There's a window right now where everyone is learning AI together, and failure is acceptable. In this episode, Lindsay Hagan (Conductor) explains why that window is closing.
Most marketing teams are waiting for AI best practices to stabilize before committing. Lindsay Hagan, VP of Marketing and Co-Head of Revenue at Conductor, thinks that's the wrong call.
At Conductor (an enterprise SEO and AEO platform), Lindsay is running AI experiments in real time: automating AEO reporting via Claude and Conductor's own MCP, pairing marketing with customer success in cross-functional hackathons, and watching her own CEO build things in Claude Cowork.
In this episode, she shares what's working and what isn't, why AEO demands a whole-company discipline that spans PR, social, and community, and why the content teams who survive this shift will be the ones who learn to direct AI, not the ones who get replaced by it.
3 Takeaways:
Subscribe to 10 Minute Martech for fast, practical insights from senior B2B marketing leaders on what’s working right now.
Chapters:
[00:43] Inside Conductor’s AI Experiments
[01:14] MCP & AEO Automation Explained
[02:14] Using Hackathons to Drive AI Innovation
[03:33] Scaling High-Quality AEO Content
[05:04] Building Brand Authority Through Offsite Mentions
[06:55] How AI Is Changing the Marketing Playbook
[08:32] How Marketers Should Start Using AI
[10:05] Essential AI Tools for Marketers
[10:56] Best People to Follow for AI Insights
[11:26] MarTech Hot Take: Human Creativity + AI
About the Guest:
Lindsay is the VP, Global Marketing at Conductor, managing all demand generation and go-to-market activities. With over ten years of experience in the B2B SaaS space, Lindsay’s strengths lie in scaling marketing teams and building cross-channel campaign strategies. Prior to Conductor, Lindsay led marketing for Augment, a Salesforce-backed augmented reality SaaS platform, where she built the marketing team from the ground up and engineered the French company's expansion into the U.S. market.
Lindsay was a Women in Content Marketing Leader of the Year Award finalist and Discovery Awards Finalist for Emerging Women Marketers in Tech. She has presented at notable conferences, including Digital Summit DC, Inside Intercom, the NYC Product Marketing Conference, and Conductor's C3 Marketing Conference.
Follow The Leader — Lindsay’s Recommendations:
Josh Grant: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgrant5/
Pat Reinhardt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickreinhart/
Carilu Dietrich: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cariludietrich/
Connect:
Lindsay Hagan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsayboyajian/
Sara Faatz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Progress: www.progress.com
Conductor: https://www.conductor.com
0:00:00.1 Sara Faatz: I'm Sara Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute Martech.
0:00:04.9 Lindsay Hagan: We sort of have this really cool moment where everyone's learning together, where in maybe 18 months to 2 years, we won't have that sort of openness. It may be a fail. You may burn a few hours in the afternoon trying to set up some really [0:00:17.2] cool cowork experiment and it may just not be worth the squeeze, or it may not give you the result you need. But I'd rather let's have that learning now versus not try.
0:00:27.7 Sara Faatz: That's Lindsey Hagan, VP of marketing and co-head of revenue at Conductor. Let's get started.
[music]
0:00:43.4 Sara Faatz: Well, Lindsey, welcome. I think... Let's get started with the fact that I think a lot of people, particularly when it comes to AI, have gone from panic to planning, but we still are absolutely in an era of experimentation. Can you talk a little bit about some experiments that you and your team have tried that have worked, some that have failed, and what you've learned from both of those experiences?
0:01:02.1 Lindsay Hagan: At Conductor, our marketing team is doing a lot of different stuff with AI. And to your point, Sara, some of it's worked really well, and then some of it's just an experiment, getting our feet wet, getting comfortable with the systems, they're just changing so fast. So we're doing a lot of experimentation right now with Claude Cowork. And we actually have our own MCP at Conductor that allows us to hook our AEO data into Claude. So we're doing a lot of different kind of plays and testing with that of how can we automate our AEO and content workflows using Conductor's MCP. So for instance, we automate weekly AEO reporting to our team with recommendations and next steps and things they should be looking at and surfacing different SEO and AEO opportunities through Claude. And that's been a real unlock for our team because you can analyze huge swaths of data and get really actionable next steps and recommendations using an MCP and Claude together. And so recently that's been one of our big unlocks is with our AEO data. But we've also just rolled out Claude internally to everyone at the company. So there is just a lot of experimentation happening and the possibilities definitely feel infinite, and that can lead to a little bit of paralysis. But one of the things we also recently did is internal hackathons. Those have worked really well for us. So we've paired up different teams. So for instance, our marketing team and our customer success team partnered up a few weeks ago to do a hackathon. It was really exciting to see what different cross-functional teams, when partnered together, can come up with. The marketing team brings their perspective, the customer team brings theirs, and then you get some really interesting solutions. And so that's been a good unlock for us in terms of helping folks really decide what to do and how to experiment.
0:02:49.2 Sara Faatz: Yeah, that's great. It's funny, I came from the developer space, that's where I spent a lot of my career. And to hear hackathon in really a cross-functional environment where it's your marketing team and your customer service or customer success team, that's really empowering when you think about what the technology is enabling us to do. So I love hearing that. But let's take a step back. You talked about AEO and some people call it GEO. Was there anything that you have been finding that's either been surprising to you or something that you're like, "Okay, that just validated a lot of the things we know"? And has it impacted your strategies for discoverability from those LLM outputs or AI-powered answer engines?
0:03:32.9 Lindsay Hagan: Yeah, I think the core principles of good AEO and the things that teams struggle with is you need high-quality content. So you can't have just AI slop if you want to be visible, but you need a lot of it. Because we are in a world where the prompts used to be or the keywords used to be... Sara, you and I would go, if we were looking for running shoes, we'd put the same keywords into Google, we'd write "best running shoes" and we'd get our responses, we'd click through the blue links. But now we're in a world where you and I would have really long and different prompts based on the type of running, the type of workouts we want to do. And with that, marketing teams have to create a lot more content at scale. And I think the challenge for teams like mine and the folks listening is how do you do that in a way where you're actually creating good, high-quality content? And so you really need to think about how can you use AI in a thoughtful way to create that content. And so it's not about just plugging in a hundred different prompts into ChatGPT and getting a bunch of articles back. You need things that are gonna differentiate the content, like research, like subject matter expert quotes, like... And really think about ways how can you unlock wisdom and give value within your content that's different than something that may be 100% AI-generated. So that's really challenging for folks in the AEO space especially. We work primarily at Conductor with enterprise companies, and to do that at scale across a lot of different teams is challenging, but it's what we're helping folks do and solve for.
0:05:04.1 Sara Faatz: I think the other interesting thing when you talk about AEO, our experience has been, and I would love to understand if you're seeing the same thing, that in a lot of cases the off-site brand and third-party mentions are almost as valuable, if not more, than what you actually have on your site. What you really need to be doing is having that connected message across all of those, and some of those channels you own and some of those you don't. Can you talk a little bit about your experience there?
0:05:30.9 Lindsay Hagan: It's funny you say that because when we think about, like, the modern AEO team, it's not just sort of the SEO professional or even just your content team, it is this whole group of folks around both your own content and your earned media as well. So it's your PR team, your social team, your community team, like what's going on in Reddit. And so absolutely, it is both on-site and off-site. And the AEO practice is much more than just one person. It is a whole group of folks that are really owning the whole brand narrative, both on your own website and then also off your website as well. So absolutely, it's something that I think about a lot at Conductor is how do we not only create high-quality content for our site, but are we doing PR? Are we doing outreach to other partners? Are we partnering with the right folks off-site? So it's just a really kind of... It's a whole ecosystem around it, and it's hard and it takes a lot of resources. It's not something you can just throw money at and you're gonna see your result overnight.
0:06:27.5 Sara Faatz: Yeah. And I think the interesting thing too is having that consistency of message. Right? When you think about... You always needed that, that was always important, but it's hypercritical now, I think. And if you want to show up in the same ways and, to your point about asking about running shoes, right, if I have running shoes for a variety of different runners, different stance, different foot... Different way your foot falls, we want people to be able to find those things. So I think it's an exciting time to be in marketing. I have to ask you, some people believe you should be throwing out the playbook completely and starting fresh. Others say you just need to evolve it. Where do you stand on that?
0:07:03.8 Lindsay Hagan: I think you have to evolve it in a really thoughtful way.
0:07:08.3 Sara Faatz: Yeah.
0:07:09.2 Lindsay Hagan: I think the foundation of marketing is really storytelling, understanding the customer, understanding their pain points, and turning that into value for the customer. I don't think that's changing, but the mechanism of how you activate campaigns, how you activate that wisdom or that brand foundation is certainly changing. And I think it's changing... Every team is different too in how they're changing and evolving. Obviously your demand gen team and what they're doing with AI and campaigns is gonna look a lot different than maybe what your content team is doing or even your brand team. They're working maybe in different systems. And so I think again, giving teams, I think, the space and the room to experiment and try new things, we're all learning this together, and we sort of have this really cool moment where everyone's learning together, so there is an opportunity to be humble and learn and really get familiar with the technology where in maybe 18 months to 2 years, we won't have that sort of openness.
0:08:05.8 Sara Faatz: Yeah.
0:08:07.1 Lindsay Hagan: So I sort of encourage everyone on my team to really start learning, testing, playing with things and... And sort of to your first question, let's experiment. And it may not work, it may be a fail.
0:08:18.1 Sara Faatz: Right.
0:08:18.7 Lindsay Hagan: You may burn a few hours in the afternoon trying to set up some really nifty Cowork experiment and it may just not be worth the squeeze or it may not give you the result you need. But I'd rather let's have that learning now versus not try.
0:08:32.4 Sara Faatz: 100%. So if somebody's listening to this right now and they haven't started on their AI journey, where would you tell them to start?
0:08:40.8 Lindsay Hagan: It's a great question. I'd say the first place to start is I think again, being really humble in terms of the learning. I think again, some of us may be further along in your career, you feel like you've mastered the craft and now there's this whole new thing in front of you to learn, and that takes a lot of, I think, humility and time and investment in terms of your personal resource to get up to speed with it. So I'd say be really open to learning and educating yourself and getting hands-on with the technology. Again, I've seen CEOs now who are running everything through Claude Cowork and are building their own thing. So every single person at the company, from the most senior person all the way down, has to get really comfortable and hands-on with this technology. And getting started can feel... Like it takes a lot of activation energy, but there's so many resources out there to help you, whether it's through different vendors that may have their own academies, learning centers, but then there's just so many amazing creators on YouTube and LinkedIn that are creating tutorials to get started. For instance, I was watching some Claude coding videos yesterday because I use mostly Cowork, but I was like, maybe I should be using code more. So definitely need to be just watching and learning and listening to different experts. There's so many folks out there that are doing and testing things right now that are sharing. My LinkedIn is just an AI feed right now of experiments that folks are running.
0:10:04.5 Sara Faatz: That's great. You've talked a lot about Claude and Claude Cowork, is there an AI tool that you can't live without?
0:10:11.1 Lindsay Hagan: I'd say Claude, and then obviously Conductor's own AI is what we use. As I mentioned, we have an MCP, so it hooks into Claude and ChatGPT or Copilot. And so we use that a ton for our own AEO and optimizing and creating our own content. And that's been a huge unlock for us in terms of making sure that we're kind of number one in our space, getting brand visibility. There's just so much consumer traffic going to the LLMs right now, and if you're not visible, that's a huge risk for your business. So not only do you have to measure it, but you also have to be able to take action on it. And we've found that using our own technology in partnership with the LLMs is a big unlock in terms of the scale that we can generate.
0:10:56.2 Sara Faatz: Great. Just a couple more quick questions for you. First, you talked a little bit about LinkedIn, but who do you follow for inspiration and information?
0:11:03.5 Lindsay Hagan: Ooh, that's a good one. I love some of the folks in our space, there's Josh Grant, Ethan Smith, Pat Reinhardt. They're all great follows. They're always sharing some great data. From a CMO perspective, I love Carilu Dietrich. She's always sharing insights that she's learning from different CMOs out there. So those are folks in the SaaS space that I like to follow along with.
0:11:26.0 Sara Faatz: Awesome. Great. And I guess last question, and it doesn't have to be AI-focused, it can be, but do you have a Martech hot take?
0:11:33.1 Lindsay Hagan: I do. I think one of the biggest hot takes is there's a whole narrative of, like, "Oh, just fire your content team and do it all in AI," or, "Fire this whole group of creators and just do it with AI." And I think that's really just the wrong framing around AI and thinking about AI. We talked about this earlier. There's so many people saying you can just automate your content and win, but it's really not about generic content. It takes, Sara, you know, your team and the wisdom and the research and the going down the rabbit holes and having a thesis and finding the research and data that you want to share. And so it really has to be a partnership with human and AI, I think, to create good content. And you need more strategic content folks more than ever because they're the ones that have to go into your organizations and come up with the angles and the stories and the narratives that you want to tell and partner with AI to create something that's interesting and going to get cited. So that'd be my hot take.
0:12:25.8 Sara Faatz: Awesome. I love it. Lindsay, it's been wonderful talking to you today. Thank you so much for your time.
0:12:28.7 Lindsay Hagan: Awesome. Thank you, Sara.