Allan Malcolm: The Future is Marketing Generalists, not Specialists

I'm Sarah Fatz and I lead community and awareness at Progress and this is 10 Minute MarTech. There's a real temptation right now to let AI become your copywriter. And I think that if you're not really intentional there, you're going to get a bunch of LLM garbage. So it just takes time to really get your internal models working with your voice first. Even weeks of outputs are probably not something you would want to put in front of your customer. That's Alan Malcolm, CMO of Voxel AI. Let's get started. Well, it's been said that AI is sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but it's actually happening for a real reason. A lot of organizations right now I know, are wanting to be AI Forward. You seem to have truly been able to manage that from a marketing function perspective. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to you to have an AI Forward marketing team and some of the things that you guys are working on and doing? Having an AI Forward marketing team involves really intentional thought upfront, not just in terms of what you want to achieve with it, but how you want to architect it. Good inputs equal good outputs. Bad inputs equal bad outputs. So it starts with, you know, is your existing go to market stack optimized to even consider agentic workflows? Is your data in a situation where you can capitalize on that and make meaningful moments that matter for your customers? If you don't have that, you need to start there first. Beyond that, it goes far beyond just trivial prompting and asking your favorite LLM for the right outcome. It really becomes about, here are the intentional capabilities we want to augment with AI, and here's the skills we need to train the models on our voice, our tone, our emotion, to make sure that that really represents us just as it would another person on the team. And I think that's the. The last thing I would just emphasize. AI does not replace your team. It's another person on the team. Yeah, that's a great, a great point. Obviously, that's a huge topic of conversation right now and probably will continue to be throughout the year. But along those lines, how do you train? You say AI Forward. How do you train your marketing folks, your team, on those skills? What paths did you guys take? And it's probably a little different since Voxel is an AI Forward company itself, but would love to share some of those learnings with our audience. Yeah. So I think first of all, we try to bring in people that are more generalist than traditional specialists. I think the Future of our profession in marketing is we all have to have generalist mindsets. You might have your areas of expertise, that could be demand gen, that could be brand, it could be content, but you have to be aware of the other functions and how they interoperate. So that's the first point. I think the future of just being a specialist in marketing is probably not the future of our profession. So start there. I think from there it starts with experimentation. Let's be really frank. Our world has been disruptive massively in the last six months. So it's not like there's people running around that are, so to speak, complete experts in this field. There are some, but for the most part, this is a period of experimentation. So you have to create this culture and philosophy that we'll experiment, we'll evaluate, we'll fail fast, and then based on those learnings, we'll continue to improve. So it's a real evolutionary time in the profession. Yeah. Are there any experiments? You know, we do fail Fridays here where we talk about experiments that didn't work and those are good for both, a laugh, but also a lot of learning. And then we also celebrate the experiments that are working. Do you have examples of either of those? Either AI fails or AI wins that you could share or happy to share with us? Yeah, I'll talk about an AI fail. I think. I think there's a real temptation right now to let AI become your copywriter. And I think that if you're not really intentional there, you're gonna get a bunch of LLM garbage. It won't sound like a person, it'll be very robotic, it won't emote with your audience, which I think is incredibly important. So it just takes time to really get your internal models working with your voice. So, like the first outputs, the first even weeks of outputs are probably not something you would want to put in front of your customer. That's a fail. I think where AI is incredibly strong, I'll give two examples where it's really strong out of the gates. Competitive intelligence. You can build a competitive agent very quickly that can get you very far down the road of understanding your competitors, positioning their icp, how they're targeting. You can learn a lot and AI really fits that void well. And then I think also just on that whole topic of icp, it can really help you uncover nuggets either in your existing ICP or adjacent markets or industries that you didn't really consider as part of your icp. Those are really strong, quick win areas for AI. Yeah, I Think that's great. Yeah, the content is an interesting one to me, quite honestly. I had a philosophical conversation with a colleague recently just about that. And the question was, hey, can't really AI just, and it's a conversation not new, but can it just replace all of the content that we're creating? And at the end of the day, one of the examples I gave is that I saw an email nurture chain that had been created initially by AI and then a human entered the loop. But the human actually didn't have the context that they needed. And so it actually, they didn't have the context for the prompting and then didn't have the context when they were creating the content. So it actually became a lot less relevant. And so I think that you still, you cannot today replace subject matter expertise. And I'm not talking about things functional expertise, but your functional area or the area that your organization focuses on. You can't replace that thought leadership right now with an unique thought with AI. And so it's really interesting. There are ways you can leverage it absolutely. For content ideation and structure and all sorts of other things. But you still have to be, at least in my opinion, you still have to have that point of view. Right. You have to be able to say as an organization, you know, we're putting a stake in a ground, in the ground on this topic, or we believe X for these reasons and AI only knows what's already out there. Yeah, I think actually you described that scenario you described. I think that the process was wrongly architected. I think it starts with a human in the loop. You don't bring in a human after the fact. I think, you know, when you're really building the right skill sets for the LLMs to, to pick up, they can be highly productive. But the skill sets are not agent generated, they're generated with people. But I also think this is the opportunity for the profession. We're always been clamoring for years about our strategic seat at the table. This is where the marketer can come in and really influence strategy, really be, you know, have their fingerprint, if you, if you will, on the business. Because you're going to be that thought leader that's going to train models on your tone, train models on your positioning, really understand that connection with the customer. A robot's not going to do that. Exactly. It's super important that you embrace that and you have humans in the loop. But I think right from the beginning of the process or workflow, you're designing. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, definitely, absolutely. Agree. You've talked a little bit already about the skill set that you think that modern marketers should have. Talking about the idea and concept that we should be more generalists. Right. Maybe full stack marketers if we're going to take from the engineering world. If I'm new to the industry, if I am a recent college graduate, there are obviously a lot of conversations right now about that and what opportunities are for them, where would you recommend they start and what would you say is going to help them stand out from other applicants in the martech space or marketing space? Objectives, sure. So this is going to sound nerdy and technical, but I think you really need to understand system level design and system level thinking. If you can't zoom out and see the big picture and understand what you're trying to solve, you know, at the 5,000 foot view, you're going to fail. I also think the ability to critical think is incredibly important for people entering the profession. I get asked this. I mentor a lot of people both mid career and early career. Understanding basic mathematics and critical thinking is your core skill. Because if you don't understand how simple logic statements get architected, you're going to have a hard time working alongside an agent. Right. I've joked on this show and in person with friends, I was an English major, communication major and a philosophy minor and I used to joke that that just meant unemployable. But I really. The skill set, I had no idea way back then that that skillset would translate so well to the world today. I mean, I think it was, you know, Karpathy who had said the next programming language is English. It's funny, one of the leading LLM providers in their standard training will tell you to speak to it like it's a person. Yes. If you're not an effective communicator, you're not going to get effective output. Right. 100% agree with that. Yeah. We've actually been talking quite a bit about prompting and teaching prompting skills in a way that, you know, it's probably no different than when, you know, Google first came out and you had to learn to search differently. But then that kind of came got down to you could just do keywords and find keyword searches. But now you really, if you're curious and have a spirit of exploration and experimentation, you will play with those words and find, find the right way to get the answers that you need. You know, it's funny, one of my previous employers, we set up a whole internal initiative around Speak like a person. Yes. I love that important. It's becoming really, really more relevant. Yes. Yeah, that's great. Well, I could talk to you all day but we, we are a 10 minute show so I think we can wrap up with what is your more tech hot take today? My biggest hot take and is probably controversial. Traditional Martech is being wildly disrupted right now. I can't say I know what the future looks like but it's becoming the, the all the various and you've probably seen the slides that have like, you know, the 200 martech logos on it. That universe of having a super broad complex Martech stack is over. I think simplicity is going to win. Integration is key and I think really understanding what your needs are versus that next new shiny ball are going to be super important going forward. That's great. Love it. Alan, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed our conversation today. Thanks so much Sarah listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I'm Sarah Fats and this is 10 Minute MarTech.