Discover how UserGems CMO Trinity Nguyen operationalizes AI to power a lean, high-output marketing team. Learn practical strategies for scaling smarter, combining human creativity with AI agents, and driving measurable impact in the agentic marketing era.
This episode features an interview with Trinity Nguyen, CMO at UserGems, an AI-powered platform that helps go-to-market teams scale outbound with warm outreach at the right time.
Trinity shares how UserGems has operationalized AI across their marketing org to maximize output with a lean team. She dives into how her team combines human creativity with AI agents, the cultural shift required to embrace new technology, and what the future of hybrid marketing teams will look like.
Key Takeaways:
Transcript
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Okay. So Trinity, welcome to the Agentic Marketer. This is our new series where we're talking with the most forward-thinking marketing leaders about how they're embracing this agentic era, which has really taken us all by storm. To get started, do you want to introduce yourself and tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your role at UserGems?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. My name is Trinity Nguyen. I'm the CMO at UserGems. A little bit about what UserGems does: it's an AI platform for go-to-market teams, specifically focusing on outbound. Our team lives, breathes, eats, and thinks about outbound all the time because that's how we build our own go-to-market, but also how we help our customers build theirs.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That's awesome. You've been at UserGems for a long time now and have probably seen a huge shift in the landscape. Tell me about your role and what you do specifically.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
I joined UserGems about six years ago as the first business hire. At the time, it was just the two technical co-founders—one ended up leading sales and CS—and two engineers. I was actually on a voluntary sabbatical from my previous job, backpacking around Europe, trying to do the Euro trip I wished I had done 10 years earlier.
I thought I’d last six months, but after three months I was bored of seeing churches. I reached out to Christian, the CEO of UserGems, because my previous startup had actually been one of their first customers. I already knew the product, and since I was bored, I told him, “Your website won’t get you any customers. Let me build you a new one.” I learned Webflow in less than a week, built it out, and basically talked myself into the job. That’s how it started.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I love that story. And I love talking with you because we were just saying before we started recording—we’ve both been in our roles for six-plus years, which is a little rare as marketing leaders. We’ve also both seen seismic shifts in the industry and how we reposition our companies. What’s cool is that both of us sell to go-to-market leaders, and we’re in this new era we call agentic marketing.
The agentic marketing era is the idea that marketers can hire agents to automate tasks and pipeline generation. That’s how I think about it. How do you define this new category?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
This is actually my first time hearing the term “agentic marketing.” Initially, I thought it meant personalization at scale—using AI to map out the buyer journey, meet them where they are, and provide value along the way. That’s been the promise for years, but we could never really pull it all together.
After hearing you describe it, I think of it as building hybrid teams of humans and AI, working together. We’re tinkering with that right now internally at UserGems.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s a great point. Agentic marketing is about finally delivering on hyper-personalization at scale, but also building hybrid marketing teams that include digital labor. I think it’s interesting that you’ve built a brand around warm outreach at scale. How does that intersect with agentic marketing? You’ve got Gemy, inspired by WALL-E. Tell me about that product and how it fits into this world.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
For us, warm outreach at scale means meeting buyers where they are in their journey using AI to hyper-personalize outreach. In the beginning, we focused on finding signals—reasons to engage with someone at the contact level, not just the account level. We started with past champions: people who already used and loved your product and then joined new companies. That’s the warmest lead possible.
Fast forward six years, and now we process all kinds of signals—people-level (relationships, job changes, connections to your customers), account-level (funding, hiring, expansion), and CRM data that humans can’t realistically manage. Gemy ingests all of this, prioritizes accounts, and can even write entire sequences like a human, weaving signals together.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s so cool. At Qualified we sit in the inbound world—people raising their hands to engage—and we use Piper, our AI SDR agent, to automate that process. You’re in the outbound world, helping customers turn intent signals into pipeline. Do your customers use a combination of Gemy and humans, or do they let Gemy autonomously handle warm outbound at scale?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Both. For low-priority accounts, we use Gemy in autopilot mode. Our team is small, and at one point half the ADR team was out on parental leave. Gemy handled accounts we didn’t have capacity for. For higher-priority accounts, we use a hybrid approach—humans plus Gemy working in tandem. And who knows, maybe one day Gemy and Piper could work together!
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I like that. Every customer has a different comfort level when it comes to adopting agents. We talk about crawl, walk, run—starting small and then expanding. One thing I always emphasize is that an agent should act like your best human would. You have intent and CRM data, but no human can process it all consistently. That’s where automation shines.
I’m curious: beyond outbound, where else are you deploying agents at UserGems?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Right now we’re operationalizing AI across marketing. Individually, people already use AI in their day-to-day, but I want to scale it into workflows that benefit the whole team.
If you drew our org chart, each function lead has human reports but also manages custom GPTs for tasks like market research, battle cards, or content creation. It’s becoming a 50/50 split—half humans, half GPTs.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Wow. If you were building a marketing team from scratch today, it would look very different than six years ago. I think 2024 was the year of tinkering. 2025 is about operationalizing and moving to production.
Marketers have gone through a whirlwind—chatGPT, co-pilots, and now the agentic era. Do you have any hot takes about AI in marketing?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Not sure if it’s a hot take, but I think experimentation is important. AI isn’t as terrifying as people think—it can be your BFF once you start using it.
The challenge is quantifying impact. A lot of AI experiments fizzle out because they’re not tied to measurable business outcomes. On the outbound side, I recommend picking real business campaigns tied to OKRs and then finding AI solutions that make those campaigns successful. That way you can measure the impact clearly, even at the board level.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s so true. Many companies will churn from AI tools because they bought them as shiny objects without proving value. Use cases are key, as is monitoring performance—just like you would with a new hire.
You’ve talked a lot about outbound with Gemy. What about other workflows? What tipped you off that they were ripe for agent adoption?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Outbound was first—low-priority accounts, then ABM. Funny story: in Q1 this year, we abandoned AI scoring for ABM because we thought a new account list would be great. It was a disaster. That quarter’s ABM program completely flopped. We went right back to AI.
Beyond outbound, I asked team leads: what part of your day do you hate the most? Then we trained GPTs to handle those tasks. Battle cards, competitor notes, things like that. Because people hate those tasks, they’re emotionally invested in having the agent succeed.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I love that. It’s a mindset shift. Instead of just grinding through tasks the old way, ask if there’s a better way. AI can get you to 80%, then you refine the rest.
How did your team adapt culturally to this shift?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
The biggest hurdle was pride. Marketers felt like using AI was “cheating.” It took reassurance that it’s just a tool, not a shortcut. Over time, once they saw results, they got comfortable. It took about two to three months for it to feel natural.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That makes sense. As marketers, we take pride in our craft. But if AI can speed up the science side, we can focus more on the art.
Did you face pushback beyond the pride issue?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yes—especially around job security. When we rolled out Gemy, reps worried it would replace them. It took months of overperformance, hiring more reps, and celebrating wins as “Gemy plus the ADR” before they felt secure. Now, the team celebrates Gemy themselves.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s great. It’s about making the agent feel like a teammate. Did you have to sunset anything to make room for agents?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Not really. Our team is small and lean, so agents are just expanding capacity. We haven’t cut freelancers or roles.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s encouraging. I’ve also seen new roles emerge—people who manage agents. For example, we have go-to-market agent operations overseeing Piper. It’s not just replacing roles, it’s creating new ones.
Looking ahead, do you think the specialist era in marketing is over?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
I think entry-level specialist roles will be absorbed by agents. What I look for are “super ICs”—people who can zoom out to see strategy, zoom in to execute, and then zoom back out. It’s rare but incredibly valuable.
AI skills will become default. What will rise in value is creativity, especially in B2B. Everyone will have access to the same AI playbooks, so creativity will be the differentiator.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Exactly. Authenticity and creativity are more important than ever. Is there anything you think B2B orgs will still get wrong about AI a year from now?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yes. They’ll keep chasing silver bullets. That’s why we see so much bad AI outbound and why people say outbound is dead. But in reality, most pipeline still comes from outbound—it’s just not fashionable to say on LinkedIn.
Some orgs will believe they can run to $100M in revenue with just AI and one person. There are exceptions, but for most companies, that won’t work.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Totally. Okay, let’s do a lightning round. First AI tool you tested as a marketer?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Honestly, boring answer: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, really early on.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Same. What’s the most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
So many. Honestly, anything we marketers come up with eventually gets overused. I like “agentify,” but even that will probably be overused soon.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Agreed. One marketer to follow who’s ahead of the curve on AI?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Casey Jenkins from Sendoso. Her team is super innovative and fast-moving. She embodies the human-first mindset, which I think is refreshing in this noisy space.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Love it. Okay, if you could automate one part of your life outside of work, what would it be?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Laundry.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Same! Okay, last question. Why are you excited as a marketing leader in this agentic era?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
It feels once-in-a-lifetime. The magnitude of change is bigger than the dot-com boom. Living through it is exhausting, but also exciting. It’s a level playing field—no one has it figured out yet.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Totally. We’re all writing a new playbook together. Trinity, thank you so much for joining and sharing your insights on how UserGems is embracing agentic marketing. We’ll see you next time.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Thank you.
Stay up to date with weekly drops of fresh B2B marketing and sales content.
Discover how UserGems CMO Trinity Nguyen operationalizes AI to power a lean, high-output marketing team. Learn practical strategies for scaling smarter, combining human creativity with AI agents, and driving measurable impact in the agentic marketing era.
This episode features an interview with Trinity Nguyen, CMO at UserGems, an AI-powered platform that helps go-to-market teams scale outbound with warm outreach at the right time.
Trinity shares how UserGems has operationalized AI across their marketing org to maximize output with a lean team. She dives into how her team combines human creativity with AI agents, the cultural shift required to embrace new technology, and what the future of hybrid marketing teams will look like.
Key Takeaways:
Transcript
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Okay. So Trinity, welcome to the Agentic Marketer. This is our new series where we're talking with the most forward-thinking marketing leaders about how they're embracing this agentic era, which has really taken us all by storm. To get started, do you want to introduce yourself and tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your role at UserGems?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. My name is Trinity Nguyen. I'm the CMO at UserGems. A little bit about what UserGems does: it's an AI platform for go-to-market teams, specifically focusing on outbound. Our team lives, breathes, eats, and thinks about outbound all the time because that's how we build our own go-to-market, but also how we help our customers build theirs.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That's awesome. You've been at UserGems for a long time now and have probably seen a huge shift in the landscape. Tell me about your role and what you do specifically.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
I joined UserGems about six years ago as the first business hire. At the time, it was just the two technical co-founders—one ended up leading sales and CS—and two engineers. I was actually on a voluntary sabbatical from my previous job, backpacking around Europe, trying to do the Euro trip I wished I had done 10 years earlier.
I thought I’d last six months, but after three months I was bored of seeing churches. I reached out to Christian, the CEO of UserGems, because my previous startup had actually been one of their first customers. I already knew the product, and since I was bored, I told him, “Your website won’t get you any customers. Let me build you a new one.” I learned Webflow in less than a week, built it out, and basically talked myself into the job. That’s how it started.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I love that story. And I love talking with you because we were just saying before we started recording—we’ve both been in our roles for six-plus years, which is a little rare as marketing leaders. We’ve also both seen seismic shifts in the industry and how we reposition our companies. What’s cool is that both of us sell to go-to-market leaders, and we’re in this new era we call agentic marketing.
The agentic marketing era is the idea that marketers can hire agents to automate tasks and pipeline generation. That’s how I think about it. How do you define this new category?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
This is actually my first time hearing the term “agentic marketing.” Initially, I thought it meant personalization at scale—using AI to map out the buyer journey, meet them where they are, and provide value along the way. That’s been the promise for years, but we could never really pull it all together.
After hearing you describe it, I think of it as building hybrid teams of humans and AI, working together. We’re tinkering with that right now internally at UserGems.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s a great point. Agentic marketing is about finally delivering on hyper-personalization at scale, but also building hybrid marketing teams that include digital labor. I think it’s interesting that you’ve built a brand around warm outreach at scale. How does that intersect with agentic marketing? You’ve got Gemy, inspired by WALL-E. Tell me about that product and how it fits into this world.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
For us, warm outreach at scale means meeting buyers where they are in their journey using AI to hyper-personalize outreach. In the beginning, we focused on finding signals—reasons to engage with someone at the contact level, not just the account level. We started with past champions: people who already used and loved your product and then joined new companies. That’s the warmest lead possible.
Fast forward six years, and now we process all kinds of signals—people-level (relationships, job changes, connections to your customers), account-level (funding, hiring, expansion), and CRM data that humans can’t realistically manage. Gemy ingests all of this, prioritizes accounts, and can even write entire sequences like a human, weaving signals together.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s so cool. At Qualified we sit in the inbound world—people raising their hands to engage—and we use Piper, our AI SDR agent, to automate that process. You’re in the outbound world, helping customers turn intent signals into pipeline. Do your customers use a combination of Gemy and humans, or do they let Gemy autonomously handle warm outbound at scale?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Both. For low-priority accounts, we use Gemy in autopilot mode. Our team is small, and at one point half the ADR team was out on parental leave. Gemy handled accounts we didn’t have capacity for. For higher-priority accounts, we use a hybrid approach—humans plus Gemy working in tandem. And who knows, maybe one day Gemy and Piper could work together!
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I like that. Every customer has a different comfort level when it comes to adopting agents. We talk about crawl, walk, run—starting small and then expanding. One thing I always emphasize is that an agent should act like your best human would. You have intent and CRM data, but no human can process it all consistently. That’s where automation shines.
I’m curious: beyond outbound, where else are you deploying agents at UserGems?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Right now we’re operationalizing AI across marketing. Individually, people already use AI in their day-to-day, but I want to scale it into workflows that benefit the whole team.
If you drew our org chart, each function lead has human reports but also manages custom GPTs for tasks like market research, battle cards, or content creation. It’s becoming a 50/50 split—half humans, half GPTs.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Wow. If you were building a marketing team from scratch today, it would look very different than six years ago. I think 2024 was the year of tinkering. 2025 is about operationalizing and moving to production.
Marketers have gone through a whirlwind—chatGPT, co-pilots, and now the agentic era. Do you have any hot takes about AI in marketing?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Not sure if it’s a hot take, but I think experimentation is important. AI isn’t as terrifying as people think—it can be your BFF once you start using it.
The challenge is quantifying impact. A lot of AI experiments fizzle out because they’re not tied to measurable business outcomes. On the outbound side, I recommend picking real business campaigns tied to OKRs and then finding AI solutions that make those campaigns successful. That way you can measure the impact clearly, even at the board level.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s so true. Many companies will churn from AI tools because they bought them as shiny objects without proving value. Use cases are key, as is monitoring performance—just like you would with a new hire.
You’ve talked a lot about outbound with Gemy. What about other workflows? What tipped you off that they were ripe for agent adoption?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Outbound was first—low-priority accounts, then ABM. Funny story: in Q1 this year, we abandoned AI scoring for ABM because we thought a new account list would be great. It was a disaster. That quarter’s ABM program completely flopped. We went right back to AI.
Beyond outbound, I asked team leads: what part of your day do you hate the most? Then we trained GPTs to handle those tasks. Battle cards, competitor notes, things like that. Because people hate those tasks, they’re emotionally invested in having the agent succeed.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I love that. It’s a mindset shift. Instead of just grinding through tasks the old way, ask if there’s a better way. AI can get you to 80%, then you refine the rest.
How did your team adapt culturally to this shift?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
The biggest hurdle was pride. Marketers felt like using AI was “cheating.” It took reassurance that it’s just a tool, not a shortcut. Over time, once they saw results, they got comfortable. It took about two to three months for it to feel natural.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That makes sense. As marketers, we take pride in our craft. But if AI can speed up the science side, we can focus more on the art.
Did you face pushback beyond the pride issue?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yes—especially around job security. When we rolled out Gemy, reps worried it would replace them. It took months of overperformance, hiring more reps, and celebrating wins as “Gemy plus the ADR” before they felt secure. Now, the team celebrates Gemy themselves.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s great. It’s about making the agent feel like a teammate. Did you have to sunset anything to make room for agents?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Not really. Our team is small and lean, so agents are just expanding capacity. We haven’t cut freelancers or roles.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s encouraging. I’ve also seen new roles emerge—people who manage agents. For example, we have go-to-market agent operations overseeing Piper. It’s not just replacing roles, it’s creating new ones.
Looking ahead, do you think the specialist era in marketing is over?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
I think entry-level specialist roles will be absorbed by agents. What I look for are “super ICs”—people who can zoom out to see strategy, zoom in to execute, and then zoom back out. It’s rare but incredibly valuable.
AI skills will become default. What will rise in value is creativity, especially in B2B. Everyone will have access to the same AI playbooks, so creativity will be the differentiator.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Exactly. Authenticity and creativity are more important than ever. Is there anything you think B2B orgs will still get wrong about AI a year from now?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yes. They’ll keep chasing silver bullets. That’s why we see so much bad AI outbound and why people say outbound is dead. But in reality, most pipeline still comes from outbound—it’s just not fashionable to say on LinkedIn.
Some orgs will believe they can run to $100M in revenue with just AI and one person. There are exceptions, but for most companies, that won’t work.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Totally. Okay, let’s do a lightning round. First AI tool you tested as a marketer?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Honestly, boring answer: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, really early on.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Same. What’s the most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
So many. Honestly, anything we marketers come up with eventually gets overused. I like “agentify,” but even that will probably be overused soon.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Agreed. One marketer to follow who’s ahead of the curve on AI?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Casey Jenkins from Sendoso. Her team is super innovative and fast-moving. She embodies the human-first mindset, which I think is refreshing in this noisy space.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Love it. Okay, if you could automate one part of your life outside of work, what would it be?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Laundry.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Same! Okay, last question. Why are you excited as a marketing leader in this agentic era?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
It feels once-in-a-lifetime. The magnitude of change is bigger than the dot-com boom. Living through it is exhausting, but also exciting. It’s a level playing field—no one has it figured out yet.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Totally. We’re all writing a new playbook together. Trinity, thank you so much for joining and sharing your insights on how UserGems is embracing agentic marketing. We’ll see you next time.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Thank you.
Stay up to date with weekly drops of fresh B2B marketing and sales content.
Discover how UserGems CMO Trinity Nguyen operationalizes AI to power a lean, high-output marketing team. Learn practical strategies for scaling smarter, combining human creativity with AI agents, and driving measurable impact in the agentic marketing era.
This episode features an interview with Trinity Nguyen, CMO at UserGems, an AI-powered platform that helps go-to-market teams scale outbound with warm outreach at the right time.
Trinity shares how UserGems has operationalized AI across their marketing org to maximize output with a lean team. She dives into how her team combines human creativity with AI agents, the cultural shift required to embrace new technology, and what the future of hybrid marketing teams will look like.
Key Takeaways:
Transcript
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Okay. So Trinity, welcome to the Agentic Marketer. This is our new series where we're talking with the most forward-thinking marketing leaders about how they're embracing this agentic era, which has really taken us all by storm. To get started, do you want to introduce yourself and tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your role at UserGems?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. My name is Trinity Nguyen. I'm the CMO at UserGems. A little bit about what UserGems does: it's an AI platform for go-to-market teams, specifically focusing on outbound. Our team lives, breathes, eats, and thinks about outbound all the time because that's how we build our own go-to-market, but also how we help our customers build theirs.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That's awesome. You've been at UserGems for a long time now and have probably seen a huge shift in the landscape. Tell me about your role and what you do specifically.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
I joined UserGems about six years ago as the first business hire. At the time, it was just the two technical co-founders—one ended up leading sales and CS—and two engineers. I was actually on a voluntary sabbatical from my previous job, backpacking around Europe, trying to do the Euro trip I wished I had done 10 years earlier.
I thought I’d last six months, but after three months I was bored of seeing churches. I reached out to Christian, the CEO of UserGems, because my previous startup had actually been one of their first customers. I already knew the product, and since I was bored, I told him, “Your website won’t get you any customers. Let me build you a new one.” I learned Webflow in less than a week, built it out, and basically talked myself into the job. That’s how it started.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I love that story. And I love talking with you because we were just saying before we started recording—we’ve both been in our roles for six-plus years, which is a little rare as marketing leaders. We’ve also both seen seismic shifts in the industry and how we reposition our companies. What’s cool is that both of us sell to go-to-market leaders, and we’re in this new era we call agentic marketing.
The agentic marketing era is the idea that marketers can hire agents to automate tasks and pipeline generation. That’s how I think about it. How do you define this new category?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
This is actually my first time hearing the term “agentic marketing.” Initially, I thought it meant personalization at scale—using AI to map out the buyer journey, meet them where they are, and provide value along the way. That’s been the promise for years, but we could never really pull it all together.
After hearing you describe it, I think of it as building hybrid teams of humans and AI, working together. We’re tinkering with that right now internally at UserGems.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s a great point. Agentic marketing is about finally delivering on hyper-personalization at scale, but also building hybrid marketing teams that include digital labor. I think it’s interesting that you’ve built a brand around warm outreach at scale. How does that intersect with agentic marketing? You’ve got Gemy, inspired by WALL-E. Tell me about that product and how it fits into this world.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
For us, warm outreach at scale means meeting buyers where they are in their journey using AI to hyper-personalize outreach. In the beginning, we focused on finding signals—reasons to engage with someone at the contact level, not just the account level. We started with past champions: people who already used and loved your product and then joined new companies. That’s the warmest lead possible.
Fast forward six years, and now we process all kinds of signals—people-level (relationships, job changes, connections to your customers), account-level (funding, hiring, expansion), and CRM data that humans can’t realistically manage. Gemy ingests all of this, prioritizes accounts, and can even write entire sequences like a human, weaving signals together.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s so cool. At Qualified we sit in the inbound world—people raising their hands to engage—and we use Piper, our AI SDR agent, to automate that process. You’re in the outbound world, helping customers turn intent signals into pipeline. Do your customers use a combination of Gemy and humans, or do they let Gemy autonomously handle warm outbound at scale?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Both. For low-priority accounts, we use Gemy in autopilot mode. Our team is small, and at one point half the ADR team was out on parental leave. Gemy handled accounts we didn’t have capacity for. For higher-priority accounts, we use a hybrid approach—humans plus Gemy working in tandem. And who knows, maybe one day Gemy and Piper could work together!
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I like that. Every customer has a different comfort level when it comes to adopting agents. We talk about crawl, walk, run—starting small and then expanding. One thing I always emphasize is that an agent should act like your best human would. You have intent and CRM data, but no human can process it all consistently. That’s where automation shines.
I’m curious: beyond outbound, where else are you deploying agents at UserGems?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Right now we’re operationalizing AI across marketing. Individually, people already use AI in their day-to-day, but I want to scale it into workflows that benefit the whole team.
If you drew our org chart, each function lead has human reports but also manages custom GPTs for tasks like market research, battle cards, or content creation. It’s becoming a 50/50 split—half humans, half GPTs.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Wow. If you were building a marketing team from scratch today, it would look very different than six years ago. I think 2024 was the year of tinkering. 2025 is about operationalizing and moving to production.
Marketers have gone through a whirlwind—chatGPT, co-pilots, and now the agentic era. Do you have any hot takes about AI in marketing?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Not sure if it’s a hot take, but I think experimentation is important. AI isn’t as terrifying as people think—it can be your BFF once you start using it.
The challenge is quantifying impact. A lot of AI experiments fizzle out because they’re not tied to measurable business outcomes. On the outbound side, I recommend picking real business campaigns tied to OKRs and then finding AI solutions that make those campaigns successful. That way you can measure the impact clearly, even at the board level.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s so true. Many companies will churn from AI tools because they bought them as shiny objects without proving value. Use cases are key, as is monitoring performance—just like you would with a new hire.
You’ve talked a lot about outbound with Gemy. What about other workflows? What tipped you off that they were ripe for agent adoption?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Outbound was first—low-priority accounts, then ABM. Funny story: in Q1 this year, we abandoned AI scoring for ABM because we thought a new account list would be great. It was a disaster. That quarter’s ABM program completely flopped. We went right back to AI.
Beyond outbound, I asked team leads: what part of your day do you hate the most? Then we trained GPTs to handle those tasks. Battle cards, competitor notes, things like that. Because people hate those tasks, they’re emotionally invested in having the agent succeed.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I love that. It’s a mindset shift. Instead of just grinding through tasks the old way, ask if there’s a better way. AI can get you to 80%, then you refine the rest.
How did your team adapt culturally to this shift?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
The biggest hurdle was pride. Marketers felt like using AI was “cheating.” It took reassurance that it’s just a tool, not a shortcut. Over time, once they saw results, they got comfortable. It took about two to three months for it to feel natural.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That makes sense. As marketers, we take pride in our craft. But if AI can speed up the science side, we can focus more on the art.
Did you face pushback beyond the pride issue?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yes—especially around job security. When we rolled out Gemy, reps worried it would replace them. It took months of overperformance, hiring more reps, and celebrating wins as “Gemy plus the ADR” before they felt secure. Now, the team celebrates Gemy themselves.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s great. It’s about making the agent feel like a teammate. Did you have to sunset anything to make room for agents?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Not really. Our team is small and lean, so agents are just expanding capacity. We haven’t cut freelancers or roles.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s encouraging. I’ve also seen new roles emerge—people who manage agents. For example, we have go-to-market agent operations overseeing Piper. It’s not just replacing roles, it’s creating new ones.
Looking ahead, do you think the specialist era in marketing is over?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
I think entry-level specialist roles will be absorbed by agents. What I look for are “super ICs”—people who can zoom out to see strategy, zoom in to execute, and then zoom back out. It’s rare but incredibly valuable.
AI skills will become default. What will rise in value is creativity, especially in B2B. Everyone will have access to the same AI playbooks, so creativity will be the differentiator.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Exactly. Authenticity and creativity are more important than ever. Is there anything you think B2B orgs will still get wrong about AI a year from now?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yes. They’ll keep chasing silver bullets. That’s why we see so much bad AI outbound and why people say outbound is dead. But in reality, most pipeline still comes from outbound—it’s just not fashionable to say on LinkedIn.
Some orgs will believe they can run to $100M in revenue with just AI and one person. There are exceptions, but for most companies, that won’t work.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Totally. Okay, let’s do a lightning round. First AI tool you tested as a marketer?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Honestly, boring answer: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, really early on.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Same. What’s the most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
So many. Honestly, anything we marketers come up with eventually gets overused. I like “agentify,” but even that will probably be overused soon.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Agreed. One marketer to follow who’s ahead of the curve on AI?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Casey Jenkins from Sendoso. Her team is super innovative and fast-moving. She embodies the human-first mindset, which I think is refreshing in this noisy space.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Love it. Okay, if you could automate one part of your life outside of work, what would it be?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Laundry.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Same! Okay, last question. Why are you excited as a marketing leader in this agentic era?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
It feels once-in-a-lifetime. The magnitude of change is bigger than the dot-com boom. Living through it is exhausting, but also exciting. It’s a level playing field—no one has it figured out yet.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Totally. We’re all writing a new playbook together. Trinity, thank you so much for joining and sharing your insights on how UserGems is embracing agentic marketing. We’ll see you next time.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Thank you.
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Discover how UserGems CMO Trinity Nguyen operationalizes AI to power a lean, high-output marketing team. Learn practical strategies for scaling smarter, combining human creativity with AI agents, and driving measurable impact in the agentic marketing era.
This episode features an interview with Trinity Nguyen, CMO at UserGems, an AI-powered platform that helps go-to-market teams scale outbound with warm outreach at the right time.
Trinity shares how UserGems has operationalized AI across their marketing org to maximize output with a lean team. She dives into how her team combines human creativity with AI agents, the cultural shift required to embrace new technology, and what the future of hybrid marketing teams will look like.
Key Takeaways:
Transcript
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Okay. So Trinity, welcome to the Agentic Marketer. This is our new series where we're talking with the most forward-thinking marketing leaders about how they're embracing this agentic era, which has really taken us all by storm. To get started, do you want to introduce yourself and tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your role at UserGems?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. My name is Trinity Nguyen. I'm the CMO at UserGems. A little bit about what UserGems does: it's an AI platform for go-to-market teams, specifically focusing on outbound. Our team lives, breathes, eats, and thinks about outbound all the time because that's how we build our own go-to-market, but also how we help our customers build theirs.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That's awesome. You've been at UserGems for a long time now and have probably seen a huge shift in the landscape. Tell me about your role and what you do specifically.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
I joined UserGems about six years ago as the first business hire. At the time, it was just the two technical co-founders—one ended up leading sales and CS—and two engineers. I was actually on a voluntary sabbatical from my previous job, backpacking around Europe, trying to do the Euro trip I wished I had done 10 years earlier.
I thought I’d last six months, but after three months I was bored of seeing churches. I reached out to Christian, the CEO of UserGems, because my previous startup had actually been one of their first customers. I already knew the product, and since I was bored, I told him, “Your website won’t get you any customers. Let me build you a new one.” I learned Webflow in less than a week, built it out, and basically talked myself into the job. That’s how it started.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I love that story. And I love talking with you because we were just saying before we started recording—we’ve both been in our roles for six-plus years, which is a little rare as marketing leaders. We’ve also both seen seismic shifts in the industry and how we reposition our companies. What’s cool is that both of us sell to go-to-market leaders, and we’re in this new era we call agentic marketing.
The agentic marketing era is the idea that marketers can hire agents to automate tasks and pipeline generation. That’s how I think about it. How do you define this new category?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
This is actually my first time hearing the term “agentic marketing.” Initially, I thought it meant personalization at scale—using AI to map out the buyer journey, meet them where they are, and provide value along the way. That’s been the promise for years, but we could never really pull it all together.
After hearing you describe it, I think of it as building hybrid teams of humans and AI, working together. We’re tinkering with that right now internally at UserGems.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s a great point. Agentic marketing is about finally delivering on hyper-personalization at scale, but also building hybrid marketing teams that include digital labor. I think it’s interesting that you’ve built a brand around warm outreach at scale. How does that intersect with agentic marketing? You’ve got Gemy, inspired by WALL-E. Tell me about that product and how it fits into this world.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
For us, warm outreach at scale means meeting buyers where they are in their journey using AI to hyper-personalize outreach. In the beginning, we focused on finding signals—reasons to engage with someone at the contact level, not just the account level. We started with past champions: people who already used and loved your product and then joined new companies. That’s the warmest lead possible.
Fast forward six years, and now we process all kinds of signals—people-level (relationships, job changes, connections to your customers), account-level (funding, hiring, expansion), and CRM data that humans can’t realistically manage. Gemy ingests all of this, prioritizes accounts, and can even write entire sequences like a human, weaving signals together.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s so cool. At Qualified we sit in the inbound world—people raising their hands to engage—and we use Piper, our AI SDR agent, to automate that process. You’re in the outbound world, helping customers turn intent signals into pipeline. Do your customers use a combination of Gemy and humans, or do they let Gemy autonomously handle warm outbound at scale?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Both. For low-priority accounts, we use Gemy in autopilot mode. Our team is small, and at one point half the ADR team was out on parental leave. Gemy handled accounts we didn’t have capacity for. For higher-priority accounts, we use a hybrid approach—humans plus Gemy working in tandem. And who knows, maybe one day Gemy and Piper could work together!
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I like that. Every customer has a different comfort level when it comes to adopting agents. We talk about crawl, walk, run—starting small and then expanding. One thing I always emphasize is that an agent should act like your best human would. You have intent and CRM data, but no human can process it all consistently. That’s where automation shines.
I’m curious: beyond outbound, where else are you deploying agents at UserGems?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Right now we’re operationalizing AI across marketing. Individually, people already use AI in their day-to-day, but I want to scale it into workflows that benefit the whole team.
If you drew our org chart, each function lead has human reports but also manages custom GPTs for tasks like market research, battle cards, or content creation. It’s becoming a 50/50 split—half humans, half GPTs.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Wow. If you were building a marketing team from scratch today, it would look very different than six years ago. I think 2024 was the year of tinkering. 2025 is about operationalizing and moving to production.
Marketers have gone through a whirlwind—chatGPT, co-pilots, and now the agentic era. Do you have any hot takes about AI in marketing?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Not sure if it’s a hot take, but I think experimentation is important. AI isn’t as terrifying as people think—it can be your BFF once you start using it.
The challenge is quantifying impact. A lot of AI experiments fizzle out because they’re not tied to measurable business outcomes. On the outbound side, I recommend picking real business campaigns tied to OKRs and then finding AI solutions that make those campaigns successful. That way you can measure the impact clearly, even at the board level.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s so true. Many companies will churn from AI tools because they bought them as shiny objects without proving value. Use cases are key, as is monitoring performance—just like you would with a new hire.
You’ve talked a lot about outbound with Gemy. What about other workflows? What tipped you off that they were ripe for agent adoption?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Outbound was first—low-priority accounts, then ABM. Funny story: in Q1 this year, we abandoned AI scoring for ABM because we thought a new account list would be great. It was a disaster. That quarter’s ABM program completely flopped. We went right back to AI.
Beyond outbound, I asked team leads: what part of your day do you hate the most? Then we trained GPTs to handle those tasks. Battle cards, competitor notes, things like that. Because people hate those tasks, they’re emotionally invested in having the agent succeed.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
I love that. It’s a mindset shift. Instead of just grinding through tasks the old way, ask if there’s a better way. AI can get you to 80%, then you refine the rest.
How did your team adapt culturally to this shift?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
The biggest hurdle was pride. Marketers felt like using AI was “cheating.” It took reassurance that it’s just a tool, not a shortcut. Over time, once they saw results, they got comfortable. It took about two to three months for it to feel natural.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That makes sense. As marketers, we take pride in our craft. But if AI can speed up the science side, we can focus more on the art.
Did you face pushback beyond the pride issue?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yes—especially around job security. When we rolled out Gemy, reps worried it would replace them. It took months of overperformance, hiring more reps, and celebrating wins as “Gemy plus the ADR” before they felt secure. Now, the team celebrates Gemy themselves.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s great. It’s about making the agent feel like a teammate. Did you have to sunset anything to make room for agents?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Not really. Our team is small and lean, so agents are just expanding capacity. We haven’t cut freelancers or roles.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
That’s encouraging. I’ve also seen new roles emerge—people who manage agents. For example, we have go-to-market agent operations overseeing Piper. It’s not just replacing roles, it’s creating new ones.
Looking ahead, do you think the specialist era in marketing is over?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
I think entry-level specialist roles will be absorbed by agents. What I look for are “super ICs”—people who can zoom out to see strategy, zoom in to execute, and then zoom back out. It’s rare but incredibly valuable.
AI skills will become default. What will rise in value is creativity, especially in B2B. Everyone will have access to the same AI playbooks, so creativity will be the differentiator.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Exactly. Authenticity and creativity are more important than ever. Is there anything you think B2B orgs will still get wrong about AI a year from now?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Yes. They’ll keep chasing silver bullets. That’s why we see so much bad AI outbound and why people say outbound is dead. But in reality, most pipeline still comes from outbound—it’s just not fashionable to say on LinkedIn.
Some orgs will believe they can run to $100M in revenue with just AI and one person. There are exceptions, but for most companies, that won’t work.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Totally. Okay, let’s do a lightning round. First AI tool you tested as a marketer?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Honestly, boring answer: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, really early on.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Same. What’s the most overrated buzzword in MarTech right now?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
So many. Honestly, anything we marketers come up with eventually gets overused. I like “agentify,” but even that will probably be overused soon.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Agreed. One marketer to follow who’s ahead of the curve on AI?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Casey Jenkins from Sendoso. Her team is super innovative and fast-moving. She embodies the human-first mindset, which I think is refreshing in this noisy space.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Love it. Okay, if you could automate one part of your life outside of work, what would it be?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Laundry.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Same! Okay, last question. Why are you excited as a marketing leader in this agentic era?
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
It feels once-in-a-lifetime. The magnitude of change is bigger than the dot-com boom. Living through it is exhausting, but also exciting. It’s a level playing field—no one has it figured out yet.
Maura Rivera – Qualified
Totally. We’re all writing a new playbook together. Trinity, thank you so much for joining and sharing your insights on how UserGems is embracing agentic marketing. We’ll see you next time.
Trinity Nguyen – UserGems
Thank you.
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