Taste is having a moment in marketing conversations—and for good reason. But Heike Young, who's spent years leading content innovation at scale, says taste alone won't close the gap between good marketers and great ones. The other half of that equation is what this episode is really about.

Heike has spent her career leading content innovation at scale, including growing Salesforce's branded YouTube channel to more than 800K subscribers through a deliberate, creator-first strategy.

In this episode, she makes the case for why human storytelling is the durable skill that separates great marketers; how carving out even 10–15% of your time for innovation can define a career; and why "resonance over reach" should be the filter every content decision runs through.

3 Takeaways:

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Chapters:

About the Guest:
Heike Young is a content strategist, consultant, and speaker with 15 years of experience building content programs that grow brands. She spent 11 years at Salesforce in ascending content leadership roles — co-hosting an award-winning B2B marketing podcast and leading the video team that grew Salesforce's YouTube channel to over 800,000 subscribers through creator partnerships, branded series, and global event coverage. She went on to lead content, social, and integrated marketing at Microsoft before launching her own practice in 2025, focused on consulting, speaking, and content creation. Her work has been featured in Forbes, AdWeek, CNBC, USA Today, and more, and she has consulted brands including Disney, Clorox, and L'Oréal on marketing strategy.

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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:

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Chapters:

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. 

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When someone clicks your ad and the experience falls apart, perfect attribution data doesn't save you. Paula Mantle, VP of Marketing at Branch, has watched this play out across a decade in tech where she learned that most purchase decisions are made long before anyone reaches for a bottle.

Paula brings that lens to how AI is reshaping discovery, why the "more content" era of AI produced mostly noise, and what marketers actually need to do now. In this episode: why linking infrastructure beats tactical channel thinking, what a recent rebrand at Branch taught her about consistency as a competitive asset, and why curiosity is the only skill with a long shelf life right now.

3 Takeaways:

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Chapters:

About the Guest:
Paula Mantle, VP of Marketing at Branch, a leading linking and measurement partner for retailers, enterprises and everything in-between. With over 15 years of experience leading multi-channel marketing efforts, Paula takes pride in building and executing creative marketing that informs and educates. 

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The most common AI mistake in marketing isn't choosing the wrong tool. It's skipping the foundational work that makes any tool effective.

Al Moore, VP of Marketing at Fluency—a platform built to deploy advertising at scale through AI-powered automation—has watched this play out from both sides: as a vendor and as a practitioner running his own team. His argument: AI accelerates whatever's already there, which means authentic storytelling, audience clarity, and cross-functional alignment matter more now, not less. 

He joins Sara to break down what it looks like to move from scattered AI experimentation to a governed, org-wide operating model—and why the HR mindset, not the tech mindset, is what separates teams that scale from teams that stall.

3 Takeaways:

🚀 Subscribe to 10 Minute Martech for fast, practical insights from senior B2B marketing leaders on what’s working right now.

Chapters:

About the Guest:
Al Moore is a creative, collaborative, and values-driven B2B marketing leader with a 15+ year track record of driving outcomes through integrated brand and performance marketing strategies. A proven people leader, he builds high-performing teams, earns trust across organizations of all sizes, and develops thriving integrated marketing programs. Al is known for turning disparate inputs from customers and business stakeholders into crisp, coherent messaging and compelling value propositions that drive employee engagement and sales results. Executive teams rely on him for critical messaging and communications that require both strategic clarity and a sensitive touch.

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💡 Learn more about Progress: www.progress.com

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Kyle Lacy’s team at Docebo is running 50 AI experiments a year and says the results are generating a multimillion-dollar pipeline... from tools his team built in a week. The Chief Marketing Officer joins the show to connect the dots between those two outcomes: whether leadership is investing in upskilling or just issuing mandates. 

Kyle is one of the most experienced go-to-market executives in SaaS, having scaled marketing through acquisitions, high-growth phases, and now a period where AI is rewriting the rules faster than most playbooks can keep up.

3 Takeaways:

Subscribe to 10 Minute Martech for fast, practical insights from senior B2B marketing leaders on what’s working right now.

Timestamps:

Connect:

Follow This — Kyle’s Recommendations:
Karen Flanagan: AI newsletter
Claire Vo: How I AI podcast
Jordan Crawford: Cannonball GTM substack

Kyle’s Best Insights:

"Anybody that I'm talking to right now in marketing that can't explain to me how they use AI, I'm not interested in hiring."

"Used the right way, you can do more creative, more responsible marketing that will give you an edge on everybody else who's just trying to build stuff for the hell of it."

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Informed buyers. Generative AI. Faster decision-making. The buying journey is undeniably changing, but the real question is how to keep up without losing focus?

Chae O’Brien, Principal Strategist at Thought Bakery, says the answer to ambiguity is  discernment. In this episode, host Sara Faatz sits down with Chae to explore why discernment has become the must-have tool for B2B marketers, and how to use AI as a strategic accelerator without letting it pull your team off course.

Chae: 
“For us to really have that discernment to know what should be part of our customer experience and what just doesn’t represent who we are, you need to intimately know what their day-to-day looks like.”

“I am not going to read ten blogs. I am not going to read fifty-page PDFs.”

“That discernment between what the AI is giving you and the context that you have is what’s really important—because if you can’t discern between the options, you’re not yet sure where your brand really plays.”

Links & Resources:
Connect with Sara: linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Connect with Chae: linkedin.com/in/chaenara
Learn more about Progress: www.progress.com

Timestamps:
00:40 – Diving into AI Challenges for Startups
02:35 – Understanding Customer Experience
03:15 – The Changing Landscape of Digital Interactions
05:25 – Leveraging AI for Go-to-Market Strategies
06:40 – Influential Figures in AI
08:50 – Future of Work and Leadership

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Kevin Hein, Chief Growth Officer at GIPHY,  sits down with Sara to discuss how AI, automation, and shifting consumer behaviors are reshaping the marketing landscape—and why brands can’t rely on legacy playbooks to keep up. 

Instead, he makes the case for surrendering control strategically through experimentation. The conversation explores the risks of over-automation, creative fatigue, and data paralysis, and why even the most sophisticated AI systems still need human insight to protect brand authenticity and drive long-term growth.

3 Key Takeaways:

• You can’t outpace AI. Experiment instead.
• Automation without insight leads to creative fatigue.
• More data doesn’t mean better decisions.

Kevin: 
“The speed at which this moves—how does a brand stay at that pace? I believe the answer is you don’t. You have to surrender to an extent. And it comes down to testing, learning, and experimentation.”

“We have a lot of data that can be paralyzing. I’m interested in insights—not dashboards that just tell you X, Y, and Z.”

“AI can be incredibly effective, but there’s a risk of numbness—creative fatigue that happens when everything is optimized but nothing is truly new.”

Links & Resources:
Connect with Sara: linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Connect with Kevin: linkedin.com/in/kevinahein
Learn more about Progress: www.progress.com

Timestamps:
00:50 – Shift from Feeds to Group Messaging
01:50 – Harnessing Group Messaging for Business
02:35 – Challenges and Opportunities in Experimentation
03:25 – The Role of AI in Brand Authenticity
06:20 – Future Trends in AI and Retail
11:10 – The Evolution of Websites and Digital Experience
13:25 – Balancing Automation and Creativity

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Eudald Camprubí, Co-Founder of Nuclia and Progress Software Fellow, joins Sara to demystify agentic RAG—what it is, why it matters, and how it’s transforming the way marketers deliver hyper-personalized, contextual experiences at scale.

Eudald explains how retrieval-augmented generation allows organizations to ask questions of their own knowledge—securely, privately, and without the hallucinations that plague general-purpose LLMs. 

He breaks down: 

• The critical step most teams overlook.
• The emerging role of small language models.
• How the combination of agents, MCP, and RAG will soon enable autonomous, high-value workflows across the entire customer journey.

Eudald: 
“RAG is a way for organizations to ask questions to their own knowledge and get answers—while keeping data security and privacy in place.”

“We’re not using general knowledge. We’re using a very small context we know is useful to answer the user’s question—and this is how we avoid hallucinations.”

“Humans are changing how they want to access information. Everything is about conversations and getting answers in the right context.”

Links & Resources:
Connect with Sara: linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Connect with Eudald: linkedin.com/in/eudaldcamprubi
Learn about Progress® Agentic RAG platform: progress.com/agentic-rag
Learn more about Progress: www.progress.com

Timestamps:
00:45 – Understanding AI and Avoiding Hallucinations
01:20 – The Concept of Agentic RAG
02:40 – Combating Hallucinations in AI
03:50 – Marketing Use Cases for Agentic RAG
06:05 – Small Language Models vs. Large Language Models
07:15 – Future of AI and Agentic RAG
09:40 – Inspiration Behind Nucleus and Progress Agentic RAG

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Suzanne Reed, Chief Marketing Officer at LBMC, joins Sara to unpack the modern marketer’s biggest challenge: keeping pace with AI-driven change without losing the human touch.

Together, they explore why a smaller, integrated MarTech stack delivers better results, how buying communities reshape the B2B playbook, and why AI can accelerate great marketing—but can’t replace the marketer’s critical thinking.

Suzanne also reveals LBMC’s recent experiment comparing AI-generated brand outputs across competitors—an eye-opener about commoditization and the importance of brand distinctiveness in the age of large language models.

You’ll learn:

• Why simplifying your MarTech stack may be your highest-ROI move
• How “HGO—Human Engine Optimization” reframes modern marketing
• What AI can (and can’t) do when it comes to buyer understanding
• How to equip early-career marketers to thrive in an AI-heavy world
• Why direct mail is back—and what personalization really means today
• What LBMC discovered when analyzing competitors via LLMs

Suzanne: 
“I call it the HGO… Human Engine Optimization. The human is the hub of all of this.”

“Marketing has always been about the psychology of the buyer. AI can help us be smarter and faster, but it cannot address those things.”

“We think we control our brands—but the models showed we’re all in the same bucket. We’re commoditizing ourselves.”

Links & Resources:
Connect with Sara: linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Connect with Suzanne: linkedin.com/in/suzannereedfranklintn
Learn more about LMBC: www.lbmc.com
Learn more about Progress: www.progress.com

Timestamps:
00:40 – Marketing Challenges and Technology
01:20 – MarTech Integration and Success
03:17 – Human Element in Marketing
05:15 – Advice for New Marketers
08:56 – Hyper-Personalization in Marketing
09:58 – Experimentation and Brand Differentiation
10:57 – Inspiration and Industry Leaders

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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:

• How leading marketers are redefining “human in the loop” to drive creativity, strategy, and better outcomes
• Where AI is delivering real, measurable impact across workflows, personalization, and productivity
• The hottest Martech takes of the year—from content strategy to customer experience to rethinking systems entirely

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

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