Practical AI Roadmap for Marketing & GTM Ops
Also - Lessons from a massive Martech migration
In this edition:
Practical AI Roadmap for Marketing & GTM Ops
Lessons from a Massive Martech Migration - Podcast Episode
POLL: What’s the Hardest Part About Getting a Marketing Ops Job Offer?
Exclusive For Paid Subscribers: 7 Things People Don’t Think About Enough in Succeeding in Marketing Operations
Did you miss Otto, the new Marketing Ops AI Agent from Revenue Pulse? Check out the recap here.
Learn how real teams are using AI to grow revenue in this report
The 2025 AI and Marketing Performance Index
Marketing teams are under pressure to deliver faster results with fewer resources.
AI is supposed to help. But there’s a gap between the promise of AI and what teams are actually experiencing on the ground.
A new study from GrowthLoop and Ascend2 surveyed 300+ senior marketers. The data shows:
89% say pressure to perform has grown significantly
Only 22% believe their current strategies are driving fast growth
This report breaks down how high-performing teams are using AI to drive results, not just talk about it.
You’ll learn:
How real teams are using AI to grow revenue
Where AI fits in the day-to-day marketing cycle
What’s working, what’s not, and what to watch for
How leaders are integrating AI into existing systems without slowing down
No fluff. Just insight on how marketing teams are actually using AI to perform.
Practical AI Roadmap for Marketing & GTM Ops
Testing and piloting AI for sales and marketing can be frustrating.
That’s why Jomar Ebalida and I developed the practical AI roadmap for marketing and GTM ops pros.
This roadmap helps you figure out where to start, what to focus on, and how to scale AI initiatives in a way that’s grounded in operational reality.
It’s structured in 3 phases:
PREP: Evaluate your organization’s current state across data, tools, team skills, and funnel performance.
PILOT: Select and test AI use cases based on your actual readiness data. (Diagram shows samples) Avoid guessing by letting the assessment drive decisions.
ACTIVATE: Scale the pilots that show promise and embed them into core processes.
Here are select projects worth walking through:
🔹 AI Readiness Assessment
This project includes evaluating data quality, the state of your CRM, the maturity of your tech stack, and your team’s readiness to work with AI tools. It also includes a bowtie funnel analysis to help identify where your customer journey is breaking down. The outcome is a clear picture of which AI use cases are both valuable and feasible for your team to pursue.
🔹 AI SDR Agent: Outreach and Prospecting
This agent is designed to support outbound sales by identifying high-potential accounts, generating personalized outreach messages, and helping SDRs scale without sacrificing relevance. It can help teams boost pipeline without overloading headcount.
🔹 AI QA and Compliance: Brand, Legal, Regulatory
This workstream ensures that every piece of AI-generated content or decision logic meets the necessary internal standards. It supports brand consistency, regulatory requirements, and risk mitigation. This process should run in parallel with pilots and activations to ensure safe implementation.
🔹 AI Agents for Ops: QA Checks, Routing, and Campaign Setup
This includes AI agents built to handle operational tasks such as verifying UTM links, auto-routing requests, or creating campaign templates. These agents are ideal for improving workflow speed while reducing manual errors and team bottlenecks.
At the foundation of all of this is change management.
Each phase of the roadmap focuses on enablement, training, adoption, metrics, and governance. Tools don’t generate value unless people are set up to use them properly.
Which parts resonate with you? What would you change or add?
If you use Canva, you can access this template here.
Make sure to check out Jomar’s Bowtie Funnel Newsletter.
73% of GTM Leaders find most reports and forecasts useless. As a result, RevOps teams waste 30% of their time drowning in bad data, broken dashboards, and forecasting guesswork. Revlitix replaces data silos, second-hand insights and outdated CRM & GTM analytics with modern reporting and full-funnel forecasting that GTM leaders appreciate. Take a demo and get a $100 gift card for your time.
Lessons from a Massive Martech Migration
Testing a new messaging platform is hard. Rebuilding your entire messaging infrastructure in twelve weeks? That’s a masterclass.
Hope Barrett, Sr Director of Product Management at SoundCloud, pulled off one of the most impressive Martech migrations I’ve seen. We interviewed Hope on the latest episode of Humans of Martech, and she shared how her team of three replaced a legacy system from 2016, migrated over 200 campaigns, and turned messaging into a true product function.
Here are a few takeaways that stood out to me:
🔹 Start with the hard questions
Hope came in to replace multi-touch attribution. Instead, she found duct-taped infrastructure, shadow logic, and broken measurement. No one could say what was actually happening in the messaging stack. The lesson? Don’t just look for a better tool. Look at how decisions are being made, what’s happening outside the platform, and whether your stack can give you straight answers.
🔹 Legacy tools fail quietly
SoundCloud’s platform looked functional, until you needed to know something specific, like how many messages went out. Hope found that frequency caps, segmentation, and triggers were happening outside the tool. That meant nothing could be trusted. The system wasn’t broken all at once. It had just silently stopped being useful.
🔹 Custom builds always cost you later
SoundCloud had wrapped their platform with custom APIs, middleware, and logic that no longer fit their needs. The vendor’s support team couldn’t help because everything was bespoke. Hope’s takeaway was simple: if your setup depends on one vendor’s stack, you don’t have flexibility—you have lock-in.
🔹 Structure Martech like a product
The biggest shift was mindset. Messaging was no longer “just marketing.” It became part of the product org. That meant better data hygiene, scalable governance, and notification features that were versioned, QA’d, and shipped like code. Campaigns became productized. That changed everything.
This episode is required listening for anyone thinking about a martech migration or trying to future-proof their stack.
Hope is one of the sharpest operators in the space. Smart, direct, and grounded in experience.
Check out the whole epidsode on the Humans of Martech Podcast.
POLL: What’s the Hardest Part of Getting a Marketing Ops Job Offer?
Top Commentary on Social
Tool specialization! Companies get super hung up that you need to have x amount of years working with X tool, even though you have a lot of experience with Y and Z tools. I think if you understand the purpose of the tools and know similar ones, it should not disqualify you. - Samantha Nowak
Recently, I've seen Marketing Operations roles that require high-level PM certifications, or (the other side of the spectrum) seek candidates for entry-level administrative responsibilities like content calendar management, managing general email inboxes, or preparing PPT presentations. I'm all about doing my own administrative responsibilities and realize they are important, but I am wondering how marketing operations became a "catch all" job title? - Karyn Guilford
The panel never seems to include the right people. I've had several, but still haven't gotten a job offer. - Fauna Solomon
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