AI In Motion

Cathy McPhillips has spent 30 years in marketing, from running Content Marketing World at CMI to leading marketing at SmarterX, the company behind Marketing AI Institute, MAICON, AI Academy, and The Artificial Intelligence Show. She's surrounded by AI education every single day. In this conversation with Asma Stewart, Cathy gets real about what it actually looks like to market AI when AI is your entire product, where CMOs are consistently getting stuck, and why the biggest barrier to adoption isn't the technology, it's admitting you don't understand it yet.

About our guest: Cathy McPhillips is CMO of SmarterX. She previously served as VP of Marketing at Content Marketing Institute, where she ran Content Marketing World. At SmarterX, she leads marketing, brand, and communications across the full portfolio including Marketing AI Institute, MAICON, AI Academy, and The Artificial Intelligence Show. She co-authored the "AI for CMOs" blueprint and co-hosts AI Answers with Paul Roetzer.

In this episode: 00:00 — Cathy's story: from career assessment to 30 years in marketing 02:00 — Community building: from Content Marketing World to SmarterX 05:00 — When AI stopped being something you cover and started changing your job 08:30 — Safeguarding the parts of work you enjoy 09:00 — How SmarterX thinks about AI strategy internally 10:30 — Use cases over tools: why chasing new tech kills momentum 12:00 — Getting comfortable with messy and uncomfortable 13:00 — Where CMOs are consistently getting stuck 15:00 — Hands-on-keyboards: why CMOs can't delegate AI transformation 16:00 — Empowering your team without micromanaging their AI use 18:00 — Inside the SmarterX marketing machine: how the team actually uses AI 21:00 — How absorbing AI at high velocity changes decision-making 22:00 — Documenting processes to find where AI fits 25:00 — Content marketing was a choice. AI is not. 26:30 — Solving the shelf-life problem: keeping AI education durable 29:00 — The fun one: planning a Europe trip with Gemini and building a Paul GPT 32:00 — Where to find SmarterX, MAICON, and AI Academy

AI In Motion is the podcast from Clarity & Motion Collective (CMC) exploring how marketing and GTM leaders are actually using AI, not the hype, but the real playbooks. New episodes weekly.

Subscribe and follow: https://podcast.clarityandmotion.com/ https://www.clarityandmotion.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/clarity-motion-collective/

Only 6% of people claiming to build AI agents are actually building AI agents. And that might be generous. Megan Ratcliff sits down with Justin Parnell, founder of Justin GPT, to separate what's real from what's noise. Justin walks through the agents he builds for GTM teams every day, shares the suitability matrix he uses to decide when a workflow actually deserves automation, and explains why he walked away from 8 of 12 agent requests from a single client. They also get into the leapfrog moment happening for non-technical builders with tools like Claude Cowork, why the "I replaced my team with prompts" crowd is missing the point, and what's coming next with reinforcement learning models.

In this episode, Carol-Lyn Jardine sits down with Heather Hurst, VP of Marketing of Canopy, to talk about what it actually takes to move from experimentation to AI that scales. How she built shared GPTs and product marketing foundations. Why her team now thinks "AI first" before defaulting to how they've always worked. And how they pulled off campaigns that would've been impossible before (like 300 customized Wheaties boxes with prospect faces on them).

This is what readiness looks like when AI stops being a pilot and starts being how work runs.

What you'll learn:

• Why 100% adoption isn't the finish line
• The hidden risk of letting teams work in AI silos
• How to build AI as a system your whole team can compound from
• What "AI first" actually looks like in practice
• How to move from capacity gains to unlocking new capabilities

Welcome to AI, In Motion — the podcast about how leaders actually make AI work.

We’re Carol-Lyn Jardine, Asma Stewart, and Megan Ratcliff — co-founders of Clarity & Motion Collective, operators building with AI in the real world.

Each episode, we talk with operators, CMOs, and builders navigating AI in the real world — what’s working, what’s not, and what it really takes to move from experimentation to impact.

The conversation delves into the impact of AI in marketing, reflecting on 2025 and the shift to 2026 as the year of AI transformation. It also explores the challenges and tips for overcoming blockers in AI transformation, emphasizing the need for innovation and fluency in AI adoption.

Chapters

• 00:00 Reflecting on 2025
• 08:54 The Shift to 2026
• 17:31 Identifying Blockers
• 28:18 Overcoming Blockers