As 2025 comes to a close, host Sara Faatz looks back at the year’s most thought-provoking conversations on AI, creativity, and the evolving role of the modern marketer.
2025 was the year AI stopped being a headline and became a reality in every marketer’s workflow. In this special year-end edition of 10 Minute Martech, we revisit the most impactful insights from guests across the season—operators, CMOs, analysts, and innovators who helped define what human-centered marketing looks like in an AI-first world.
You’ll Learn:
You’ll hear from:
Mariam Tariq, SVP, Marketing & Digital Strategy, Progress [00:44]
Scott Brinker, Martech Analyst & Advisor, chiefmartec [01:52]
Karen Steele, Founder, Steele-Alloy [03:20]
Jennifer Ortiz, EVP & CMO, Progress [04:32]
Juan Mendoza, CEO, The MarTech Weekly [05:34]
Tom Wentworth, CMO, Incident.io [06:54]
Elizabeth Edwards, Founder & CEO, Volume Public Relations [07:58]
Frans Riemersma, Founder, MartechTribe [08:47]
Mallory Russell, Award-Winning Content Marketing Strategist [09:40]
Hazem El Zayat, Chief Experience Officer, Ogilvy One [10:13]
Amanda Cole, CMO, Bloomreach [11:08]
Links & Resources:
Connect with Sara: linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Learn more about Progress: www.progress.com
Timestamps:
00:40 – The Role of Humans in the AI Era
04:25 – Practical AI Tools in 2025
05:40 – Martech Hot Takes
0:00:00.2 Sara Faatz: I'm Sarah Faatz and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute Martech. As 2025 comes to a close, there's really only one story that dominated every conversation this season. You guessed it, AI. So for our final episode of the year, we're taking a look back at some of the best insights from guests across the season. Leaders who've helped define what human centered MarTech really looks like in an era of a from co pilots to automation to customer experience, every marketer was trying to answer the same question. How do we keep humans in the loop as AI transforms how we work? Let's hear what some of our guests had to say.
0:00:43.0 Mariam Tariq: Very important role for humans. I mean, there is a lot of conversation, as you know, about agents taking over and what's going to happen to the workforce, but I really see AI as an accelerator. But humans are the real drivers. And so it's not about being fearful of the future, but it's really how do we empower humans to do more where they're better utilized? AI can handle the kind of repetitive work, but humans really bring in the judgment, the creativity, the empathy, the context that AI can't. And I think marrying these things together is really critical. I was reading a LinkedIn post from a former manager of mine, a gentleman named Ahmed Datu. He calls himself a recovering CMO, but he is CEO of a company called AllGood. And he put this really quick thing online last night and it said... He was posed the question about hiring humans versus deploying agents. And then he framed it really well and he said that you hire humans that have that domain expert first and then you look at what are they doing, once they're productive, really identify those repetitive tasks, and then bring in AI to handle that execution while the humans focus on strategy and creativity. So that really sent it to me very well.
0:01:52.7 Scott Brinker: It's funny, I did a map of this of like, where do we spend calories in marketing? And I roughly put it into three buckets. There's strategy and creative, which has always been the pinnacle of like, why do people go into marketing? Oh, because of the strategy and creative. But the truth is, for a long time, the amount of calories we could spend really on the strategy and creative was very limited. Most of our calories went into a bucket. I would just broadly call production and analysis. Like it took a lot of work to be able to bring those strategy and creative ideas to life and then there's a third bucket, where I live and love the marketing, operations and marketing Martech, capabilities that support that. And to me, what's very exciting about AI is I think it has a lot of value to bring in reducing the cost and the time associated with that production analysis stage. And if we turn around and we use that opportunity to lean in to the strategy and creative to run more experiments to like try and bold new ideas.
0:02:54.3 Scott Brinker: And again, like, it's not like every idea is a winner. Not everyone works. But one of the things about marketing is it's very hard to predict what's going to work in advance, but if you can accelerate this loop of being able to experiment and try new ideas and get that feedback, I think that's actually an incredible competitive advantage. And so I'm hoping, yeah, marketing as a whole is really going to take advantage of this moment to say, like, wow, could we take strategy and creative to a whole new level with this new tool set?
0:03:21.9 Karen Steele: Yeah, I think AI is an enabler and I think the human has to be empowered. So I think it's up to the human to take advantage of the tools to learn as much as they can and be empowered to do more creative thinking and output for greater outcomes with AI. So the human doesn't go away, the human gets more productive, but the human also deploy smarter techniques because of the AI. So I'm really excited. I think that there's a lot of young people coming up in the marketing ranks right now that are, they're growing up with this proliferation of AI that some of us that have been around for a long time, we've seen other, whether you call them innovation trends or technology shifts, we've seen a lot of those over the years and we've adapted. And I think these young people are learning like we've never learned because they're right in the middle of all of it. And I think it's exciting, exciting for a whole new skill set in marketing in particular and certainly Martech.
0:04:23.8 Sara Faatz: Of course, talk is one thing, but 2025 was also the year AI finally became practical. Real tools, real use cases, real results. Check it out.
0:04:32.5 Jennifer Ortiz: I use Copilot all the time, every day. It helps, you know, everything that when AI came out, first came out is true. Right. Makes you more productive, helps you... That's a practical application. I think. I think we need to roll out more of that in our marketing organization. We're also using a tool that's helping us with top of the funnel nurtures and lead Conversion, the tools integrated with Salesforce, it's tool called Conversica. We absolutely love it and I think what we love so much about it is we're not missing leads, we're not missing people. Progress is a lead gen engine and I'm so proud of that and all of the things we do to be that lead gen engine. But where we generate a lot of leads, people can fall through the cracks. Form submits can fall through the cracks. It's all configuration today. It's helping us nurture, convert and get in contact with these people who are raising their hand at the top of the funnel and it's doing a great job and we're handing those hot leads that we might have missed right off to sales.
0:05:34.6 Juan Mendoza: So this organization is a large real estate marketplace. So basically they have a lot of consumer data, they have a lot of financial data and their product is really about helping consumers find their ideal property, their next property. And we sort of work with them and we've been looking at, okay, well they want to embed gentic AI capabilities and large language models into their personalization, customer experience stream of work. Initially when we sort of worked on this idea, we looked at it as a dichotomy. So what I mean by that there was two camps.
0:06:11.1 Juan Mendoza: So you have what we call volitional personalization, which is what... A better way to sort of explain that would be kind of a pool type personalization where a consumer may use an AI like for example a chatbot on a website or a tool on a website to get a personalized experience through a large language model. They would ask it, hey, I'm actually just looking for these specific features and this specific criteria from the thing I'm looking to buy in that example that the AI model would use their probabilistic reasoning and they would provide those options. And now that is actually a format of personalization. No matter from the customer experience perspective. It is personalization because a customer is putting information in and they're getting a personalized recommendation out.
0:06:54.4 Tom Wentworth: My real example is my email client supports MCP. It's called Short Wave. It's great and it is connected to linear which we use for tasks like task management system. Obviously it's connected to my email and my calendar, it's connected to all my call transcripts and it's collected to slack. So every day in the morning when I wake up, I don't check my email, I run a prompt that I saved called my day and I say look at everything holistically and tell me what's important. Go do research. Because this thing can also access the web. So I'm meeting with somebody. Go research them and give me a nice summarized list of my entire day.
0:07:32.0 Tom Wentworth: And then after that, I can say things like, block off my calendar so I can get the work done that you told me was important. Or I can say, cancel the meeting with this person 'cause it knows how to do all these things with MCP and it goes across all of it, it correlates it, and it will be able to say things like, "Hey, you have this linear task and you just got an email about it. Would you like me to update the linear task with the information you got in your email so you stay in sync? " It's crazy.
0:07:58.8 Elizabeth Edwards: Talk to your AI, stop typing to it, speak to it, turn on the microphone and speak and speak and speak. And give it all kinds of context. And then there was this and then there was that, and keep going into even more and more detail and give it jobs that are beyond what would be logical to ask a human to do what. Once you've given it all of those, that context, then tell it to respond as a polymathic expert from the perspective of economics and business and psychology, and really engage AI with verbal engagement, 'cause what you will say is so much different than how you will type and you will get much, much richer responses.
0:08:40.3 Sara Faatz: Before we wrap up 2025, let's end where we always love to with a few of our favorite Martech hot takes. Take a listen.
0:08:47.0 Frans Riemersma: Mistake we always keep making with technology, and that is that we think it will solve things for us. But in the end, even Geni, it's still a tool. So just like a hammer, it will not build your house. You need to hold it and you need to hammer something in the wall. Create that wall and think about having that wall in that place. And I think these are all tools that can really help us. We have to design that house for a customer. And yeah, we had some nice conversations earlier where I mentioned some cases where you think, Why am I solving your workaround? So your product is faulty, it's not complete, why should I click twice? Or there's some tools that I think they are. I don't know. The designers are probably so insecure that they want confirmation all the time. Like, are you sure you want to click away? Are you sure you're doing that? Are you canceling the cancellation?
0:09:41.0 Mallory Russel: No point in producing more if you don't have a great way to distribute it. And also if you're not getting it in front of like the right people to begin with. So I think quality over quantity, quality is going to bring in quality traffic, quality engagement and then support your business metrics at the end of the day. So I don't think that part has ever changed. Actually, it's maybe even of more importance now to, to really think about quality and how you're producing that and being really aware of how you're using your resources.
0:10:13.4 Hazem El Zayat: I speak to a lot of brands and I speak to a lot of clients and I generally always say the experience, customer experience is responsibility of everybody in the organization from security guard at the entrance up to the CEO and vice versa. It's not a one person or one department job. That would always be my concern on sort of the hallmark conversations like let's drop the struggle of who owns it. Let's embrace it as an organizational wide effort and a culture that needs to sort of filter through the entire organization, even when it comes to HR or people or what have you. On one hand, it's embedding again, a customer centric mindset in all the people that we hire and the training programs that we do and so on and so forth. But then it obviously then connects to a very popular area these days of employee experience obviously as well, because that becomes the other side of the customer side of things. I guess in some capacities.
0:11:07.8 Amanda Cole: Yeah, I guess the hot take is rethink everything we need to... I do think this is a throw the baby out with the bathwater moment. And I would challenge yourself to set a really strong vision and say, just give yourself the opportunity to say what if? What if AI really could do the things that people are saying that it can? How would I rethink systems, retrain people. And do things differently in this future?
0:11:32.7 Sara Faatz: And that's our best of 2025 edition of 10 Minute Martech. A huge thank you to all of our guests who joined us this year sharing their time and valuable insights. And thank you to you, our listeners, for taking the time to tune in. We appreciate you. If this episode got you thinking, share it with a teammate or a fellow marketer who's experimenting with AI. And of course, hit like and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming in 2026. Until next year, I'm Sara Faatz and this has been 10 Minute Martech.
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