Babylist Cut Newsletter Build Time by 87%: Then the Roadmap Expanded | Elizabeth Martin

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Welcome to the making sense of MarTech, where the rabbit hole goes deeper than the headlines. This is a show that puts ideas to the test, not just on display on the hot seat. Today we have the illustrious Elizabeth Martin. Her team at Baby List recovered 600 hours a year through AI automation and called it a gift.

But when your company is growing into new verticals, your market is structurally shrinking and you've got a new CMO to impress. More time has a way of becoming more expected. Today we're asking, is this an empowerment story? Or is it the number that justifies not hiring more? A little bit about Elizabeth.

First, she is a director of Lifecycle Marketing and CRM at Baby List, the leading registry and commerce platform for growing families, where she oversees the email and customer engagement infrastructure that touches 9 million parents, one of the most high stakes moments of their lives in roughly three months.

Her team built what one ASP called the most advanced MCP implementation among its clients cloud powered. End to end email production system that cut build time from 2 hours to 15 minutes, handing back those precious 600 hours a year. This isn't her first rodeo. She's led lifecycle and CRM teams at some of the biggest names in e-commerce, and you'll hear about them in a few moments.

Welcome, Elizabeth. Thank you for being here. I'm so excited. Thank you for having me. Hi. It's like a long time coming since when we first met to I know. All right, so to dive in, let's start off with some rapid fire. What was your first martech tool? Salesforce. Back in the day. Ooh. Marketing cloud or Pardot.

Mhm. Mhm. I think Pardot actually I'm the black sheep I love her.

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How is your token budget these days? Oh this is a tough one because I don't actually know a baby list. We are encouraged to be heavy users of the tools and to really experiment. I did talk to one of my team members who's my heaviest user And where she's on track to spend about $1,200 this month. Okay, that's pretty reasonable, all things considered.

Yeah, I'll be curious to follow up in a couple of months to see if that changes. I'll let you know. I'll let you know if Claude disappeared tomorrow, and you had to go back to the old workflow for one month. What's the first thing your team would actually miss and what, honestly, might they not? I think the first thing we would miss is our independence.

Claude has actually, outside of just automating our workflows, has actually made us a lot more independent. We have access to cloud code. We have access to our data layer snowflake. So we're able to really sort of blur the lines between engineering product and lifecycle and CRM in a really fun way for the team.

And so I think we'd really miss that independence, being able to create API triggers and really think about our workflows differently. I would miss what I know about our program, or being able to dig deeper into what to discover about lifecycle, and maybe list What we wouldn't miss is sort of the role blurring that comes along with that.

We're expected to be experts in everything we do, and that can cause a lot of extra work, honestly. And so I think that that causes a little bit of friction, for sure. And speaking of friction, which might be one of the words I would use for some of these, but you have worked at Amazon, Zulily, Real Self and all recipes.

What is one word for your experience at each of these companies? I would say for Amazon's surprising Zulily. This is tough, but I would say bumpy. Since I went down with the ship, their real self was thrashing and all recipes was just fun. It was one of those jobs that really just so fun. I cosign each one of those without even knowing the context.

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Thank you. Okay, so now Baby List has a shop, a health vertical, a fulfillment center, a financial education hub, and a podcast as a lifecycle marketer, which one of these expansions is the hardest to write a welcome email for? We just launched what we call Early Investor, which is a really exciting product.

It is a gifting platform for college funds, and it's really sort of the first of its kind. Um, it has such great product market fit and it's going really, really well. One of the main benefits of baby list in general, and this product is it really takes the awkwardness out of for parents of asking what they need.

And it's a new product. It's really industry leading. And so I think that one has been you know, we brought it to market, we wrote the welcome content and now we iterate. So I think that that one's newest to us. And because it's just so fresh in the industry, we're iterating and learning now that we brought it to market.

That's wonderful. And last but not least, what's your hottest take? My hottest take today is that anything we built ourselves, my team personally for the workflows that we manage is better than any in tool AI workflow that we've come across when you get to control all the guardrails and variables. That makes total sense, but there is a steep learning curve I would imagine there.

Yes, yes, that's true, that's true. Okay, I want to dive in. So setting the stage, your team's framing of this AI work is explicitly optimistic. So recovered time to better strategy, deeper personalization, smarter experimentation you name it. But you're doing this inside a company that's aggressively expanding into these new verticals and all these different changes.

And to add to this, you're selling into a market where the US birthrate just hit a generational low. That context matters. For what? 30% more output in the same team actually means. So in 2025, a Pew survey found that 52% of U.S. workers are worried about how AI will be used in their workplaces going forward, and only 6% think it will create more opportunities for them.

A third think it'll mean fewer. So have you actually protected that reclaim time from your team, or has it already been quietly folded into the roadmap? That's a really great question. I think about it a little bit differently than that. So with the things that are really automated or easily automated with AI are clearly documented things that are like really rote processes, things that you do over and over again.

And so those are the things that are so easy to automate and really like kind of take off your plate to enable you to do higher level thinking. And when we talk about sort of 30% more capacity or be able to do 30% more, that reclaim time is being spent on sort of that higher leverage work. So I think I should if I back up a little bit, what we're doing now is use leveraging the AI tooling to do those rote processes so that the team members can be more deeply embedded with our partners and understand their processes and help make better decisions about the life cycle implementation and really end to end.

Own strategy through production rather than just owning that technique. That tactical execution of the production. They're doing the more strategic layer of work, which enables us to make better decisions for our users. So the AI piece is sure that the work is enabling us. The AI is enabling us to do a lot more, but it's enabling us to do like, better work.

I love that. So building on that, does that mean your roles and job descriptions have changed as a result? Yeah, a little bit. When we think of sort of the evolution of sort of the AI workflows, that baby list. We really started a little bit earlier than most, and I think I know we'll get into this a little bit more later, but we started about a year ago and then really accelerated this year.

And the tech team really led the charge. Obviously, like, you know, product and tech and engineering, they taught that those workflows are changing rapidly and that industry is changing so rapidly, and we partner so closely with them in terms of execution. And there are stakeholders and where they're stakeholders.

And so we really kind of recreated our roles on our team. And to be more end to end. So now we have sort of what we call an embedded pod model where, you know, I'll have there's a celebrations and events, um, team, a baby list. And so we have somebody on my team who goes and works with that team and attends their stand ups.

And so rather than them pulling us in at the end when they need us to send a triggered email, my team member is then, you know, owning end to end. How are we going to bring this to life from a transactional perspective? But then how also are we going to bring it to to life from a product marketing perspective?

So it's really enabled us to, um, in a really fun way, participate more in the product development cycle, but also make really good decisions for our baby list users, which is always the goal. Without a doubt, I think it's a really cool distinction of yes, this happened, but as a result, actually, we got to broaden our skills and we're part of the conversation.

We have a seat at the table more than ever before. Yeah. And one of the things I think is really just neat about that is how is that permission? We have permission to be builders, we have permission to participate, and we have permission to use cloud code and try things out. And they've told us we can't hurt anything, which is comforting to hear when you're coming down.

Yeah. When you're doing something you've never done before and submitting PRS and all of those things. But yeah, it's been transformative. Not without its challenges. You know, AI, as you mentioned, people do have some uncertainty. And, you know, when you're going through rapid periods of change that can be uncomfortable.

And we've had our own moments of that, of course, as well, for sure. And I guess the question I have is with the same amount of headcount, does that mean it's a case for not increasing headcount or just mean we're optimizing our current team. We're actually hiring at Baby Loss quite a bit. Our CEO likes to say we're not going to do more with less.

We're going to do more with more, which I think is a great distinction. I actually just hired on the team somebody new who's going to be our marketing technologist and help us continue to uplevel our workflows. And, you know, we're expanding into doing more integrated marketing, which is exciting. Our engineering team is growing rapidly.

And and I think as we evolve our workflows, we're constantly evaluating what the needs of the team are. And as the product team doubles in size, I'm evaluating what my team needs to. We we check in regularly to make sure everybody's bandwidth is that they're not working outside of work hours or. Yeah, that they're not too overwhelmed.

That's fabulous. So it actually is the accelerant we all want and hope as opposed to something else. Ideally you do have to slow down to speed up in the beginning, right? It does take a little while to give. For us, it's Claude. Everywhere uses different tools. But it takes a while to give Claude all the context that she needs in order to execute the campaigns.

And so that can take some time. Does your internal Claude have a name? No. What should her name be? I mean, I don't know yet. We can brainstorm. So at this point, we all know as it relates to prompting garbage in, garbage out, it's its own craft and requires real human investment. Where does that labor live on your team?

Is it distributed fairly, or has it quietly landed on certain experts, certain heavy users? We have a lot of skills we leverage so across the team. So that sort of try and minimize or sort of flatten out that work so that we aren't requiring new prompts to be leveraged all the time since skills are transferable, and now you can sort of house them centrally and they update all the time.

So skills are really our answer to that. We also are really fortunate at baby Lives because we believe so deeply in the future of AI and AI enablement that we have an AI enablement team. And so they've helped us with other skills, which are things like a prompt improver, which, you know, I'll write, I'll write a prompt that's like, help me write, help me translate this document into a deck for senior leadership.

And then I'll say, you know, run the prompt improver and it will be like, I'm a senior strategist on Elizabeth's team, creating a deck for XYZ and really sort of helps improve. And then, yeah, we go from there. So we're doing our best to evenly distribute it really by sharing information and sharing skills and keeping those up to date.

That's really lovely and thoughtful, and I appreciate that. There's an AI enablement team. Well, because you could have one employee, you know, become an expert and another fall behind because they didn't understand anything. They didn't have the same resources and access. Yeah, absolutely. It's a nice democratization of how the team will work together and be able to troubleshoot and navigate problems and challenges along the way.

Well, it's such a new way of working. We're all learning this together. I think, you know, I asked somebody who reports to one of my managers the other day. I was like, can you teach me how to do this? A cool thing you just did. I mean, we're all learning together. It's very fun. Every day there's something new and no one knows what's going to change in two weeks.

That is true and also troubling. So, speaking of the tech, I want to get into the actual architecture. And because the details are where the real trade offs sometimes hide. So you have described the system as an elegant notion form clod and are iterable MCP existing templates and a two hour build cut to 15 minutes.

But template based speed is only as good as the templates. So what's the failure mode? Is there a source code to QA against? Yeah. Good question. So for us what the way it works is that the pass through. So we're taking notion and we're really using a notion page as a copy doc. And then using the iterable MCP to really publish to the template.

And so we have a variety of these templates that live in notion. And we just use the copy doc to create the notion page that then passes through. Where this becomes challenging is if the template fails QA because it is code, right. We're not using the drag and drop editor. We're not building it in our old ways of building where we would just go back into the template, make a small change or a tweak, then are just going back out and we're rebuilding the whole thing from scratch again.

If the template fails QA, I think that's kind of where we see failures. The other limitation that we have is we haven't quite figured out modularization yet. And some of our templates are very modular. And so we need to like there are some templates that we haven't quite figured out how to really automate.

And so that's something that we're really excited to tackle for the end of this year. Amazing. Where has the system produced something that got close to going out the door but shouldn't have? We're doing a lot with Claude. We're writing copy, we're creating templates, we're doing analysis. We're we have Sigma, which is where our data is plugged in.

We're pulling data from iterable. We've had some fails, Claude. You know, when it writes copy for us, we have to review that, because even if it's on brand. We were laughing about this example the other day where Claude spit out something that was like, air filters are on sale just in time for fire season.

It's like, no, Claude, you have to, you know, it's not going to work. Well, if that is not acceptable, yeah, yeah. Or email templates will fail QA because by the nature of our business, we really believe that you need to have an unsubscribe link at the very top of the template, just in case something happens during your pregnancy and you really need to opt out.

Claps why is that not a standard right thing? Yes, yes. And so like we have to iterate on sort of our QA skills all the time. And sometimes we had it recently we were working on an analysis of our audience health and transactional versus marketing emails, and it gave us some wrong outputs that, if we hadn't verified, would have given us the wrong direction.

So we're getting there. It's iterative, for sure. And it's nice to hear, even with such an advanced setup, that truly very few teams not only are equipped, but have live and implemented that. Yes, we're aware it still makes mistakes. And guess what? The humans are so required in order for this to go right.

As mentioned, your MCP implementation of an AI lifecycle production model has been lauded as one of the most advanced, and I agree. What would you push back on that characterization? Like where does it still feel like y'all are in V1 beta? There's a lot we still like. Okay. Thank you very much. Really love all the work we've done.

And we're just so excited and proud of the team. I think where we would love to continue to have the MVP that we work with. Shout out to iterable. Please make it better. Um, there are things we still can't do like journey QA, can't read journey tiles, do the API limitations. I have a whole document that I run every two weeks to make sure we're continuing to uplevel our program.

There are still like, I would love to be able to set up like eight way multivariate push notification tasks. That's something I could do with the cloud browser plug in with iterable. But should I? Probably not. I should probably use an MCP to do that. And so there's still some areas of gaps and opportunities.

I think there's audience building is still is still an area where we we do it in the platform because the audience, the ways that we define our audience and the data fields are still not, not quite there. That makes sense. And I love that you mentioned needing more features within an MCP. Mhm. A couple weeks back had a conversation with Ezra about governance and security and safety.

And I'm curious what your team is doing since you're, you know, you handle HIPAA. You guys have a health business. Like for me those are immediate red flags of, oh no, how do we set up this MCP so it's secure, safe and abides by all laws. What is your team doing to ensure that for your customers? Yeah, our customer security is paramount.

IBD lists everything we do is with our users best interest in mind. We love our users is one of our core values and you wouldn't believe how much we love it. So when you set up the MCP, you are using an API key which has your specific permissions, and those API keys are not to get too specific, but those are specific to whatever platform instance you're in.

And so for us with iterable, we have a separate instance which keeps all of our health data separate. And so that's really keeping all of our user health information separate from our registry data. And so all of that HIPAA protected data is not something that we're using with our iterable MCP. We're using the iterable MCP for our registry projects.

Iterable is HIPAA compliant. And I'm sure there is a way we could use the MCP. And I have a compliant way, but we aren't there yet. And we would definitely consult our health business attorney before we did anything that would potentially touch that data. We love some compliance and actually enforcing it.

Yes for sure. And I got to ask, are you guys rotating those API keys every so often? Okay. Jacqueline, I listen to your podcast and I talked to my AI enablement team, and we are going to make sure we are taking all of the security precautions. Fabulous. Well, I'm glad our conversation can have a semblance of, you know, a spark of inspiration for sure, because, yeah, Isra and I have been talking about it for a long time, and it's mind boggling how little protections are built in.

So you really have to be at the forefront of thinking about every angle. What is a feature that you guys have not built that has been deprived, criticized, just because you guys are shipping so fast that you want to prioritize right now? I think the dynamic templates would really be a big unlock for us. I think journey building automation, we built a QA tool for that that sort of sits outside of our standard QA tool.

I think merging those together is something that we need to put on our list, because I think that that would really be a big unlock for us as we're building more complex journeys, especially as we're adding things we need to tell our users about and sort of at the beginning of their journey with us. I think those are pieces that we we probably need to continue to uplevel and push on.

I think, too, there's this piece where we probably should go back to the beginning and see if there's like the tools changed so fast. And three months ago is very different than today. I mean, in what was it in July of last year or August of last year, I wouldn't have been able to picture where we are today because these MCP tools didn't exist or these plugins weren't there.

And so we should probably sort of or we plan to reevaluate sort of our the way we set everything up. And is there a better, faster way. Or, you know, maybe we could solve this QA problem where we'd have to go out and rebuild all over again. There's there's probably a thing we could do. Yeah, a lot of it in your own work and re optimizing.

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And now back to the hot seat. Since you have publicly shared how you're setting everything up, are you concerned ever that the competitor would maybe take this idea and run with it? Or is that actually an encouraging thing? So encouraging. We would love people to do that. As I mentioned before, our goal at baby lists, like everything we're doing with AI is to make things better for our families that we serve.

And we are so excited when people reach out. You know, Natasha on my team presented at Iterable Activate, and she has created such a network that she is meeting with now to talk about how we've set this up, how we're doing it. We want to help other businesses and other folks do the same thing because, you know, unlocking your capacity to do that higher level thinking is going to make things better for our entire industry.

If people are doing better or sending better emails or push notifications, then all of our collective unsubscribe rates are going to go down right. The inboxes will be less crowded, so I think it's a great thing to be able to share. And we're excited. Rising tides lifts all boats and if only everyone thought that way.

Exactly. So what you and your team have built, do you consider the tool, emote or the people, or is it something else? I think it's the people. I think people forget how important people are. Sometimes I agree they are the engine. Even if you have technology improving upon that engine, it's an augmentation.

Part Two. All right. Last time on making sense of martech. Elizabeth Martin told us what a competitor copying her team's AI workflow could actually take from maybe less tomorrow. So today we're asking what happens when every CRM team is running off of this same ideal utopian version. So zooming out to the industry at large and from baby list for the moment, because they're not the only one running this type of experiment, they just might be one of the more advanced versions.

Do you think what you've built at Bibulus is actually rare, or is nearly every single team doing this? How many other teams do you know of who are thinking like this? I keep telling you, you're asking the questions, but it's because you are. I don't think it's rare. I think we maybe started sooner and we're a little farther down the path.

Our AI journey at Bibulus started in 2025. I think I mentioned that earlier and we we had what we called project AI, where every team sort of started to think about what the future of AI could look like for your function. And we really have been encouraged to think about AI and the context of improving our workflows for our team, and then shift our focus to on our side, really improving our life for our users.

We had help. They formed our AI enablement team, who were really critical in helping us get set up with the venerable MCP, and we had really strong goals and documentation, which really enabled us to kind of hit the ground running. And we gave ourselves like a firm deadline of like we wanted to have an email sent through the MCP by Presidents Day that was like the sales and deals email that we wanted to get sent out.

And so we were sort of ready to go when iterable launched their MCP, where it was like we we had a strong AI roadmap and we were sort of operating against was let's just retry all the things on this roadmap continuously because things started to change really rapidly starting in Q4 of 2025. So I guess, to wrap it back into your question, I think what we're seeing now is that as these tools become more public and as more teams, we're trying more things, things are catching up.

And that's wonderful. If there's anything we can do to help or always happy to help other teams. So if so many other companies are maybe just on a different trajectory of the same end goal, how are any of these companies actually protecting that? Reclaim time for strategy. Do you have specific things that maybe you're doing for your team with regards to that?

Do you know other teams that have strategies or frameworks? You know, I don't know. I think for our team, it's really what we've seen is that people are really enjoying the time to dig into the questions they have. You know, being able to say, like, how does this data trigger this email? How does this tie together with this?

What would a good strategy be for for this? Or how can I end to end accomplish this task. And so that's kind of how I've seen it come to life on my team. Um, and then sort of with our pod model owning end to end strategy through production, it's reclaimed time upfront to do more of that, like thinking work, which I think people tend to, well, enjoy more in talking to people on other teams.

I don't know if I've really dug into that. What I've seen be a little bit more unique about our workflows at Baby List is that we have a little bit more access to the tools and a little bit more freedom to experiment. You know, I recently did several rounds of interviews for a role in my team and a role on other teams or roles on other teams.

And what I've seen, that's a lot of people are really staying within the tools don't have permission, like need to get somebody involved to send an automated slack message or need to get somebody involved to sort of either set up an MCP or right to publish to notion or whatever, and we can do all of that stuff, which is an incredible gift for myself and the team, because it just enables us to really push ourselves as far as we can.

So I think what is particularly interesting to me is similar to you. I'm a doer. I don't like to be restricted. It it kills me when I work with certain enterprises, and it takes two weeks to even get a field created in Salesforce, and that's a quick turnaround. And so it really sounds like there's a cultural distinction and difference.

And one the first thing I hear is trust based off of everything you've shared. But what makes the culture enable this type of work? Yes, it's definitely cultural. And Baby List was founded by an engineer, Natalie Gordon, who founded the company to suit her own needs. And really, we have a builder culture and one of our core values is progress, not perfection.

So, you know, you might want that Salesforce feel to be perfect, and I might be able to give it to you in an imperfect way, faster. But the faster way will probably suit your needs for what you need today. So we sort of live our values and how we build and how we execute every day. And that makes it exciting, for sure.

And I guess the next immediate question I have is governance. Like who is overseeing, who gets access to what? Because it sounds like you have pretty much full access to everything. You need to not break anything, but to inform and have all the context. Yeah, the context is all there, which is at this point incredible.

And it's all the context in a snowflake in a data warehouse. Mhm. Yes, I still have snowflake basic access, but I can plug snowflake into Claude and I can talk to snowflake about what I need to know about emails and workflows and what's happening with this user segment. I don't have all of the access. Right.

That's still protected. That still belongs with the data team. My team has built our access with cloud code. We can't like publish PRS. We can submit PRS. They're still reviewed by engineering. So we're being we still do have there still is a line that we can't cross. And we do talk to the AI enablement team about where is that line, how can we move it?

We talked the other day about I didn't know anyone can create an MCP, but anyone can. And I know your thoughts on M.c.p.s. Their security and governance. I'm excited. Intrigued but worried. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We are protecting the business in a smart way. We have enough smart people thinking about that that we feel like we're operating safely.

I love that. Okay, let's say that this approach style to production becomes a standard practice in the next two or so years, because I think the market usually takes anywhere from 2 to 5 years to kind of follow the real trailblazers. And I'm curious, how does this impact the life cycle, the CRM org chart, and does that look different depending on the size of the company and you name it?

If there's 600 people at baby Listening. Where do you foresee this? Yeah, I think we started with what we're calling our pod model, where team members are embedded with product and really end to end owning sort of all parts of the process. I'm curious where it goes next. I think it will change. And I don't know.

I don't know what will happen. What are your thoughts? I wish more people would admit that there is no answer yet. We don't know until we know because I agree. I think that the nice thing about working in this space, and having worked in it for so long, is that it's constantly changing. Channels change, platforms change, capabilities change.

And so the people who know this space know that change is inevitable. And so our roles are going to change either way. This is just accelerating it. Yeah. And the only constant is change. And so it's kind of going to roll with it. Or are you going to fight it. So we can't truly predict what the org chart is going to bring.

That said, fewer people may be doing the same amount of work or less. We don't know. Do you think there's a role that we have not thought of that will exist and come out of this new standard? I'm sure I'm sure there's a role we haven't thought of that will come out of it. The buzz right now is the marketing engineer or the chief marketer that reports to the CMO or the CEO who orchestrates all of the the marketing work or marketing tech enablement.

So I think there's roles that are going to evolve, and then there's roles that are going to be invented. And I think that the people who adopt and use the tools are setting themselves up to be ready for whatever's next. Yeah. Yeah. So many thoughts on the marketing engineer. It sounds like a marketing ops or martech person this whole time, just with a fancier elevation of title to make some people feel better.

I've been in B2C marketing my entire life, so I've never held a marketing ops title or worked super closely with marketing ops, so I don't know. You are very marketing ops focused though, because for those who don't know, Elizabeth and I met a couple three, four years ago when you were evaluating different ISPs and we talked through all the different challenges and, you know, potential angles to think through of what the right fit would be.

And you were more informed than anyone on that call. And yeah, so while you maybe haven't had the title, doesn't mean you haven't had the experience. Thank you very much. It's true. So with all of the differing opinions on what the future of AI is bringing, what is your perspective on AI? Efficiency is mostly a either reduction or just a general headcount justification, just up as an innovative narrative.

There is a version of AI adoption where efficiency just becomes a euphemism for doing more with less. Where you automate 30% of somebody's work, immediately fill that capacity with more work, and you kind of like move on, just like automate, automate, automate. And that we've seen that tension across other industry where AI hasn't broadly translated into massive headcount reductions yet, but it is raising expectations around speed.

And I think in some cases, like what's been really exciting for us is as we embed with our partners, we're able to work faster. I think what we haven't sacrificed is our commitment to like a good output and a good work product. And so for us, we've been able to spend time on the front end of what the what the end, what the output is, instead of sort of the technical execution aspect on my team.

I don't want to say we spend 30% more campaigns because we can. I want us to be spending that time being smarter and making sure that, like, if our program can be 30% more efficient and drive the business and our communications can be 30% better for our users. That would be a better output than us just doing 30% more work.

If that makes sense. Oh does it? I am a huge proponent of send out when it's or deploy something when it's actually worthy. Don't just deploy and execute something just because you can. Not only is it not a thoughtful way, but it's not particularly strategic. You've got very specific segments and subsegments.

Use that wisely. Otherwise you're just kind of throwing gasoline on a fire and just hoping it does something. Yeah. And it's not great. Yeah. And I think we we really it's for us like baby lights really believes in AI. As for us it's really about making parents lives easier and and everything we do is how can we make parents lives easier and serve our families, our growing families.

And so AI is going to help us do that. I mean, everybody's using it. And so how can we leverage it in a smart way? And so I know you and I briefly touched on this, but you know, we're automating now. And that automation now is going to free us up. And maybe we can talk about this next time. It's going to free us up to do more personalization and make things better for our users.

Yes, I am so curious, but I want to zoom back in from the greater industry and onto you. So a year from now, if this AI workflow is the standard across different industries and everyone using some version of it, what's the thing about how you led this rollout that you want people to remember and or maybe some advice?

People really need the space to experiment and try things. The where this has been the most successful is when you have real workflow problems, like real things that you're trying to solve a problem. If you're not trying to solve a problem or not, or automate something that is slowing you down day to day, you're not going to see the opportunity.

And I think that's been really eye opening is everybody has a different aha moment with workflows for this specific workflow. I think AI can be uncomfortable and really recognizing that, you know, changing your work really rapidly can be uncomfortable and really making space for that, but also like making space for that, that experimentation.

And you do have to slow down to speed up. And then I would also say start documenting now if you want to do this a year from now. So make sure all of your processes are documented because they won't work if you don't write it down. Exactly. I mean, I've always been a huge documentation nerd. Now I feel so validated and vindicated this whole time.

00:36:54 — 00:38:24

I'm so happy for you. I know I'm the rare, rare one that enjoys that kind of thing. And I think to add on to your statement about giving people the space to try and not be overwhelmed, I think there's also easy things to implement, like cool AI channel where it's like, hey, I built this cool thing. And so that it's more of a learning experience for everyone.

And to your point, you had a quick scenario where someone presented something and you're like, wait, can you show me exactly how you did it? And really fostering these connections of guess what? Anytime someone says they're an expert in AI right now is full because no one's an expert. Like I would dare to say even the machine learning engineers who are working on these things that are creating the LMS, they don't know what they're doing.

They know a lot more than what the standard lay public do. But that's not saying very much. And so it's an exploratory time, and it should be exploratory with intentions of how do we do this? Let's do it together. Let's learn. And so it's kind of like going back to school in a lot of ways for sure. And a baby list we have every other week we have AI show and tell.

We have an AI channel where people are sharing their ideas. And we have on the marketing side, we have our own AI channel because the other area channel can be very engineering focused and we're marketers. But what do you mean you're also marketing engineers? What about you? Thank you. Uh,

00:38:25 — 00:45:34

you know, somebody might come to a show and tell and be like, oh, this is silly, but I figured out how to get to Inbox Zero using the Claude Gemini plugin and somebody else, that's their aha moment. And somebody else might come and say, I figured out how to create a calendar for all my kids events. And so people are using it in all kinds of different ways.