Six themes on AI and customer marketing

It’s nearly 9pm and I’m headed home on the last flight out of San Francisco to Santa Barbara. What a fun day of learning. I caught up with old friends and made some new ones.

Here are the themes I kept hearing all day:

• Growth lives in your existing customers. Retention comes first, because you can’t grow a leaky bucket.
• Faster silos are still silos. Every team asks customers for something, and very few share what they learn.
• AI needs a solid data foundation. Skip it and you just get faster confusion.
• Keep humans in the relationship. Automate the impersonal work and spend the time you save on real conversations.
• Customer voice matters more than ever. Buyers ask AI before they talk to sales, so specific customer proof gets found.
• Outcomes win budget. Activity doesn’t, retention and revenue do.

What I took away: the teams winning are the ones that listen first and share what they learn across the whole company.

Thank you Base for putting this on, and for the new connections and the chance to catch up with old friends. Great time all around.