Ticket Taker vs. Problem Solver: Be Irreplaceable with Darrell Alfonso

This spring commencement speakers across the country have been getting booed off stages for telling graduates that AI is the future when it should be those graduates future. So. Meanwhile, this is all happening. Marketing ops teams are also getting leaner, job listings are down, and people who built careers on technical fluency are starting to wonder if that's still enough.

Darryl Alfonzo has lived both sides of this, and today we find out if the optimism still holds out. Welcome to Making Sense of MarTech podcast I'm Jacqueline Friedman. AI is transforming marketing, and the ops professionals who embrace it will thrive. I too have said that as well, but it sounds great as a general rule of thumb, but it feels differently after you've been laid off or made redundant because quote unquote, of the excuse, which is an excuse of AI.

So today we are very fortunate with our guest, who's had the rare credibility of navigating this moment from the inside as both a practitioner who's championed AI adoption. And as someone who went through his own reckoning with the job market. We're going to pressure test the optimism. Look at the numbers that make people uncomfortable, and figure out what the people telling us not to worry about actually are getting right, and what they're just completely glossing over.

So first and foremost, a little bit about Darrell. He's the marketing operations lead at the Pelham Group. Before that, he led marketing operations at two of the most data intensive, operationally complex environments in tech AWS, aka Amazon Web Services. And indeed, which is a little ironic considering the job market right now.

And he's literally wrote the book on this field, and it's called the MarTech Handbook. And he's also the author of the Marketing Operations Leader newsletter. So you were laid off last year and you've called it a wild roller coaster. What do you think everyone is feeling?

And as a result, this experience has given you something. Most martech commentators that are saying these things don't have it's skin in the game. And also when you're talking about real job market realities. So welcome, Darryl.

I'm so excited to have you. Thank you. I have gone through all of that. Yes, I am still I am still optimistic.

You know, I'm like a forever optimist. I'm happy to talk about that. And yeah. Hot take.

I actually think that a lot of the layoffs maybe some of the more reasons not, but especially at the beginning of the AI movement, were actually due to bad business practices and not really AI. Yeah, yeah, I think it's still to date. Yeah, a lot of the tech companies, especially tech companies over hired in the war for talent, you know, and in the war for talent was hiring engineers and software developers with nothing with it for them to do. They hired them in order for their competitors not to get them.

So you actually had just a bunch of people saying, like hanging around. So now rather than admit that, uh, we didn't really do this correctly, they like, this business model is not really great. Or talent models not really great. They blame it on AI.

Yeah, perfect. It's a good. It's a good scapegoat. It's a good scapegoat.

Yeah, well, let's dive in because. Yes. All right. So rapid fire Amazon or indeed which one had the most absurd meeting culture.

Because I know at least one of them has a crazy one. Amazon with the 20 minutes reading in silence memo meetings for sure. Without a doubt. What bothers me the most is that you have to delete everything after the fact.

Like nothing can stay present and like document it and record it. But I don't understand the philosophy of that specifically. Um, okay. What was your first martech tool?

Constant contact. Ooh, that's a good one. I'm still a fan. I think I like MailChimp more, but it's a good gateway drug.

Both of them. Okay, you've written that most sea level executives don't distinguish AI from basic automation. So give me the most ridiculous AI claim you've heard from a leader. Something that made you question whether you should correct them or just let it be.

I actually don't like the whole AI is going to is going to single handedly make us $1 billion business or something like that, from, especially from the scale ups. I think right now you're already seeing most of the use cases are just internal and efficiency use cases. And most companies. Their problem isn't efficiency.

Oftentimes it's just like lack of direction strategy or, you know, bad leadership practices. That's shocking. I don't like that claim. Agreed.

If you could delete one more tech vendor from our entire industry. Which one and why? I think that, you know, they do a lot of it's like kind of customer bullying where you have to use all of their products in order to get the most benefit out of AI or like Agent Force. And, um, I don't like that business model.

And I think that it's, uh, already led to, like, several really bad decisions. So I'm not a fan of that. You're not alone. And Adam Greco likes to call it sweet fatigue because sweet fatigue.

Good one. Why would one company want an entire suite when you could have Best of Breed that all work together? Mhm. You wrote a job hunting survival guide based on your experience, what is a piece of advice that you wouldn't have deemed necessary two years ago.

And it is today, I think that two years ago and especially four years ago, I think that if you knew your stuff and you were pretty reputable and you had like a good network, I think within the job market you would be just fine. And I'm glad you referenced the job survival guide, the one that we did with Humans of MarTech. And a lot of it is just essentially do anything like be willing to do things that you wouldn't be normally willing to do. Be willing to take a step down.

Be willing to take a pay cut. Be willing to take a fractional job because now's not a good time. And you know if as long as you have a good paycheck and you're able to learn and exercise your skills, especially around AI. That to me is a win today.

You know, until things sort of settle down in the future, if it ever does. Yep. I'm in full agreement, and I never would have said that because my my initial thing is get the job that you want and get the salary you deserve and everything and all that still is true. However, it is not always the reality.

Nope. Not at all. And yeah, I definitely think in the long run you should focus on getting something you like to do and that challenges you and that you enjoy, you know? But right now people need to pay their bills.

So getting back to these boos at commencement ceremonies, they really become their own story that's spreading like wildfire. And the graduates are really pushing back in real time about AI as your future messaging. But most of us who are listening to this are already in the workforce, and so we don't exactly get to boo the speaker in the same guttural, visceral way. And so we start to figure out what's actually true, what's fact, what's fiction, and how we can work within it.

So how do you read this cultural moment? I think it's symbolic of what's happening between technology and business leadership as a whole, because what I think is happening is that business leaders themselves, unless you're like the head of OpenAI or the head of anthropic or whatever, actually don't really know what to do or what to expect out of AI. Only recently has Claude been like the number one choice for, you know, developing vibe, coding or doing most work related things.

A year ago was ChatGPT. So the speed at which things are changing and the leaders are changing makes it really so that we can't anticipate what's going to happen. But I think that leaders are continuing to pretend that they do know AI is our future, and they don't even know what that means. So I think that it's it's very out of touch, just like how these, you know, commencement speeches are not realizing what's really happening is that these students need inspiration for because they're going to be the next generation of, of people going into the workforce.

They don't need some sort of AI talk. It just doesn't make sense to me. Agreed. And also, the students already know AI better than they do at this point.

Yeah. If anything, it's like you old, old man. You old phony. Like we know what it is.

We know how to use it. We're using it on the daily for different things. But also we are not replaceable at the same time. Yeah, yeah.

And I guess most people in this industry are still really trying to meet the gap in leadership on what they understand is AI versus automation. And you think that is wrong? Tell me why. My first thought is we've had automation for a really long time and it's just workflows.

If this then that, then do this then do this. You daisy chain them together. Right now people think that's AI because they didn't have a good understanding of automation in the first place. So now all of a sudden, anything happening automatically is AI, right?

It's it when AI is really like either like a probabilistic, you know, large language model or AI making decisions based on different criteria and learning at the same time. So they are very different things. I think that the challenge becomes when it comes to executing tasks. What we've really needed is, is a smart person running and orchestrating automation for a long time.

I think that personally, I don't think it is worth, you know, dying on this hill because leadership is just going to, you know, has already gone through the gates anyway. You know, a lot of my advice that I've been talking about has just been leverage this time, leverage the fact that everyone wants to use AI, and people like you and me know that this isn't really AI, but if you show it to them and they think it is, you win. I really think that that's the way that I look at it.

So the World Economic Forum says if 41% of employers plan to reduce their headcount because of AI. I would dare to say we're already at 85% in terms of those who are reducing. And meanwhile, anthropic CEO said AI could eliminate half of all entry level white collar jobs within five years. Really inspiring stuff here.

So you came out of a layoff and immediately started writing about how marketing operations professionals can thrive. Are those two things intention or you genuinely not worried about the job security of the marketing office function. I have two minds when it comes to this. The first one is that the mission of my writing has always been to elevate the marketing operations professional, because I've always thought that they were worth a lot more and deserved a lot more credit than they were getting, and that hasn't changed.

I really think that the really great operators out there are problem solvers, and they use technology and people and process and just ingenuity to drive business results, and I'm always going to hold that. And I feel like because there aren't that many people sort of preaching that message, I feel like I'll always be carrying that flag up the hill, even if it's like just me, you know? Because I do feel that if at least one person kind of sees, like, hey, that is the direction that we have to go, then it'll be worth it.

Having worked with a lot of technology and marketing technology professionals that weren't as passionate as I was. It definitely seen how AI can replace some operations folks. There are some people and it's like, it's your choice, right? I'm not saying I'm not judging you.

There's no harm in this. But there are a lot of operations, people that are just ticket takers or project managers, and they just take a request. They build it in whatever and now and they return it back, like glorified customer support, especially if it doesn't require building things. Those people I do think are, um, in danger of being replaced.

The best of us aren't. And I'm hoping that more of us become the best of us. If that doesn't sound cheesy. So no, it doesn't sound cheesy at all.

It's really just everyone. Yes, things are moving at a pace that is hard to keep up with. However, your interest and willingness to learn is what's going to set you apart. As long as you stay curious.

If you're interested. Your job is not going anywhere. Or at least. Yeah.

The concept of your job is not going anywhere. Maybe that specific role is not at the same company, but we need creative thinkers. I think so, and like, you know what? Like, I obviously I didn't want to get laid off, but.

Oh, of course not. Yeah. And especially at that time, like it was really important that we would have health insurance because our baby needed something and it was a rocky time. I wasn't quite happy in the role that I was in.

You know, I didn't feel like I was making the impact that I could have and that over long periods of periods of time kind of gets to you that as I use AI every day, more and more in my job, I can't help but think that there's other operators going like, hey, I could do this. What am I doing? Maybe I should lay myself off. You know what I mean?

And I feel like, if anything, if it'll give people like an opportunity to kind of try something new or go go to something where they can actually make feel like they can make a difference. It's worth it because like looking back and coming out on the other side, I actually wouldn't have changed what happened. I would have like, I don't want to go back there. I'm happy where I am.

Like, I'm happy. Like making a difference. And I get that. That's very I am privileged because it's not like, you know, I couldn't pay my mortgage and they were taking away my house.

Like, I definitely get that. But I will say that I wouldn't be surprised if more people that are going to be getting impacted by the changes find something that they really like to do. Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. Even though it might take longer than one would like, there's always a reason for that door to close, and it just means a new one is opening.

It might take a couple more doors to close before you meet that destination, but isn't that life? It's all a journey. But I wholeheartedly agree. It's like no regrets, even if it really.

at the time, and it was not. Seriously. Seriously. Mentally, you know.

For your own family, everything you can. It's it's a lot. It's a lot of burdens. People are having to take on every profession.

That doesn't have to do with that has to do with knowledge, work or expertise. It's it's literally everything. So, you know, I think that right now it's just a time to like, be resilient and roll with the punches because you're not alone. If you're worried, you're not.

Everyone is. Yeah. I think, um, one of the most beautiful things that's come out of a lot of this pain is a lot of communities are popping up like there's in the, like, mops and life cycle space. The village Randy Levy has created and there's a bunch of different, just safer spaces where folks can help kind of make introductions and help give critiques or even just honestly having anyone else who's going through a similar thing to talk to Because you're not alone and lay off.

Used to be this big flag on someone's resume. And I know when I was at Grammarly and hiring, we had to change the policy where it used to be, like, oh, if they've been laid off, like, let's really double click and make sure everything's okay. But it came to a point where, no, no layoffs are so common now that it's clearly not the person. Seriously, it's you're lucky if you haven't.

Like, it's more likely that you've been laid off like given the numbers. Exactly. And you are only particularly lucky if you got laid off and actually got a severance package versus those you got laid off and nothing else, people get lit. Mhm.

So most teams at least I talk to their inheriting a Franken staff and a huge backlog. They're most certainly not getting a blank slate a tabula rasa. You know the ideal. Create what you want.

Choose your own adventure. So what does strategy first mean when you're still mid mess when you join a company? I like the idea of two concepts I think will really help in this situation. One is the working backwards concept where you where we figure out what are you actually trying to accomplish.

And like what what does success look like, like in six months? Do you have a efficient lead management process? Do you have data that marketers can trust, build audiences and activate on? You know, do do you have a good sales handoff?

Like what does what does it look like 3 or 6 months down the road and then work backwards to build the technology and the processes that support that? Now the other thing that's really going to help is just this idea of really quick wins and things that you can work together on to help improve things. One of the things that people don't like realize is that when you're creating your work together with people, if you like, want to fix an entire marketing automation platform that is complete trash, that can take a really long time, especially at a big company.

It could take months and months and months and that sort of slowness. The drag can get become incredibly frustrating. And you also can start to blame people like, oh, it's the it's it, it's legal. It's this.

You just started getting into these fights. I think that we overlook how important it is to establish a good working relationship of people that feel like when they work together, they win. So even if some things are, like not as impactful, like maybe setting up a new JIRA intake process or, you know, setting up a new cadence of like, this is the roadmap, this is how we're going to accomplish things because things get accomplished together. You realize, oh, we're on the same team, we can do this.

But when people work together, they go really fast. And like the opposite is true. If they don't like it's it really sucks, you know, and I've I've been in both I've been in more places that sucked than it moving really quickly. Yeah.

There's nothing quite like when you have a dream team where you have full trust and you all see how this maybe monotonous task ladders into the bigger picture and realize what the level of impact it will become as a result. I think some of my favorite days working were literally like 4 to 5 hour just working sessions where like, all right, this is monotonous. Let's just chit chat and you take this half, I take that half and let's try to get it done as quickly as possible. Yeah I agree.

All right. I was a little nerdy and grabbed some lines from your newsletter. So you always push for accurate, clean, real time data for years and you continue to hit walls. And so now you're saying that the frame that finally opens those doors is AI needs good data to function, which makes total sense.

And that works because executives care about AI. It means you get budget. But is that slightly cynical because you're using their confusion to get budget for work that should have been funded regardless. Yeah, I guess I guess it's kind of cynical.

There's kind of a means to the end, at the end of the day, like if you kind of like cut some corners, I think it's fine. I think you could take it all the way through to, to the other side, where you can actually be really cynical about a lot of things that happen in business, you know, all the way from what I said before about fake AI goals and fake AI futuristic planning, to all the things that Wall Street is actually based off of, you know, it's all based on potential and probability and guessing.

It's like legal poker and people cheat. So like, I think you could take that cynicism and go take it much farther than getting buy in for data improvement. But one thing I will say is it's not wrong. You really do need good data.

And I think that what's actually happening is that executives, because they feel like they're going to be left behind, are willing to do and really like, you know, because it hurts to create new budget and it hurts to like go to the CFO and ask for more money. But they're willing to take that pain because they want this thing so badly. And now, finally, we have it. And you know, I am not ashamed of doing that.

And also, it's not a lie. So I agree, it's one of the sequential steps in order to achieve the goal. You're making bets on actual data. Yeah.

Like the way that I phrase it is, are you going to let your AI SDRs loose on like, wrong people's information? You know, like, there's so many potential problems that could happen if you have you're using AI and bad data. There's so many. It's just so agreed.

Okay. So we've been talking about the data piece. But also now if we think about the execution layer, if AI is absorbing that just general routine, what does the role of someone who's executing actually look like in three years? So there's a couple of different ways that I think this could go.

On one hand, you have the elevation to more strategic and more technology orchestration type roles. You know, where. And this is kind of like in Mira's career progression. You know, if you build emails like for real living or build websites for a living, if automatically you have a tool that does that for you.

Now, you don't have to do that anymore. You start to do things like connect email to the revenue channel or connect other channels together, connect it all to the website. So the sort of like each level of abstraction that you go up, you're actually like adding more value to the business. So I think it could go in that direction for some people.

For some folks, like the people I mentioned earlier that actually enjoy that type of work, that ticket taking, they I think will be probably let go or moved or their role will be repurposed into something else. Unfortunately, we're seeing that already in a ton of different industries. All share at one of the companies that I worked at. They let go of the entire marketing team not because of AI, but because the future, which was like more of an enterprise go to market focused type future.

The current marketing team didn't have the skill set to do it right, so they had to repurpose those roles. Unfortunately, like if you asked me, hey Daryl, our future is like making commercials for the Super Bowl. You know, I'd be like, I'm not the guy, you know what I mean? I don't think I could do that kind of factual.

And then I think, lastly, there's this vision that I first heard about from Paul Wilson, which is the future of marketing operations, is just a prompt, and I think that we are starting to see that with all the MSPs and how everybody is connecting everything to cloud code, so they actually don't have to go into other platforms and they just do everything out of Claude. So we're getting closer and closer to that direction. But I will tell you, you have to know what to ask cloud first, and it can give you some direction.

But the number of times that I take a look at something that AI is outputted and just from like experience and being able to know what's important and what's not and what's a waste of time and what's not, I really think like, oh, if you try to replace me with Claude, like, good luck, you're going to be so rude. Oh, that is my favorite response. Just good luck. I mean, that's one of the I think it's cathartic for folks, but particularly in our roles, we typically have keys to the kingdom not because we want them, but because we have to have them from an administration standpoint, and there's nothing better than when you are laid off or the whole team is laid off and everything breaks because everything was connected via you sometimes are the integration user or the admin.

And so all of a sudden they're like, oh no, everything's not working. And so there's at least some solace that like the dumpster fire is happening without you. Seriously, I'm one of those people that looks for stuff to do, you know, as I'm sure like you do too. It's just like, hey.

Yeah, how how can we, like, make things better? Like, that's a that's a very operations person, in my opinion. You're just trying to make things better. And, you know, even when I got back from parental leave and when I was, I took a really good amount of time for parental leave because indeed, it is awesome that way.

I had set up the team and I had like multiple team members. I had set up the team to where they could operate without me for several months, and when I came back, they did a good job and I started. Yeah, I started to think like, what am I gonna do? You know, crap.

And I found stuff to do. But there are people that that were in the same position that didn't look. And I think that we were primarily a remote first culture, but if we were all on site, it would be the equivalent of people just kind of coming in, walking the halls and going like online shopping at their desks. And that is not just indeed, oh, of course, that bloat exists in so many everywhere.

It's primarily large, established and enterprise companies because things are easier to hide through not just silos, but existing processes that they've outgrown or no longer apply. But they can kind of just make it happen. I mean, almost every financial company, particularly banks that I know of, takes like anywhere from 3 to 6 months to send one email. It just hurts my brain.

It's like you're you have to pencil push. I don't doubt it. Yeah, my brain literally doesn't work like that. It doesn't work.

Yeah. I don't get it, I cannot compute, but things I can compute. There's a data point and I want you to sit with it. So.

MIT found that AI is only cheaper than humans and 23% of tasks. That means a quarter of tasks only. And for example, this was recently announced that Uber's CTO blew through the entire company's AI budget for 2026 in 4 months. And that was just on token costs.

And also, Nvidia's VP of Applied Deep Learning says compute now costs his team more than the people using it. So the pitch has been working. It was relentless about cost savings, but the reality is actually it's ballooning budgets instead. So is this potentially an economic case for AI replacement to maybe be built on math instead?

Or maybe the humans are cheaper? Ultimately, I wasn't aware that it was more. Some teams are spending more money on compute than like people's salaries. And I think that that's crazy.

I do think that today that might be true. I don't think that will be true tomorrow or like down the line. And I say that because technology typically becomes more efficient and like in the case of like hardware, like smaller, if you think about the first computers, they took up entire rooms and you're just like, how is this worth, like running a calculator? Like, I don't think so.

And the USB stick of. Yeah. And I do think that from a technology standpoint, the electricity and compute costs are going to go down. And probably with AI the needs will probably go down to like we're going to figure it out.

But that's just me being an optimist. I do think that the danger lies in trying to automate everyone's job with AI. And just like buying all the tokens in the world that, you know, the token cost would be crazy. So I do think that that's a very real concern now.

And it's just yet another proof point of like, don't lay off all your ops people just yet. Like, I don't think you have a map to to get to the where you want to go. So that's what I think. So it's safe to say you're not a fan of a token leaderboard.

Yeah, it's the quality over quantity conversation and it's so rudimentary. Why would you want a quantity of tokens used per person, per day, per month? You name it over outcomes in actual quantity. That is the whole point.

AI should augment what we do so that we're empowered to and from this is, you know, little philosophical. But like from a a workers perspective, productivity is the only thing a company cares about. So why wouldn't you want to make your workers more productive? But they need to know when and when aren't use cases to do that.

Ultimately, they'll cost you more because of that token cost. That said, you're right the cost of credits and tokens will go down just like any other technology. But you know, I'm I'll go ahead and say it. There's some data centers going on fire.

So like, maybe not, I don't know, maybe not. There's a bunny under fire and, uh, under question. Yeah, there's more coming. And I think that, like, when these sort of like constraint or like scarcity of resources problem comes up, I think that myself included, we forget about discovery and innovation.

And they actually discovered that Nvidia like for some reason has these graphics chips that really support AI really well. And then like, what are we going to discover next? I really do think that especially with Nvidia's growth and just success, we're going to see people that are going to try to figure out another way to do it. Never discount human ingenuity, that's for damn sure.

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See what high touch can do for you at high touch. And now back to the hot seat. From your perspective, at what point does augmentation just mean we'll need fewer of you? Research is showing that 79% of employed women are working in jobs that are a high risk of automation, compared to 58% of men.

And this is, of course, as in high income countries, particularly the reason why Asus is marketing ops skews heavily female, and I know some of the best operators are women. And so I guess why is this not a topic that keeps being discussed out in the open, like whether it's at industry conferences? I know at least amongst my peers, we're talking about it. But I'm curious from your perspective, why is this not making it onto the conference room agendas?

I think that's really interesting. I didn't know that it's skewed female. Why is this not being discussed? Executives are there's a much lower probability that executive will be female or in technical roles.

And it wouldn't be a female that you can like go back to, you know, number one, like sexism. And then also just the whole entire like educational and like cultural thing of like women being directed into certain roles and men being directed to certain roles because of either like they people think women are two are more emotional at versus logical, which, you know, isn't true. So I think that that's definitely a larger question. I will say I do have some experience with diversity issues, um, especially within within marketing.

And I feel like there's some parallels. So for example, in most of the marketing teams and marketing ops teams that I've been in, everyone's been white. I don't think that that was a coincidence. I think that marketing in general, I think tends to lend itself to more classical like type stereotypes, is the first issue.

I also think that if you don't intentionally think about it, you usually just look and hire people that kind of look like you, and you try to you get along with people that look like you. And I think that all of us, like me included, need to try to push ourselves to work with, collaborate with, and hire people that are very different, especially thought differences. And, you know, you and I were talking about this earlier, but like, it's so great to work with my co-host that humans of martech, right.

Because Phil, I, I feel like is very opposite of me. Right. Very organized. Wants to make sure that there's like a theme for each podcast, whereas I'm more of like shoot from the hip.

I'm going to come up with this crazy question on the spot just from like looking at the person's face, you know, I'm going to know what to say. Um, and honestly, there are times to both of those sort of like, skills or strengths are useful. There are like different times, you know, so like my shoot from the hip makes me a really good moderator. If you're hosting a, you know, podcast that reaches a lot of people, I think the quality should be higher.

You know, I think there should be more planning and I think more people should follow suit. We're trying here every other podcast. I, I beg you to do that. No, seriously.

My rants done. I think it's just it's important to like consider this type of like diversity in general when we're like working with people and choosing who to work with. It makes me think of the structural choices and how we can go about fixing it. And for me, top of mind is trying to take the bias as much as possible out of the hiring process and building in scorecards frameworks where you ask the same questions, but you ask questions so that you can see how the person thinks, see how they get to a certain conclusion, and also as a result, hopefully your bias is sorted because you've already defined what a good answer looks like.

Do they hit these points? If they exceeded that, that's a whole, you know, a different stratosphere versus okay, they responded, but it wasn't. Didn't even discuss. I'm like, okay, this may be a two out of five as opposed to a five out of five response.

And so there can be some more objectivity to, without a doubt, a very subjective process. Speaking of people needing a job, I want to talk back to the personal stakes. So we've talked about your optimism and where it's been meeting a lived experience and what that reckoning actually is producing. And you've stated that AI won't replace marketing ops because most marketing and go to market problems are fundamentally people problems.

I agree, and that AI falls in this gray area of quote unquote business. But you also just went through a layoff while writing and teaching this. So like what did you experience with regards to this thesis? Did it hold up?

Did you find it to be true? I'm curious to learn more. One of the things that I kind of learned throughout the process is how little control you actually have on some of these larger things, and I will tell you, and I might get in trouble for saying this, but that indeed the company really grew and rose and fell with the economy, you know, because indeed makes money when you have people posting jobs and people applying to jobs. And when the market goes up, that goes up too.

When it goes down, it goes down too. So regardless of so many GTM improvements that you do, you you couldn't like help that shift. I worked at Amazon too, and that was very much the case. Like so much depended on Black Friday or seasonality is seasonality everything.

It was so it was so big deal. So that personally helped me with the layoff. Because honestly, even if I was the best marketing observations person in the world, times ten like it still would have happened. So I was reflecting on that part of my journey, and I think that it was actually a nice it was a nice realization.

What I continue to double down on is that there will always be a need for smart operators to figure out how to solve problems. I just think the nature of the problem is going to change, you know? And whereas we used to spend so much time being in HTML and CSS or like duplicating databases. Like I've spent so long doing that.

I now will be able to do something completely different. And now the things are like, how do we get everything connected to cloud code? How do we enable marketers? We're all using, you know, AI.

And the problem now is how do we make sure they don't smack our customers in the face with 100 emails that they can create in two minutes? You know what I mean? So the job has now changed, but the goal is still I have a really like, optimistic and like aspirational view of marketing in general. And and for me, I think marketing is there to create just an amazing customer experience, which is what it used to be like from the beginning.

That's why there's like when they talk about like packaging and pricing and placement, like marketing is so much more than just promotion. And if marketing is so much more than just promotion and like the sort of like governor of the experience then. Operations is so important because we're the ones that actually get it done and actually make things happen. I'm still very hopeful for the smart operators out there that are still being curious and still working hard.

I agree, and I think a great metaphor for those who are curious, if you think about aviation, pilots are still doing the same job they were doing 100 years ago, but they're not having to do every single thing. There is a little bit more of monitoring, there's more radar. There's I don't know, I'm not a pilot, but you can be a little bit less, you know, pedal to the metal at all times paying attention. Then one used to be in terms of at least, you know, simple commercial flights.

And that's a testament. Like you need to have a human. We're not in the Waymo stage of airplanes, but at least right now, those pilots are so high in demand because they know how to fix it when things go wrong. And in my opinion, that's where the operators who know what they're doing will succeed the most.

Because you don't go to a doctor hoping just for a great outcome. You go to the doctor who knows how to fix it if something goes wrong because things go wrong. And it's how the cleanup, how you're taking care of afterwards is what really differentiates good from great, in my opinion. But good operations is incredibly creative.

Like you have a finite set of resources and oftentimes a really lean team to accomplish things that typically require like sometimes millions of dollars to do, like big migrations or like understanding the data and like we figure it out. And I think that that whereas you can do those things faster with AI, like curiosity and creativity, isn't AI's Bhag like unless you tell it to you need that like driver to do it. I wholeheartedly agree, It's why I love our industry so much because for me, it's right brain and left brain.

And just to be creative with our solutions and also very analytical and direct with how we're going about it. And so 100%, that's why it fulfills me. Okay. I want to push you on something that you've also referred to, or we're just going to keep drilling you on the hot seat.

So you've argued that marketing ops should evolve into the new COO of marketing, and that operational leadership is what future proofs the role. So here's what I keep thinking about. So when tactical skills get automated, every ops professional's instinct is to claim the strategic high ground. What happens when the C-suite realizes they can get AI generated strategic recommendations without the operational complexity that comes with them?

I want to key in on the chief operating officer role first, and to me, that person and you kind of think of like Sheryl Sandberg, like of Facebook back in the day. What does that person do? And it's almost like their goal is to bring the CEO's mission to life. You know, the CEOs want to set the vision with the board, hire the leaders, and from a business, from a running the business standpoint, COO, whatever comes up, they have to do.

And for me, I've always been thinking that the marketing operations leader should step into that role. And right now it's a nice blend of overseeing the technology, but also being a little bit of like a chief of staff and like understanding what the marketing leader needs. And, you know, even at my work sometimes. Right, I'll see things that I know is stopping the entire team, like the fact that we're not using Monday correctly.

We're like, everybody's using it differently. There's no like, alerting system. People are still sending messages to their back and forth over email. And when you look at that and you go like, this is incredibly inefficient.

We're not using a project management tool. How we should be. And that typically is not. Doesn't fall into the realm of like a martech operator, but you can see how much it's going to help.

And you see that the CMO is not going to do it, you know. So I think that it's like operators should be called to step out of their boundaries and step out of their, you know, safe zones and start to get into things where, hey, if we solve this problem, which increasingly become people stuff, if we solve this problem, things will move faster. And then I think your point on execution, I still don't think that we're at that stage. I was on this webinar with Zapier.

They're leading in implementing AI throughout GTM, and when you look at it, most of the use cases were internal internal efficiency use cases. I think that we're at the stage where we're still just making things more efficient and not taking over the full execution, right. So you still have salespeople talking face to face with customers, and they still need to close the deal. They still need to sign the contract.

Even with plug, like, there's still this human element of like, AI can't continually learn and improve the website and the platform without the guidance of. So. So I think that people are thinking that execution is all just like knowledge work and PowerPoint making and automating emails where the actual revenue drivers of the business aren't that. I still do think it's important for operators to step into the CEO role, and I think that when people refer to execution, I think it's internal.

I think it's just like making admin work much faster, which is good, but it's not what's going to move the needle for the business long term. I wholeheartedly agree, I'm a big fan of the concept of separation of church and state, particularly operations from marketing. But I see Mops, rep ops, sales ops, any ops under operations, And then essentially their client is the marketers in the marketing team and their use cases and their needs. Because yes, we kind of have to reach across different aisles that are not our domain.

To your point, project management can be also customer support. Like, oh, did you realize we could get your data here so that actually your sales rep knows more about this and it's really just thinking outside of the box and being willing doesn't make it easy, especially if you're navigating at a large company. It's really hard to do that, and people can be protective and need to be a little bit more open minded. But to your point, I agree.

I think the best CMOs these days were operators of some sort within an operational lens, and we need more of them because without it, CMO has the hardest job. It's the most likely to get cut. It's the most, Most undervalued, which is mind boggling to me, but I think there is more rigor that can come into play if there's someone who knows how to speak to the business value in addition to what marketing value comes across. Yep, absolutely.

All right. This might be the hardest question. I feel like everyone is always talking about how we are living in this golden age of marketing operations, and we keep collectively telling ourselves a story that I don't feel like fully matches the data. Do you think we're in a golden age, or do you think we're on the precipice of something more?

I think that I'd love to. To think that I think that if marketing operations, which I was saying, like a couple of years ago, could lead AI when it comes to GTM, then I think it would be the golden age. I don't think that that's happening. I think that most teams are being force fed to use AI by leaders that feel like they're going to be missing out if they don't do that.

Marketers honestly that are just trying random stuff. I saw this joke the other day where it's just like, oh, I spent the entire weekend clod coding this, this app so that now people can schedule a meeting with me. And I spent, like, wasted so much time doing that where, like, you could have just used candy. There's a bunch of that happening.

It's definitely not the golden age for marketing ops, because a lot of our jobs are is being taken by AI, and it's been so interesting to have a front seat. I literally downloaded my entire I downloaded my entire US database and I put it into into copilot, and I had it do full on consulting data recommendations. And I kid you not, the recommendations were better than I could have done. Like it pulled out insights faster and better than I could have.

And I think that that's scary. That is scary. I've had Claude write some of my posts and I'm just like, Holy crap. This is better than what I could have done.

But it doesn't like change the fact that, like, I won't stop making content. That's like the thought comes from me. It's just that things are things are changing so quickly. I think that instead of a golden age right now is either a tipping point and I'm not afraid for myself or for you or for, you know, my colleagues out there that I that are so smart and always curious and always trying to make things better.

I'm not worried, but I am worried for a good number of, of marketing operators that that again like the ticket taking like the button pushing they. Yeah, we hate being called that. But there are some people that do that and that's what I'm afraid of. I agree, and to your point, I don't think we're in a golden age.

I think actually we're in an enlightenment era where more is being revealed than anything before. For your example, like you're able to better analyze your entire audience, you're able to enhance what you already were doing. But we're learning so much more, and it's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out in the end. But I think regardless.

Like we started off with, you know, students are booing about AI and they're not wrong. That's also, I think, a really important heavy tension of like, yeah, they're not wrong. It's also not great. It's both it's good and bad.

And it's we have to figure out where and when to use it. It's just it's like any other tool. Where is it actually helpful and optimizing what we're doing and where is it actually giving us tech debt quite literally a financial debt. Totally.

It's like a first principles thing. And I think that like it always goes back to what you said, where if you're shooting bullets into the dark, not knowing where your target is shooting so much faster is not really gonna help. I do think that it's that quality over quantity. What might be interesting is now that a lot of the technical aspects and the execution aspects will be sort of automated and taken over, the case can be made that now the most strategic and the most creative are going to win.

And maybe that's where we'll be at I don't know. Yeah I think so too. What do you know now after all of your not just work experience, but particularly the layoff experience and seeing both sides of it. What do you wish someone had told you before the layoff happened so that you could better approach it?

It's not personal. Uh, there's like bigger factors happening. Like if you believe in destiny and everything happens for a reason, this is part of it. So I think telling myself that there's going to be a lot of personal growth that you would not want to go back on, I think is so important.

And also, I already knew this when I, when I got laid off. But you have to reach out for help, not just for a job referral, but for yourself. And there was this Harvard study done of, you know, students that were going through Harvard, and they were they hit the, you know, the first year, which was one of the most difficult. And it showed that when finals came, the people that tended to just, like, hide away in the library, shut themselves and isolate them.

Not only do they have a tougher time, they didn't perform as well than the people that form study groups that would talk, that would talk things out. It's very counterintuitive to when you're going through something. You actually have to reach out more, you know, because you don't feel like it. You might feel embarrassed or ashamed, but it actually helps you get through it faster and it makes you, like, really understand it more so that that would be my like advice is to like, lean on your network not just for jobs, but for support because they'll help you.

They'll help you get there. Yeah I agree. And if I were to add a piece of advice on top of that, if you think of your network as only a referral maker, you're thinking about it way, way, way wrong. Because I've seen folks say like, my network is not working, it doesn't do this.

And it's like, well, is it actually a network or is it just professional connections you've made on LinkedIn? I don't know. So to your point, yes, community is is of the utmost importance. Everything from Mike Rizzo's community to email geeks, but wholeheartedly agree.

Okay, Daryl, this has been exactly the kind of conversation that's honest. And I think just more of what our industry is needing to hear from and not the, like, very shiny, sugarcoated version, but the one that you know, folks are having in the hallway after the meeting, we're like, oh God, that didn't go very well, did it? And your consistent work helping practitioners run their teams like businesses helped reduce friction and grow their careers. And it's really landing differently, I think when it comes from someone who has had to apply it to their very own situation.

It's not just, you know, preaching to the choir, it's you're practicing what you're preaching. And so before I let you go, I've got to ask, who is someone we should have on the podcast? My friend Maya James is a great revenue marketing leader. My friend Rosemary just got a job leading marketing operations at ServiceNow.

Awesome person, great conversation. And I'm I'm excited to be part of the podcast next chapter. I'm excited to what you're going to do with it. And yeah great conversation.

Thank you. All right. Last but not least. Where can folks find you and follow along on LinkedIn.

And my Substack is called the Marketing Operations Leader. Awesome. All right, Darryl, thank you so much. We I'm so appreciative.

And I feel like it's been a long time coming to finally have this conversation. Totally. So thank you so much. Thanks, Jacqueline.

I thank you so much to Darryl for coming on the podcast. And there's a couple takeaways I want everyone to recognize from that conversation. Most of the layoffs that have happened over the past number of years are blamed on AI, and it's actually just a cover for really bad business strategy and talent strategy. They've been over hiring in the war for talent so that competitors can't take those folks.

And as a result, there's a lot of people with nothing to do. Which that just means that the layoffs are getting blamed on AI, when in actuality it's not that. And so it means if your job hunting right now, you're not competing against a machine, you're competing in a market shaped by years of really bad business decisions, and they're finally catching up. So it's not personal.

Please don't take it that way, even though it will, without a doubt personally impact you also. There are two tiers of marketing ops professionals right now. We've got the ticket takers who fulfill requests, and problem solvers who use technology, people and process to drive outcomes. Which means the job that you need to be doing today is making sure everyone knows which one of those two you are.

And also, if you're looking for tips and tricks on how to maybe uplevel yourself from being just a ticket taker. Darryl's newsletter and a great place to start. Lastly, MIT found AI is only economically viable in a quarter of tasks, and with Uber's CTO burning through an entire 2026 AI budget in four months, it means that the replacement narrative your leadership keeps selling you is built on math that is not going to hold up to scale until we hit some sort of economies of scale.

And so to that end, thank you so much for tuning in to the making sense of martech. See you next time. And a special thank you to Christine Murtaugh, who edited this episode. And an extra special thank you to Jenna Carter for believing this passion project meets business.

Stay curious.