm loving Perplexity for that use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I second that. I'm a big Perplexity fan.
Okay — besides AI, because most people would say that — what do you think is the most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
The one I struggle with the most is return on ad spend — especially for the B2B use case. In B2C, you can often connect the click to the purchase. In B2B, I think it's a mirage. Even the people who built attribution models will tell you that every model is going to give you a totally different story. The W-model gives you one story, and the straight-line gives you a different story. Everything is half fiction, half accurate.
So I like to tell my team: let's look at ROAS on pipeline, let's look at ROAS on bookings, but let's not make our decisions on it. For B2B — return on ad spend is overrated. And I'm inviting anyone who disagrees with me to help me learn more.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, that one. If you disagree, tell me your secret. I feel like we've gone through iterations of that here at Qualified, and it's like either I'm showing an insane amount of influence — and then I bring it to my CFO, and they're like, “Yeah, there's no way that's right.” Or it's last-touch, and then it's… I agree with you. That is an overrated buzzword. It's really hard to prove. And if anyone disagrees, please message Susan and me on LinkedIn — I want to know your secrets.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, let's have a podcast on that.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay — who is a marketer you think is ahead of the curve on AI that our listeners should go follow?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Someone I'm certainly following — and I think she's got it all going on, she's totally fearless with AI — is Amanda Cole at Bloomreach. She's built her entire campaign process through CharacterQuilt, which is a new startup that is really creating this AI brain and pushing the limits of what you can do with AI. It's very inspiring. And I think she gives you a glimpse of where we could go with this.
Interestingly, Bloomreach is also an AI-based company — helping B2C brands. I think it's in their DNA, but huge kudos to Amanda.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, Amanda is fabulous. She was one of our 30 2025 agentic marketers to watch for that reason. Okay, last question: if you could automate one part of your life outside of work with AI, what would it be?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
This is a really easy one because I'm in the throes of it. I'm in the thick of a move right now, and it's a cross-country move. And if someone could automate packing and cleaning and unpacking on the other end — I'd give AI a raise and the corner office if they could do that for me.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I love that one. Well, Susan, thank you so much for joining us on The Agentic Marketer. It was so great to get your insights and hear how you guys are doing with Emmy. Thank you so much for joining me.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Thanks, Sarah, for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here.
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Discover how agentic AI is reshaping modern marketing as Emplifi CMO Susan Ganeshan shares insights on lifecycle engagement, scaling teams, and reducing churn.
This episode features an interview with Susan Ganeshan, CMO at Emplifi.
Susan shares how Emplifi is using agentic AI to drive global coverage, re-engage high intent website visitors, support BDR teams across regions, and dramatically increase opportunity creation while reducing operational strain. She breaks down her approach to building an AI first marketing organization, why scale is impossible without AI, and how marketers must adapt as LLMs increasingly reshape buyer behavior and website traffic patterns.
Key Takeaways
Transcript
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, 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 how you are using AI agents to hit your pipeline targets. But before we dive into the show, Susan, can you just tell me a little bit about yourself and the work that you're doing over at Emplifi?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Absolutely. Thank you, Sarah, so much for having me on this podcast. I'm super excited to be here. Look, there's nothing that jazzes me more than sharing lessons learned and swapping ideas with other marketers. That's basically how I've always structured my career. I'm a five-time CMO. All software companies — very different beasts, very different kinds of software. It's everything from IT to finance and government.
I've worked in companies that span from 10 million and scaled all the way up to 400 million, done some IPOs along the way. Qualified has been my partner through three of those five companies, happy to say. These days I'm at a company called Emplifi, and we are social media marketing, social media commerce, and social media care. And it's a unified platform that uses AI to engage, connect, and convert audiences into buyers.
We are really proud to be recognized as a Forrester Leader in their Social Media Platforms Wave. And honestly, what excites me the most about today's world of AI is that it just opens up so many possibilities in marketing. And so I'm so happy to be here and talk with you about that.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. Your point of sharing and sharing with all of your peers — that's one of the reasons we started this podcast, especially right now with agentic and agentic AI and agentic marketing. It still feels so new and fresh that I know I myself have been leaning on peers and other people within the industry to just try to expand my knowledge. So I'm so glad that you're here to share with us because you're doing some amazing things both in your career and at Emplifi.
So to kick things off, Susan, how do you define agentic marketing? What does that mean to you and your team over there at Emplifi?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, well, I think it will help give you a little bit of a glimpse into my mindset if I talk to you first about my marketing philosophy. So I've long said there's no silver bullet in marketing. There never has been. You have to do everything right. You have to be on every channel, every tactic, every region. And it's a tall order because most of us don't have enough marketers and enough budget, right?
Whether you're five marketers or 50 marketers, it never feels like enough. So if you take our experience with Qualified — since the launch, we've had 2.8 million web visitors, and Qualified has helped us book nearly 2,000 meetings. I can't hire a big enough BDR team to do that. It's just not possible.
Additionally, we're also using another side of Qualified — the AI assistant. You guys call her Piper; we call her Emmy. She's become an indispensable part of our team. She doesn't sleep, she never takes PTO, and she just manages to make all of this look really easy. And that's what's giving us scale without burnout. So to me, agentic marketing is that ability to scale.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep, yeah. I think that's so true. And to your point, if there are no silver bullets, that just rings so true to me. Because if there was, our jobs wouldn't be nearly as hard as they are, because we would have something that we could just lean on. But it is about doing all the things right.
And I think what you mentioned about scale — Emmy never taking any vacations, never sleeping. We hear from a lot of people as we look at agentic AI, even beyond just our own product, that scale is so hard. We don't have the budgets. We don't have the headcount. You can't simply hire a team big enough to handle all the website traffic that you're getting, which is a problem a lot of marketers have.
So it's really great to hear that that's how you're looking at it. Like, we can use agentic AI. We can use agents to help us scale beyond what we'd normally be able to do with human headcount. So that is, I think, a really good way to look at agentic.
Now, as you were looking at things at Emplifi — how has AI, whether it be Piper or Emmy or any other AI agentic tools that you're using — how has it meaningfully improved marketing performance for you?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Sure. Well, if you look between 2024 and 2025, we've reduced our BDR headcount by about 20%, but we increased our opportunity creation by more than 22%. So that, I think, demonstrates the magic of AI. Emmy alone delivers the output of the equivalent of six full-time BDRs. So think about that for a second.
The fully loaded cost of a BDR — those six would probably be about 700K or more. And you get the bonus of no HR and people management. So I guess I would say, if you have too few BDRs, or if you have a global remit and you have to be available 24/7, you need AI.
If you have too little budget — and if I meet a marketer who tells me they have too much budget, I'm one, jealous, and two, in disbelief. But if you have too little budget to make all the noise in the market that you need to make, you need AI. So let's just get to the bottom of it: none of us can do our jobs without it today.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah. I like your point of then you can take money to put towards things. We hear a lot when we talk about AI — that it frees up your time to do things that are higher quality. And for me as a marketer, I'm like, it also frees up more money for me to put toward things that drive interest and traffic.
So it is kind of this self-fulfilling prophecy that if I can put that money toward driving more high-interest traffic to my website — but then I have agentic AI to help me scale as I drive more website traffic — then I can keep putting more at that top of the funnel and driving more pipeline.
Now, as we look at AI and agentic responsibilities and as AI is becoming a more prominent part of our team — Susan, how are you thinking about your role as a marketer changing? Or how are you thinking about your team's roles as marketers changing as they work alongside agentic AI?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I think one of the things we need to recognize is that it is also changing the landscape underfoot. I have met with many of my peers recently who have said that they're seeing declining web traffic. Some of them are reporting 20 to 30% drops. And that's, of course, because of the AI summaries not leading people to your website.
So thankfully, at Emplifi, we've tried to counter that with some smart search engine optimization, strong brand presence across YouTube, Wikipedia, G2 — all those places that the AI engines are getting their information from. And so I think the evolving role of the marketer is that you have to constantly be reading the surf, right? And reading the waves. And then you have to sometimes paddle faster, or you have to catch a wave.
I would love to give one other example. As marketers, sometimes we'll hear somebody make a big claim. Like remember when GDPR came out? Everyone was saying email is dead, right? Going back to my philosophy of "there's no silver bullet" — guess what? We still have to do email. GDPR maybe tried to kill email, but it didn't work. Or TikTok tried to kill ads, but that didn't work.
So the truth is, you have to be available on all of those channels. And those channels don't die; they just evolve. So email is not dead. Now it's agentic. It's personalized, it's precise, and it's one-to-one — instead of being that blast message.
Can you hear my dog in the background?
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I just heard her, but not before.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I'm going to just have you pause for one second. I'm going to close my door.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You're fine. You're good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
So I have my lawn care people who always come on Monday, and of course they come in this one hour.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
The most important question I have to ask is: what kind of dog do you have?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I have two golden doodles.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
So sweet. I know, between dogs and lawn care — all the things. I feel like working from home now, I'm just like, "Yeah, totally. This is normal." We'll cut it out — our producer's done that. We've been here so many times. So don't worry about it.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Of course it's the one time they show up...
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Actually, my favorite was Sean on one episode — he had someone come take down a tree when we were recording. Sean Whiteley. And he was like, "Hey, we're gonna have to reschedule this. I have people literally chopping down a giant oak tree." And I was like, yeah, that is a good reason to reschedule.
Susan, do you want me to go back to the question? Okay, I'm gonna go back and then we'll cut to that one.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Let's start with that one — how the marketer's role is evolving. That sounds good.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, so as we're thinking about agentic AI and how we work as marketers, I'm curious to get your take. How is the role of the marketer evolving as we're working alongside agentic AI and involving it more in our teams? What do our responsibilities as marketers start to look like?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I think first, I want to always say — having done this now for so many years — that marketing has always been evolving, whether it's because of AI or something else. And that's why I love this job so much. You have to be a constant learner.
Anyway, let's talk about some of the things I'm hearing from my peers. My peers are saying that their web traffic is down. Some of them are reporting 20 to 30%. And of course, we've encountered a little bit of that at Emplifi as well. We're countering that by — again, I've talked to my peers, and we believe the recipe is smarter search engine optimization, stronger presence on YouTube, Wikipedia, G2, and all these other places that matter.
Basically, what we've learned is that while the tides have changed, we can catch a different wave or we can paddle a little bit faster to get through those currents.
But I think one of the traps we as marketers shouldn't fall into is extremism. For example, when GDPR came out, people said email is dead, right? And every few years a channel or another is declared dead. They don't die — they just evolve.
Email now is agentic. It's personalized, it's precise, and the best part about it — and the part I love the most — is it's one-to-one. Instead of being these blast emails that may or may not speak to the audience.
One of the things we've been using Emmy for — our agentic email through Qualified — is to support our BDR needs in Brazil. We have an AE in Brazil, a salesperson. We do not have a BDR. Emmy can speak Portuguese even though no one else on my team can. We had some turnover in our BDR team in APAC. We took all the inbound leads and we funneled them to Emmy so she could schedule the meetings for us.
Sometimes we'll run an event and it will be a huge success, and it's too much for the BDRs to follow up on all at one time. And so instead of them just blasting out a generic message to all of those leads that may or may not hit, we take those leads and funnel them to Emmy so she can swoop in and do those custom one-on-one messages.
And then one of my BDR team's least favorite tasks is to schedule meetings for trade shows. And of course, you're spending 35, 50, 100K sometimes on these trade shows. So you need them to produce opportunity. And the only way you're going to get to an opportunity is through a meeting. And to get to the meeting, you need the BDR to schedule it.
How about Emmy? She doesn't get upset. She loves doing it. You just give her the trade show schedule and tell her to go.
So I guess the beauty of this is the always-on flexibility. And we can test, learn, and try new workflows and new use cases very, very quickly. And then Emmy — she just keeps getting smarter and smarter. So it's working for us.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, the learning and testing. I think every marketer I've had on the podcast has said some sort of variation of what you said, Susan — like, hey, website traffic is down. That's universal. I think we're all feeling that, as AI summaries and the LLMs are taking traffic that we normally would have seen.
And I like the way you took that — marketers are evolving now. We get to focus on those problems. Like, do we need to catch a different wave? Do we need to ride that wave faster to figure out how to now bring traffic back up and still hit our pipeline numbers?
But when we're working alongside something like an Emmy or agentic AI, we don't have to worry about those problems. We can focus on these new things that are moving so fast with AI that there's always a new problem — like website traffic declining.
So it is interesting to hear you say that. I appreciate you sharing that insight.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Great.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, so before I jump in, I want to dig into Emmy a little bit more and some of the results that you're seeing — which you've already shared some great insights — but I always like to ask this question. Is there a hot take that you have about AI and marketing right now that you think most marketers would not agree with you on?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So sometimes I actually find most marketers that I've engaged with are on the same page. I think the challenge we have often is… I did see a little blip in that, so hopefully it was just uploading and not in the recording.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You're good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
One of the challenges marketers are faced with is voices across their business telling them to keep their hands off their leads or hands off their customers. Sales will say, “Hey, it's already in the funnel, so I'm talking to them — you don't have to.” Or the CS team will say, “They're a customer now, so I'm responsible for the communication — you don't touch them.”
And I really think that's kind of crazy. It's as crazy as saying the moment you send your kid to college you can stop parenting them. Yeah, right? I have two through college now. I have found that's when they needed me most.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I definitely needed the most parenting when I was in college, yes.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I mean, look, it's the same with our customers. Always be marketing. Always be selling. And use your AI agents to turn pipeline into customers, to turn customers into advocates, and to continue that conversation and keep the connection — so you don't see the churn.
So I would say my hot take is: marketing doesn't stop at the sale. We change the tone and we change maybe a little bit of the frequency, but AI can help with that — and can help us all scale into infinite customer marketing.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Absolutely. That is actually something we've run into here at Qualified. Now that we have something like Piper that can help with these email touchpoints… You mentioned trade shows; I was laughing through that because I'm like, yeah, we've all been there. They don't want to schedule meetings. They don't want to follow up with event leads. But I spent a bunch of money to be at that trade show and to get those leads, so I obviously want the SDRs or the BDRs to work those.
The idea of not touching them — we've run into it at Qualified, where it's like, okay, this is an owned account by an AE. Are they going to be upset if we follow up with them? If we send them a marketing email? And I'm with you, Susan, where I'm like, no. Why wouldn't we have our AI SDR also send really personalized messaging while our AE is following up with them, or our CSM team is following up with them?
It's our job to market to them and to educate them. And AI helps us do that now in a really personalized, scalable way. I'm not doing this one-off email blast to them. So I do — that was a hot take, but it's one I actually agree with you on.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Awesome.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, now we talked a little bit about Emmy. You've hired her. I loved all of your use cases — especially as you talk about how we've run into similar situations where we have AEs or accounts in different geographies or time zones that we don't have BDRs to support. So I loved all of those examples.
What is — or is there — anything that was unexpected that Emmy helped unlock for your team beyond helping book more meetings and work all of that traffic? Was there something unexpected that took you and the team by surprise when you hired Emmy on?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yes. And I'm so excited about this metric. We took Emmy and asked her to re-engage with people who made it to our website but didn't fill out a form or ask for a demo or take it to the next level. And from that alone, we saw a 12% increase in our meetings scheduled. So — full stop.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, I was like, wait, that's a wrap.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. Look, I think it proves my point about there's no silver bullet in marketing — that you need to be omnipresent. Because think about the way you buy. We're all getting Instagram ads about, say, the latest cool look on clothing or bathing suits or the best travel spots to go to. And you don't click and buy the first time you see that ad.
It takes you some repetition, some looking at how others are doing it, some references. In our case, we help our customers present user-generated content — which is basically, if you're trying to sell makeup, then you put user-generated content out that shows somebody putting that makeup on. And it's a real person who is a peer to people. And then next thing you know, after a while, you get that customer.
But you had to be there and present with them through that entire exchange — and probably sometimes in multiple channels. If you figure out their email, you can email them. If you know they're going to be at a trade show, you can track them down there.
In other words, being omnipresent with them is absolutely essential. And when you take your AI agent and say, “Where aren't I present today?” and put them there, then you get that conversion. And that's all about getting that conversion.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I really like your point about thinking about it from how we buy as humans. Your point about B2C — I have a six-month-old baby now, so I get a ton of recommendations on baby products. And how many times I go look at a product, go to the website, think about it… it takes a little while before I pull the trigger and buy.
And that's for something in B2C. Sales cycles are so much shorter; it's so much quicker. But in B2B — yeah, it's just me and my husband. A buying committee of two. But yes, it's a much smaller decision. But then in B2B, you've got huge price tags, huge buying committees.
So being omnipresent with those people and having AI help you — because no one comes to a B2B website one time, looks, and is like, “Yeah, I'm gonna buy this right now, and I can just pull out an invoice and do it.”
Okay, so it sounds like at Emplifi, you've been doing a lot of work with AI. You have a lot of use cases you're using Emmy for. I think one of the things I hear from peers most often is: it's really hard to make the leap from experimentation into actually utilizing AI. And it sounds like you're doing a great job with this with Emmy.
So what did it take for you and your team to make that leap from experimentation into leading with AI within your marketing organization?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Sure. So we started with specific use cases that we thought were safer. And honestly, we just weren't that worried about it.
You've heard the phrase “fail fast.” It's okay to make a mistake or put Emmy on a case that just doesn't pan out. We have put her on some and it didn't work out. But that doesn't mean we couldn't adjust the scenario or adjust the intelligence that we're feeding in and give it another try.
But when you're experimenting with AI, I want to encourage everyone to think about the entire customer journey. So before they land in your funnel, while they're in your funnel, after they either buy or even go to closed lost. In post-funnel — if you think about every one of those steps — can you get more efficient? Can you bring AI to the task? And then can you bring humans in at the right moment?
For example, we have modified some of the way Emmy talks over time. And once we got comfortable with that, and we saw that the meetings she was getting for us were easily transitioned to BANT-qualified opportunities, it was easy to go live.
Let me also say it from my customer's perspective. At Emplifi, we have more than 50 different use cases that you can implement in our platform that are AI-specific. And what we see is that many of our customers will combine the AI — like say somebody uses it to craft the content of a social post — they may use it partially at first. Maybe just to get the image, but they'll write the caption themselves. Or they'll caption it using AI but they'll find the image themselves.
They might do one or the other job. And then eventually, they switch to trusting the AI enough because it's also learning, right? It's also learning how these captions have been written and rewritten.
So there is a comfort level, but we keep the human involved. And getting back to our team size we talked about earlier — we have small teams. But enabling them to do five, ten, twenty times the work they could normally do just because they're using AI as a kickstart, I think is a dramatic improvement for all of us.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That is a perfect segue. I want to talk a little bit more about use cases. You know, we talked about Emmy and generating pipeline, and you just gave some great examples of things you're seeing within your own Emplifi platform.
What, as a CMO, are some compelling use cases for AI agents that you're seeing emerging in the market right now? And are there any that you wish you were seeing more of — or you hope to see more of soon?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So starting with what we are most recently experimenting with and trying is a use case that combines Qualified with Sixth Sense. And we're a Sixth Sense user — I'm also a three-time Sixth Sense user — but you could use Intensify or Demandbase or G2 or others that are throwing you signals and telling you who might be interested in buying.
Combining that Sixth Sense data together with Perplexity — which we use to research additional people and different personas — together with Qualified in order to reach out to those individuals… I feel like this is going to be one of our most important use cases. It would basically be: we're going to turn signals into opportunities.
And yeah — it's live. We're doing it now. And we'll let you know later how it's panning out.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's amazing. Yeah, I would love to hear how that turns out. Because getting started with one agentic AI use case is kind of like wading into the water. But then when you start talking about orchestration — bringing multiple AI-forward or AI-native tools together to work and orchestrate entire workflows — that's where it starts to get really tricky.
So I love that you guys are on the forefront of that. You're starting to piece together different tools and bringing Perplexity in. I'm excited to hear how that goes.
Now, how do you think — as a CMO — are you leading your team in a different way in this AI-first era? Or do you think CMOs need to lead differently now that we have so much AI within our teams?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I think you do. What I did is I took a step back and looked at where I think my team gets bottlenecked. And it's when you think about how to do B2B marketing — it really does take a village, right? So you've got your creative team, you've got design, you've got writers, you've got operations, you've got analytics — and there are all those handoffs between all of those teams.
So I feel like AI can be that accelerator to speed the collaboration, eliminate some of those bottlenecks — just because now we can do creative design through AI instead of on our own. But it also lets us team up and focus on the higher-level thinking instead of the lower-level administration.
So I think what we all need to remember as CMOs leading in this AI era is: there's this garbage in, garbage out philosophy. And I used to say this about my PR firms all the time. Think about how much we pay PR firms. If you're lucky, it's under a 10K retainer a month. Many people are paying 25, 50K. It's a lot of money.
And the CFO would be the first one to ask me, “Do we really need a PR firm? Can't you just hire someone and do it internally?” And I would always say these words: garbage in, garbage out. Because I worked with some of the best PR firms. And if I was involved in feeding them the strategy from the company, keeping them in tune on our key messages, telling them who our competitors are at that moment and how we differentiate — it always seemed to work really well. We'd get really great results.
And I think we are in that exact same world with AI.
So I was recently talking to a CMO friend of mine who said her team had just fed a whole bunch of data into an AI engine. And in addition to feeding internal data, they fed in their entire website. Well, guess what? The website had pages for discontinued products — because you’ve got customers still on those products. So you can't take the web pages away. But you've got to be smart enough to say, “Okay, I'm not going to feed in the discontinued products because I don't want the AI engine trying to market those or link them somehow to my other products.”
So you have to be really, really smart. You've got to be that person feeding the AI engine with the intelligence you want it to know about — and not feeding it the things you don't want it to know.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
That's such a good example. When we first rolled out Piper here at Qualified — obviously we're customer number one when I'm testing things — we were like, “Just give her the whole website. Let her read everything. What could go wrong?”
And the unknown use case that came out of training our AI SDR was that I found a bunch of old content on our website that we should not have had on there anymore. And then I got to give the feedback to our product team: we need a way to toggle on and off certain pages on our website.
So it was great for our content manager. I was able to tell our content team: hey, can you take a look at this content and make sure it's up to date? Because it is garbage in, garbage out. I don't want to feed our AI this outdated thing. So it helped me clean up our website, which is great.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
That's right. Sarah, I'm going to ask you to wait one second now because you probably hear the background noise. They're blowing the leaves. I don't know if you can see — we have 100-foot-tall trees in our backyard, and so the leaves have to be blown every week.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
We can wait until they go by. Susan, are you in D.C.? Am I making that up?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, I'm just outside of D.C. about 15 minutes in Vienna, Virginia.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, so you guys are in peak fall right now…
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
It is… the past weekend was just stellar. Gorgeous.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Which is so nice for Halloween. It's always so nice around this time of year to get the peak fall, good weather, color change. It never doesn't feel good.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, and with the dogs you're not worried about them getting ticks. The fall foliage here this year — for some reason, I think the more rain you get, the better the foliage. And I feel like we had a lot of rain in the spring, so it really hit hard this year and it's gorgeous.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Totally. We lived in Little Rock for about a year and a half, and the ticks that our dogs would pick up… I keep forgetting about it. You said that and it sent a shiver down my spine. I was like, okay.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
I have some stories. I won't go there now.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
You traumatized me with that. I don't hear them as bad anymore. Do you want to keep going? Cool.
Okay, I will move on. Susan, I might skip the role that AI is playing in storytelling and brand building and go to the… okay, let's go into the lightning round. Does that work? Awesome.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yep.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay, Susan, so I want to wrap up this portion here as we talk about AI and the future and our organizations. I'm curious: what do you think is something that B2B orgs are still going to be getting wrong with AI a year from now?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. I have a mantra: people buy from people. They use software, but they trust humans. So if you think AI can replace every human interaction or every part of a sales process, you're missing the whole point. We need to use it to amplify the people we have in place — to give them breathing room, to give them the ability to think bigger, to move faster — but not to replace them.
And going back to my original point: we're all working on these small teams with small budgets. Most teams are already short-staffed. So don't think of AI as taking your job — think of it as making you better at your job. AI is not going to replace us. We're just going to get smarter and better and more productive because of it.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yep, I totally agree. Okay, to wrap things up, Susan — it's my favorite part of the show. We do a lightning round. Keep it fast. I have four questions I want to run through.
First one: other than ChatGPT — because that was everyone's first foray into AI — what was one of the first AI tools that you experimented with?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah. So I had taken over the BDR team and been working with some consultants in my network who suggested Perplexity. And Perplexity really is that BDR sidekick. They're helping us do what we call three-by-three research — three interesting facts about the people we're trying to sell to in three minutes. So we surface those insights and we surface the people we also want to sell to. And it gives us a really smart conversation starter. So I'm loving Perplexity for that use case.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I second that. I'm a big Perplexity fan.
Okay — besides AI, because most people would say that — what do you think is the most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
The one I struggle with the most is return on ad spend — especially for the B2B use case. In B2C, you can often connect the click to the purchase. In B2B, I think it's a mirage. Even the people who built attribution models will tell you that every model is going to give you a totally different story. The W-model gives you one story, and the straight-line gives you a different story. Everything is half fiction, half accurate.
So I like to tell my team: let's look at ROAS on pipeline, let's look at ROAS on bookings, but let's not make our decisions on it. For B2B — return on ad spend is overrated. And I'm inviting anyone who disagrees with me to help me learn more.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, that one. If you disagree, tell me your secret. I feel like we've gone through iterations of that here at Qualified, and it's like either I'm showing an insane amount of influence — and then I bring it to my CFO, and they're like, “Yeah, there's no way that's right.” Or it's last-touch, and then it's… I agree with you. That is an overrated buzzword. It's really hard to prove. And if anyone disagrees, please message Susan and me on LinkedIn — I want to know your secrets.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Yeah, let's have a podcast on that.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Okay — who is a marketer you think is ahead of the curve on AI that our listeners should go follow?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Someone I'm certainly following — and I think she's got it all going on, she's totally fearless with AI — is Amanda Cole at Bloomreach. She's built her entire campaign process through CharacterQuilt, which is a new startup that is really creating this AI brain and pushing the limits of what you can do with AI. It's very inspiring. And I think she gives you a glimpse of where we could go with this.
Interestingly, Bloomreach is also an AI-based company — helping B2C brands. I think it's in their DNA, but huge kudos to Amanda.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
Yeah, Amanda is fabulous. She was one of our 30 2025 agentic marketers to watch for that reason. Okay, last question: if you could automate one part of your life outside of work with AI, what would it be?
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
This is a really easy one because I'm in the throes of it. I'm in the thick of a move right now, and it's a cross-country move. And if someone could automate packing and cleaning and unpacking on the other end — I'd give AI a raise and the corner office if they could do that for me.
Sarah McConnell – Qualified
I love that one. Well, Susan, thank you so much for joining us on The Agentic Marketer. It was so great to get your insights and hear how you guys are doing with Emmy. Thank you so much for joining me.
Susan Ganeshan – Emplifi
Thanks, Sarah, for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here.
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