Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to The Outpost, where customer marketers trade what works.
This is where your peers are sharing their best customer marketing and advocacy plays –– the ones that get their CEO's attention.
Join us every other week for new episodes. And to join one of our sessions live and unlock the content that will define your next best play, mosey on over to userevidence.com/outpost
[00:00:08] Jillian Hoefer: Hello everybody, and welcome. I am Jillian Hofer. I run content at User Evidence. We are so excited to have you here today for our vibe code check. It's a vibe code check. We are going through not only some incredible research that we have put together with Scott Brinker, you're getting a first look at it
[00:00:27] Jillian Hoefer: But then also we're gonna be grounding some of this data today with some actual practitioners who are in the field vibe coding with their teams, have moved into more systematic vibe coding rather than just one-off little experiments here and there.
[00:00:37] Jillian Hoefer: So we're so excited to have you here today with us
[00:00:40] Jillian Hoefer: We are being joined today by Emily Pick and Ashley Ward.
[00:00:44] Jillian Hoefer: They are practitioners who work, Emily's at Docebo, Ashley's at LeanData. They're gonna be just bringing some groundedness to our conversation today. We have some aggregate data that we're sharing from our report, obviously, that really it's good to just have, like, tactical, practical people who are in the field sharing their own experiences.
[00:00:59] Jillian Hoefer: So Emily is one of the product marketing leaders at Docebo, and Ashley runs customer marketing and advocacy over at LeanData. They're gonna be telling us exactly how their teams are using vibe coding and kind of their own experiences to bring some groundedness to the data we're talking about today.
[00:01:11] Jillian Hoefer: And then we're gonna kick the conversation off today with Scott Brinker, who does not need an introduction, let's be honest, but I'll give you the intro just in case you don't know. Scott Brinker used to be the VP of platform ecosystems at HubSpot, and now is one of the most influential voices in the world in marketing technology.
[00:01:28] Jillian Hoefer: He's the creator of that famous MarTech landscape chart that you have seen, I'm sure, many, many years running, and the editor of chiefmartech, and he has spent years helping marketers make sense of rapidly changing intersection of marketing, technology, and now AI. So he is the perfect perspective to bring to this conversation and the research that we did.
[00:01:46] Jillian Hoefer: That's why we wanted to partner with him. He brings a unique perspective on where the industry is heading, and so I'm really, really excited to have him join us for today's conversation. So without further ado, I am gonna bring Scott to the stage here. Hi, Scott.
[00:01:57] Scott Brinker: Hi, Jillian. Wow, that's the most enthusiastic introduction I've ever received.
[00:02:02] Jillian Hoefer: If nothing else, I'm here to bring the enthusiasm. We are so excited to have you, and thank you not only for being here today, but also for partnering with us and User Evidence on this research. Um, I, I think I hopefully can speak for both of us. We've got some good stuff that we're sharing today.
[00:02:15] Scott Brinker: Oh, I am so looking forward to this.
[00:02:18] Jillian Hoefer: Amazing. So we'll start with kind of just the overview of the results and the research that we are sharing today. Um, so who we surveyed for this. We had 302 SaaS marketing leaders sound off, anywhere from manager level to leadership to practitioners. The interesting thing about this research, and the thing that I do wanna just point out to everyone just to have some context here, is that the top roles that we ended up surveying for this research were marketing ops directors and VPs, VPs or heads of marketing, so leaderships within marketing, and CMOs, 65% of whom worked in demand gen, growth, brand, and content functions.
[00:02:55] Jillian Hoefer: So this is not, like, a tech-skewed audience. This is definitely people who s- you know, run the, the gamut of marketing, and some of them are more technical marketers, some of them are not technical marketers at all. So we have a lot of cool research here that I just wanna kind of frame in that light of these are not all tech people that we were talking to.
[00:03:13] Jillian Hoefer: Vibe coding is opening up the world to so many others, um, and I, I, I know that, Scott, you feel the same way.
[00:03:18] Scott Brinker: Yeah. And just to qualify it, so the 302 people we surveyed, one of the qualifications for it was that they are actually using some sort of vibe coding tool. So this isn't about, like, who's using or not using vibe coding.
[00:03:30] Scott Brinker: This research is entirely about for those who are doing vibe coding, what are they doing? What's working? How are they managing it? Uh, so just want that framing there as well, too.
[00:03:40] Jillian Hoefer: Absolutely. Perfect point. So let's dive in. So what Scott and I are gonna be doing today for the first part of this conversation before we bring Emily and Ashley on a little bit later, is that we just wanna go over kind of like the big beats of the research and the findings that we had come out in this report.
[00:03:55] Jillian Hoefer: Obviously, like I said, you guys will get the report. You can deep dive into all the cool little data points that come out. I'm sure everyone finds a storyline that is impactful to them. But, like, these are the six points that our teams, as user evidence do for our tech, if we've been living in this data the past few months, really went, "Ooh, okay, th- this is interesting.
[00:04:11] Jillian Hoefer: We really do need to make sure that we call this out." And Scott, of course, is gonna be adding his industry commentary here that you're not even getting in the report. So the first thing that is just kind of important, again, to level set from the research here, adoption, really, of vibe coding is already mainstream.
[00:04:25] Jillian Hoefer: So we found that seven out of 10 respondents said that their team already vibe codes with at least some structure, which I do think is something interesting because it's not just, like, one-off, like, "I tried lovable ones." It's there's some structure involved. And 41% said that it's widely used or fully embedded within workflows.
[00:04:42] Jillian Hoefer: For you, Scott, just, you know, you've been mapping the MarTech landscape for a long time. When did this vibe coding kind of thing and trend start feeling different to you? Like, it maybe wasn't just another wave of hype.
[00:04:54] Scott Brinker: Well, I mean, it's sort of amazing when you think it was only, like, February last year that even the term vibe coding, uh, you know, which is sort of an off-the-cough, off-the-cuff, uh, you know, post on X, uh, by Andres Keparti.
[00:05:07] Scott Brinker: Um, and here we are, like, you know, just a little bit more than a year later, and oh my goodness, like, everyone knows vibe coding, whether they're actually using vibe coding or not. And what was fascinating in this research was for those who actually are using vibe coding, how quickly they've actually matured of adopting it, you know, not just these sort of one-off experiments, uh, you know, not this sort of like, as you say, yeah, "Oh, I randomly tried lovable once," you know, but people actually developing this as a part of their marketing operations, their marketing workflows.
[00:05:40] Scott Brinker: Um, I mean, I'm, I'm trying to think. I have been in MarTech, uh, for, like, decades, and I can't think of anything that has had that sort of rapid maturity adoption curve in the history of MarTech ever
[00:05:56] Jillian Hoefer: I mean, I think also, Scott, we would be remiss not to mention that, you know, like GTM engineering, that kind of whole, you know, discussion did predate this.
[00:06:05] Jillian Hoefer: It kind of like led up to it. Can you share a little bit maybe about like wh- where did you see kind of go-to-market engineering fitting in and, like, did, how did that give way to vibe-coding, if so, in any way?
[00:06:16] Scott Brinker: Yeah. Well, I mean, this has been sort of this long arc, uh, of more and more technical talent existing within the marketing organization, right?
[00:06:23] Scott Brinker: The rise of marketing technologists, which, oh my goodness, is, you know, 20-some-odd years old at this point. Uh, you know, uh, marketing operations in the past decade really started to develop, uh, as a much larger and more influential part of the, uh, marketing organization. And then in sort of like the, uh, what we'll say the, uh, the, the post-AI spark of, you know, ChatGPT in, you know, 2022, uh, we saw some really significant advances forward, one of them being that whole go-to-market engineering movement, which Clay gets credit for, uh, uh, coining the term go-to-market engineering.
[00:06:59] Scott Brinker: You know, and I think what you found is the, the, the set of people, whether they were working in marketing operations officially, or if honestly they were, like, demand marketers, growth marketers, who simply were leaning into, "What are the latest tools and technologies I can leverage, uh, to unlock, uh, the work I'm trying to do?"
[00:07:18] Scott Brinker: I mean, in some ways this has been like the, uh, the arc we've also seen with, like, no-code capabilities, going back to, like, Airtable and, uh, Zapier. But boy, did it take on an acceleration here over these past couple years.
[00:07:31] Jillian Hoefer: Absolutely. Yeah, it's been fascinating to be in the, in the depth of it, you know, as someone who's in the marketing side right now.
[00:07:38] Jillian Hoefer: So obviously, adoption was an interesting takeaway from our research here, but I think this is where we start to get into the stuff that we really went, like, okay, this is what people have been wanting, outside of just the platitudes that you see on LinkedIn of like, "I vibe-coded something that replaced my entire marketing organization."
[00:07:52] Jillian Hoefer: Like, we really wanted to see, okay, what are people actually using? How are they building this? How are they building things with vibe-coding? So according to our research, the top use cases right now are pretty much all internal. So 57% of teams are using, you know, workflow automations, like lead routing and data syncs.
[00:08:09] Jillian Hoefer: So that's what they're using vibe-coding to create. They're doing custom integrations between platforms and APIs. They're, you know, cleaning and enriching pipelines, building internal tools like calculators. And then also the customer-side fa- or the customer-facing side. So there's really only 17% of our respondents that said they were building actual customer-facing apps with this technology.
[00:08:34] Jillian Hoefer: Scott, in your opinion, like, w- are you surprised at this, that people started internally? And, and do you think there is gonna be a shift to external soon, or do you think we're gonna stay within that realm of like, "Ooh, I think I just wanna build these things for my internal teams"?
[00:08:46] Scott Brinker: All right. Well, if you go back one slide, I'm not touching the slides, I swear.
[00:08:50] Scott Brinker: All right. Yeah. Go back one slide. Um, I think this is, like, the perfect encapsulation of why vibe coding is the ultimate painkiller, uh, for marketing ops. Uh, because these top three use cases, I mean, these are the things that people have just found so painful. I mean, the workflow automations, you know, routing and data syncs.
[00:09:14] Scott Brinker: One of the reasons why I think AI has been disruptive to classic SaaS applications in the marketing industry is because for, like, the past decade, two decades Marketers, marketing ops teams have largely had to take these SaaS apps as they were built, uh, and like, okay, you can do whatever you want. It's like the old, you know, Ford thing, like you can have your car in any color you want as long as it's black.
[00:09:41] Scott Brinker: You know, like you can do any sort of workflow you want, as long as you're doing it the way we think you should do it inside our product. And if there's another product, you know, that's something different. You know, and for marketers who just work across a heterogeneous tech stack, you know, they have to be able to get things to flow across different applications.
[00:09:59] Scott Brinker: That, that, that really has been a constraint. And so this unlock of using these vibe coding tools to be able to create their own bespoke workflows that span different apps, uh, I mean, that's, that's just, I think, f- I mean, the data shows this has just been a real unlock for folks. Uh, what's the next most common thing that, you know, has been a pain point in MarTech stacks?
[00:10:20] Scott Brinker: Integration. Man, like every single survey that I have seen for the past decade, you ask people like, "What's your pain point with MarTech?" Uh, and if it isn't the top one, it's in the top three of, like, integration. So wow, now I can actually, like with these vibe coding tools, create these more bespoke integrations the way I want.
[00:10:39] Scott Brinker: And I know we're gonna talk a little bit about the magic of how they do that. And then of course, yes, data, data cleaning, data management, you know. But again, we've had to sort of constrain ourselves to the particular ways the individual tools wanted to manage that. Being able to step back with vibe coding just gives marketers and marketing ops teams the ability to really tailor the way they're gonna be managing pipeline management.
[00:11:04] Scott Brinker: So, um, yeah. This is, this is why people are adopting this and loving this. It is a massive painkiller.
[00:11:10] Jillian Hoefer: 100%. And I know that like, you know, we talked a little bit about the, the new capabilities that were unlocked for people who we surveyed. They said they can move faster on experiments without that dev sprint.
[00:11:21] Jillian Hoefer: They can automate previously manual workflows. They can reduce vendor and agency reliance. We're gonna talk about this a little bit later from Emily and Ashley's perspectives, but I am curious, in your work with different teams, Scott, and in your own experience, uh, do you feel like there is an unlock moment typically for people when they go, "Oh, wow, now I get what this vibe coding thing is, and I see the power"?
[00:11:43] Scott Brinker: You know, the most common first step unlock, the one where people like go, "Oh, wow, okay, I get it. This is cool," um, is honestly on the data analytics, uh, reporting side. Mm-hmm. Uh, I mean, let's face it, we have got a ton of incredible data in marketing, but it has been locked in different applications and different silos, and generally the way in which we've had to access that is to, again, go into a particular martech tool, navigate our way through their various, you know, reporting menus, and how do I configure this screen, and what do I do, you know?
[00:12:17] Scott Brinker: Or at some point just give up and say, like, "Um, let me file a ticket and see if an analyst might be able to get to this, you know, sometime before my, you know, uh, you know, retirement begins." Um, you know. And so again, it's just been something like that has been a pain.
[00:12:31] Jillian Hoefer: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:31] Scott Brinker: But then you get people who come in with like, you know, their first experience using some of these vibe coding tools to simply be like, "Oh, well, let me connect a couple of these apps with MCP," I know we'll talk about that in a moment, you know, and then I just ask questions.
[00:12:44] Scott Brinker: I ask the sort of questions that pop into my head that I could ask anyone in just plain natural language, but now I can finally, like, have the, uh, AI be able to deliver the answers to those questions, you know? And it isn't dependent on the boundaries or the particular quirks of an interface for any one particular product.
[00:13:03] Scott Brinker: Uh, it is like mainlining the answers to the analytical questions I have, and marketers have an unlimited number of analytical questions, you know, about their customers and their market. Um, I think for the first time people start doing that and they see those results, it's like, "Wow, okay, I get it. This is magical."
[00:13:21] Jillian Hoefer: Absolutely, and perfect segue, you are a professional, Scott, into the next finding that we had, which is talking about the top tools in the MCP signal. You know, 75% said they're using MCP for at least some integrations, and MCP usage, we found, typically correlates with maturity within an organization of how mature are they actually as an organization of using vibe coding.
[00:13:42] Jillian Hoefer: I mean, for me personally, my usage, I feel like MCP was an unlock, just kind of going, "Oh, now I can pull these things in and I can have a source of truth, and I can pull these data points- Mm-hmm ... that were, like you said, previously locked." Um, so in your perspective, Scott, on the MCP side, like what are you seeing from teams that you're working with?
[00:14:01] Scott Brinker: Well, I mean, first of all, I do think it is worth noting here that when we were asking about the different tools that marketers use, uh, for vibe coding, I mean, there was a good set of like 10 or so that we were asking about, and they included things like, you know, Replit and Lovable that honestly, a few months ago, I would've thought would've been the easier on-ramps, uh, for people who wanna just start playing around with this stuff.
[00:14:25] Scott Brinker: Uh, the fact that those people who are actually using vibe coding in their marketing organizations, their top tools are honestly the same top tools that, you know, like professional developers are leaning into. You know, uh, OpenAI Codex, you know, QuadCode, uh, you know, GitHub Copilot. I thought that was pretty remarkable.
[00:14:44] Scott Brinker: Um, the MCP component of it, though, in many ways, this really is the secret sauce that makes this stuff so valuable for marketing. I mean, don't get me wrong, the, you know, frontier models, uh, they're wonderful in the way they can converse with us. Uh, they have an enormous wealth of knowledge, you know, that they've been trained on.
[00:15:04] Scott Brinker: Um, but it's when you connect them to your existing MarTech stack, your existing data sources through MCP, that's when you're actually able to harness all that intelligence and inference and conversational w- uh, you know, uh, uh, expertise, uh, applied to the specifics of your business. Um, and it's kind of amazing because again, we said earlier, you know, integration has been a real pain point, uh- Mm-hmm
[00:15:32] Scott Brinker: for MarTechs pretty much since the beginning of MarTech. Um, I, I, I feel like this has been my, uh, windmill that I have tilted against, uh, you know, forever. Um, for all these years that we've been wanting better and easier integration in MarTech, there's never actually been a standard for it. You know? It's like every single vendor in their own particular way, and this particular API and, you know, it just was a real friction to being able to get a wider integration across the industry.
[00:16:01] Scott Brinker: Anthropic introduces MCP, uh, and remarkably, in just a few short months, you know, OpenAI and Google and essentially all the major players in the industries say, "Great, fine. We'll use this as the standard," which became this incredible unlock. I mean, as an aside, I don't know when we're ever gonna see all those major frontier labs ever agree on anything ever again.
[00:16:23] Jillian Hoefer: Right.
[00:16:23] Scott Brinker: But thank goodness they agreed on this one. Um, and then as soon as people started seeing these unlocks, you know, that started this flywheel where they started pushing all of their other MarTech vendors to be like, "Hey, you really need to give us an MCP server." You know, and the more that we do that, the more they felt compelled to do it to the point where pretty much for every major MarTech tool that's on the market right now, you can connect to it in your AI interface of choice through MCP.
[00:16:49] Scott Brinker: Oh my goodness, in, like, 18 months, this is, this is an insane acceleration of adoption, and let me just say I am here for it.
[00:16:58] Jillian Hoefer: I, again, kind of going back to the point that you made earlier, Scott, do you typically see the kind of first foray into MCP, is it for that data use case and pulling data from different sources into one place?
[00:17:11] Scott Brinker: Absolutely. And you know, one of the points here too of like, uh, the security component of this. Mm. 'Cause I know one of the objections we sometimes hear when people haven't looked closely at this, they're like, "Wait, what? You can just connect anything and get any data you want?" No, this is the whole point of having MCP as official servers in our existing MarTech apps.
[00:17:30] Scott Brinker: You know, our existing data platforms, is those things have the place where, okay, for a MarTech app, marketing ops controls who has access to do what. The fact that they're accessing it through MCP, that doesn't matter. The governance structure stays in place. If you're connecting to larger data sources across your organization, your IT and data teams, they have set up, you know, uh, or they should have set up right, good governance for, like, how you're able to access what permissions you have for what data you can get to.
[00:17:58] Scott Brinker: The fact that you're getting it through MCP in no way reduces that security or control. It just makes it actually more accessible for the things that they have permission to use, but just honestly couldn't use it before because it was too technically difficult to actually get at it.
[00:18:14] Jillian Hoefer: Yeah. It's been extraordinary how quickly, you know, the MCP has kind of just taken over of, like, the standard for how these things are being built and asked for from, from software.
[00:18:24] Jillian Hoefer: Um, we're gonna talk a little bit more go- about governance later. We have some really interesting findings about governance, um, that we are gonna talk about. But before we get there, we do wanna talk about just generally something that was very interesting that kind of made all of us raise our eyebrows, uh, on the data analysis side was that we've found that really, uh, the, the adoption and kind of confidence journey of someone who is adopting vibe coding really maps almost identically to that famous Gartner hype cycle, right?
[00:18:51] Jillian Hoefer: Confidence in the beginning is super high, but then at that six to 12 month kind of point, that confidence plateaus. And I think, Scott, we talked about, like, this is something that i- it's not really surprising, but it is very interesting, right?
[00:19:06] Scott Brinker: Yeah, no, I mean, it's, um, it's funny that like Gartner pattern, uh, boy, it's, uh, played out in so many different ways.
[00:19:13] Scott Brinker: Yeah. Um, but I've also, uh, the... It, it also actually maps more or less to like the Dunning-Kruger, uh, curve of like how we actually learn. Um, you know, like when we're first learning something new and we have this unlock of like, oh, wow, this is this capability and what I can do, um, we actually do, just, just human nature, we tend to overestimate.
[00:19:32] Scott Brinker: Oh yeah, this will be great. This... Then I can do it. Oh, and then we start to hit some of the challenges and the hurdles, um, and being emotional creatures, you know, we sort of have that, huh, all right. Now this is hard. Maybe it won't be able to do what I thought it was. But if, you know, we sort of like plow through that dip, uh, what, you know, in the Gartner hype cycle is the, uh, trough of disillusionment.
[00:19:56] Scott Brinker: Boy, that's a great name, trough of disillusionment. You know, it's like if you push through that, you know, that's when you then get to the other side where you actually start to master that skill, master those tools. Um, and it takes a while, you know. Um, it's funny, the original Gartner hype cycle, that curve was expected to generally play out over like a 10-year period.
[00:20:18] Scott Brinker: Yeah. That was back, you know, in those queen old days when we thought 10 years was a fast adoption cycle for technology. You know, what has happened across MarTech, across the tech industry overall, is that cycle has compressed to something that is closer to two to three years, and that is exactly what the data from this, uh, study showed.
[00:20:36] Scott Brinker: I mean, it is essentially a two-year cycle for folks to like get over that like initial hump of like, oh, wow, this is the unlock to the universe. Okay, no, we actually, this is gonna take a little bit more work to, you know, really master it. Uh, but then being able to push through to the other side.
[00:20:52] Jillian Hoefer: And I do think, Scott, it kind of speaks to the importance of top-down encouragement and buy-in, right?
[00:20:59] Jillian Hoefer: Because if it's just one person experimenting, they're in that trough of disillusionment. Their leadership doesn't understand or doesn't want them to continue pushing through to the other side of that. It becomes very easy to go, "Okay, well, I'm just abandoning this 'cause I have got to get my stuff done.
[00:21:13] Jillian Hoefer: I can't, you know, be in this, you know, experimentation phase for forever." Would you agree with that?
[00:21:18] Scott Brinker: Totally. And I mean, again, it's one of the things that a lot of technology adoption historically-
[00:21:24] Jillian Hoefer: Hmm ...
[00:21:25] Scott Brinker: tends to happen bottom up. Uh, you know, like, it's the people who are actually hands-on, you know, are like, "Oh, here's this new thing I can use."
[00:21:32] Scott Brinker: In fact, often there's usually resistance, you know, top-down to like, "I don't know about this new-fangled technology you want to do." Um, it is really wild that with AI it was such the opposite. You know? Yeah. Where boards and C-suites were just like, "You just need to use AI." You know, you'd ask them, "Well, what will we use AI for?"
[00:21:51] Scott Brinker: "No idea, but you go figure out. We gotta go use AI." But you're absolutely right. That gave people this incredible cover to actually lean into this, and it still is the folks who are actually hands-on who are figuring out, you know, the real use cases, the real lever points. Um, yeah, but the fact that they've got that top-down, uh, support and buy-in and air cover, that's been phenomenal.
[00:22:12] Scott Brinker: And I think, yeah, it's fair to say that's probably one of the reasons why we've been able to have such this accelerated adoption curve.
[00:22:19] Jillian Hoefer: I think you were the one that pointed it out to me, Scott, when I said, "Oh, 89% of marketing leaders said that they're confident in their team's vi- current ca- capacity.
[00:22:25] Jillian Hoefer: That number is high." And you actually pointed out, you were like, "It's actually, I, I don't think that high because leadership typically, since they're a little bit further removed from the actual doing, they're, they're the most confident in the world."
[00:22:37] Scott Brinker: Yes. Sometimes to the chagrin of them.
[00:22:43] Jillian Hoefer: In this case might be a good thing though.
[00:22:45] Scott Brinker: Might be
[00:22:45] Jillian Hoefer: a good thing. Um, okay. And then coming back to the thing that we kind of alluded to earlier, we did uncover quite a bit about governance and the importance of governance for vibe coding within organizations. And we actually did find out that, you know, there are certain guardrails that organizations that when they put in place, it helps vibe coding become a power up and not a hold up, even when you're in that kind of trough of disillusionment, even when you're in that period that it feels frustrating.
[00:23:12] Jillian Hoefer: Mm-hmm. The governance, actually the guardrails help these teams succeed more often than not. Um, 83% of the people that we surveyed said that some form of formal policy or governance framework was in place. 46% had an org-wide policy, so quite a bit lower there, but at least, you know, I, I do think we're getting to a point that it's growing to that 83% number.
[00:23:32] Jillian Hoefer: The most common guardrails that most people said they had was an approved tool list. Obviously, that's probably the, the lowest bar there that they could set. Um, data access and privacy restrictions, and then code review and QA before deployment. Um, also this, again, the maturity correlation here. 92% of fully embedded orgs said that they had formal governance in place, but only 25% of early experimenters did.
[00:23:57] Jillian Hoefer: Um, and then training was the most underused lever, so only 20% required it as a guardrail, but orgs that do it consistently outperformed in confidence and ROI as well. Anything about those findings, Scott, that was surprising to you?
[00:24:12] Scott Brinker: Well, I think, uh, if you go back one slide on that- Yep ... 'cause this one was, uh, the data I found, uh, yeah, uh, really interesting.
[00:24:20] Scott Brinker: I guess, just as an aside, vibe coding as a name is both a wonderful thing and a terrible thing. It's- It's so true ... wonderful because it is really catchy. You know? Like, once you hear vibe coding, like you remember vibe coding forever. And any, all of us in marketing, we know how hard it is to come up with a name that actually catches.
[00:24:39] Scott Brinker: But that being said, the downside of it is just the nature of when people think of like, oh, vibe, vibe coding, th- it, it, like, feels like, oh, well that's the antithesis, you know, of doing something with any sort of structure or governance, and that's just not the case of what's happening here. Uh, you know, the fact that people are using tools that have been approved and vetted, you know, by, uh, IT, by security, by their marketing ops teams.
[00:25:04] Scott Brinker: The fact that the way in which they're accessing data that they're leveraging in these tools are done through the permission and governments, governance structures, you know, of their existing systems. Um, the fact that when you actually talk about, you know, like deploying apps or agents, they have like, you know, quality assurance, uh, you know, and code review mechanisms for that.
[00:25:23] Scott Brinker: You know, this is... It, it is a myth that vibe coding is just the vibes. Um-
[00:25:27] Jillian Hoefer: Mm-hmm. I thought it was interesting, Scott, you said you had a framing around this when we were discussing these slides about AI adoption starts as single player, but organizations are multiplayer. Could you, could you unpack that a little bit?
[00:25:42] Jillian Hoefer: Because I think a lot of marketing leaders are still treating governance as, you know, like IT's job to figure out.
[00:25:47] Scott Brinker: Well, I think, yeah, that's, that was the other piece of this data that was so fascinating, was most people traditionally, particularly in marketing, you know, when you think about like, oh, governance, the initial thought is like, "Okay, that's gonna be, that's gonna be something that's gonna slow us down."
[00:26:03] Jillian Hoefer: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:03] Scott Brinker: Um, you know, I mean, but we have to do it, you know? But it's gonna make it slower The data that we saw actually showed the exact opposite. Once people actually put good governance in place around, uh, their vibe coding capabilities, it actually accelerated, uh, their ability to deliver. And I think it's, yeah, that thing you and I were talking about is, you know, when people first got these AI tools, they were this sort of single-player thing.
[00:26:29] Scott Brinker: Like, "Okay, well, I can do really cool stuff on my computer with my AI tool, you know? And Joe over here and Mary over there, they're each off doing their own things, you know?" But yeah, businesses, organizations, marketing teams, they're not single-player, uh, they are multiplayer. And when you have everyone sort of in a multiplayer game, but treating it as single-player, you know, you just...
[00:26:51] Scott Brinker: You get this sort of like, uh, cancellation of, you know, oh, I'm going in this direction, this other person's pulling in that other direction, or I have to reinvent, you know, what we're doing. You know? Absolutely. It just really, it actually does start to drag. And so the moment you put in some of that just governance structure of like, okay, let's agree we're all going to use these tools, you know, so we can start to share knowledge and skills and things like that.
[00:27:13] Scott Brinker: Okay, here are the clear ways in which, what data you can access and how you access it so you don't, everyone doesn't have to hunt around from scratch every single time they want to implement that. You put those things in place, and all of a sudden it really does put this vibe coding capability on rails.
[00:27:27] Jillian Hoefer: Absolutely, yes. I, I've felt that myself as well, even in our organization as we've adopted it. Um, okay, and then the last bit here we wanna talk about before we bring Ashley and Emily to the stage, important for all of us. What separates the top performers? So according to our research here, the three traits that kind of defined what these high performers at vibe coding were, number one, a marketer or, or a marketing practitioner introduced the practice internally.
[00:27:49] Jillian Hoefer: So we were finding that typically if someone kind of from inside the house, someone from the marketing team said, "Hey, here's the power of this thing," and introduced it, that, that is something that helped kind of power it up even more so. Second, the org formalized governan- governance efficiency, which we talked about.
[00:28:06] Jillian Hoefer: And then nu- number three, the team invested in training. Scott, in your experience in kind of working with teams and talking with teams as well, have you seen that come to life, that kind of the inside the house typically goes quicker?
[00:28:19] Scott Brinker: Yeah, I love that, uh, that framing of it. Um, you know, it's funny, even back in the days of no code, uh, and I wish I could remember who I should attribute this to, but I read a post someone who had this really great insight that, you know, when you empower the person who actually has the pain-
[00:28:37] Jillian Hoefer: Mm
[00:28:37] Scott Brinker: with the ability to come up to, with the solution to their pain, like, the result is magical and utterly unique, you know? And the only thing that held us back was even with no code tools, there was just a limit to, you know, what we could do and how much. You know, that is exactly what you see. Marketers, hmm, they have a bunch of pains, uh, you know, in how things need to get done and how to optimize, you know, their work and their experience and their outcomes.
[00:29:01] Scott Brinker: And by letting them have that freedom to really identify, "Oh, okay, how can I solve this in a way that I understand that is really relevant to my work?" Instead of having someone who actually doesn't understand marketing trying to say like, "
[00:29:15] Ashley Ward: Oh,
[00:29:16] Scott Brinker: okay, here might be an example of how you could, you know, do something that is completely unrelated to market."
[00:29:22] Scott Brinker: It just, you know, it just doesn't resonate. Um, and so yeah, it was really exciting. I mean, you know, wouldn't we choose? Um, you know, uh, we love what we choose
[00:29:32] Jillian Hoefer: And I think unsurprisingly, nine out of 10 respondents said that they plan to expand vibe coding usage in the next 12 months. And, you know, it, it's for those kind of, like, inside the house use cases like we said, like automating campaign orchestration, internal dashboards, custom AI agents, all these things that are helping us as marketers accelerate and, and, and solve that pain, like you were saying.
[00:29:55] Jillian Hoefer: Um, so I mean, future, future's definitely bright here. It's not, it's not the end of a two-year hype cycle, most definitely, at least from my view, I think.
[00:30:03] Scott Brinker: It is only gonna keep getting better because, you know, now the great thing is, you know, we've started to incorporate this into our operations, the way we work, but boy, AI is not standing still.
[00:30:14] Scott Brinker: You know, these models keep getting more sophisticated, the tools and harnesses around them keep getting better and better, and we're just gonna be in position now to, like, inherit, uh, that innovation. Um, yeah, it's gonna be really exciting.
[00:30:27] Jillian Hoefer: It's getting good. Well, I'm very excited. Speaking of getting good, we're gonna have Emily and Ashley join us here on stage.
[00:30:32] Jillian Hoefer: They're gonna talk a little bit about how this research that we've been talking about really is coming to light in their own organization. So Ashley, Emily, welcome to the stage.
[00:30:41] Emily Pick: Hello. Hello. So great to be here with you all today.
[00:30:45] Jillian Hoefer: Wonderful to have both of you joining us. Thank you so much for sharing.
[00:30:48] Jillian Hoefer: Like I said, it's, it's great to be able to kind of ground this data in real experiences. Um, so Ashley, I'm gonna start with you really quickly. I think, you know, Scott and I were talking earlier about, like, the moment. Mm. A lot of practitioners kind of have that moment that it clicks for them and they realize the power of vibe coding.
[00:31:04] Jillian Hoefer: Tell me a little bit about maybe what that moment was for you.
[00:31:07] Ashley Ward: Yes. Um, so I've been at LeanData for seven years. Um, and one of my biggest challenges is just reporting and analytics. I run customer marketing, and that runs over, um, life cycle, expansion, advocacy, and everything is in Salesforce. But, and I'm really good at Salesforce.
[00:31:26] Ashley Ward: Like I know the ins and outs, I know all the fields. Like I, I know how it works, but I just never could get that, like, you know, just that one place where I could go and see, you know, what are all the things that we've, we've done. And so, um, you know, I've had all these different requests to different teams over the years and just, it's one of those things.
[00:31:45] Ashley Ward: So, uh, we had Claude, we have the MCP, we've got all of our stuff in there, and I was like, "Let me see what I can do in here." And in an hour maybe, um, I was able to create this, like, fully amazing where the, literally had everything that I had ever asked for. Um, and it sounds dramatic because it was. Like, I almost started crying because it was just this like, are you freaking kidding me that for so many years I couldn't get this, and now I had, you know, everything.
[00:32:17] Ashley Ward: And it wasn't perfect, and I had to take a bunch of iterations. And it was like, you know what I couldn't do two days ago, all of a sudden something happened and now I could do it this way, and it was just, it was so incredible. Um, so I have a dashboard that shows me all of our pipeline, all of, like, attribution, all of our advocacy activities.
[00:32:36] Ashley Ward: Um, and we get it every week. Um, we can look at it whenever we want. Some of it now finance has taken and integrated into, to bigger company-wide dashboards, but yeah, that was my, my big aha moment
[00:32:49] Jillian Hoefer: Talk about the pain, right, Scott? It's exactly what- That is
[00:32:52] Scott Brinker: awesome ...
[00:32:52] Jillian Hoefer: exactly what
[00:32:53] Scott Brinker: it is. And you can just sort of see the joy, the visceral joy.
[00:32:58] Jillian Hoefer: Every marketer out there is just giving that nod of like, "Oh, yeah, no, we would cry, too. We, we did, we did cry at our moment." Um, Emily, the thing that I was so excited to talk to you about because, uh, you know, I've followed Docebo for a long time, big fan of Kyle AC and the w- whole team that you guys have over there.
[00:33:14] Jillian Hoefer: You guys really have a reputation for just running with AI as an organization, especially as a marketing organization. So what does AI experimentation actually look like for your team at Docebo as someone who's been ... You know, your team has been in this for over a year, I would say, as, like, a full team initiative.
[00:33:32] Emily Pick: Yes, and I think that even beyond Kyle up to our CEO, Alessio, um, it really is to the point that you all kind of made throughout the presentation is we have a lot of top-down support as far as experimenting with AI. Um, I've been at Docebo for about eight, coming up on nine months ago, uh, started. And, um, when I came in, we had so many different AI tools.
[00:34:00] Emily Pick: We were experimenting. We had Replit, we had Vercel, we had, uh, Lovable, we had Figma Make, we had Claude, of course, ChatGPT, Gemini. Um, pretty much if you can dream it, uh, we had it. And so I think very much also to the degree of shifting from experimentation into actually standardizing now, the first Probably four to five months I was here, it was, "Everyone, we're going to support you at least one day a month.
[00:34:29] Emily Pick: We want you to go heads down on AI. We want you to black out a day, and we want you to start building. We don't care what you build, we just want you to figure out what is it that's making your day more difficult, and how can you offload that with AI?" Um, so over the course of, I'd say, in particular, the last three to four months probably, we have really started to think about, okay, which tools across the team are we getting the most value from?
[00:34:54] Emily Pick: Can we make sure that if we're creating something, that it's shareable between everyone? Um- Mm-hmm ... I would say every single function within the marketing team has been deep in experimentation. Um, and in the before times, it was a little bit difficult when you were like, "Hey, I, uh, spun up this Lovable site and I'd really like you to take a look at it."
[00:35:13] Emily Pick: And you're like, "Cool, I don't have, uh, login access to be able to comment on these things." Or they'd be like, "Claude, I just made this thing in Code or Cowork, and look at this great HTML output." Um, and then you're like, "Great, still can't access it." Um, so we, we have gone from experimentation into now we have aligned on what are the tools that we're gonna be using moving forward.
[00:35:36] Emily Pick: And now we're shifting from what are these one-off experiments to what can we do to automate and use AI to improve these processes that we know are repeatable, these workflows that we know are causing a drag in our day-to-day. And I think a great place that we've seen that and where we started pretty early was actually with Lovable.
[00:35:57] Emily Pick: And one of the realizations that we had was it's not just how are we as marketers using the tech internally to make our lives easier, how can we also use it to meet customer expectations for- Mm ... how the market is changing. So a great example, in the past, we, if we wanted to create, like, an interactive tool on our website, right?
[00:36:20] Emily Pick: If we wanted to qualify someone down our pipe, um, that would've been a pretty significant process with the dev team, with the content team, with our demand optimization team. Um, we've been able to streamline that process from something that could've been a months-long major initiative into literal weeks.
[00:36:38] Emily Pick: So, um, we recently published a learning performance index where, uh, we worked with our chief learning officer, uh, to put together what the parameters would be around this thing, and really w- guide our users and our customers through a journey that gives them some actionable insights as far as, hey, where are you?
[00:36:58] Emily Pick: What kind of, uh, almost like a, an Enneagram to a degree, uh, for your type of, uh, persona as a learning leader. So great, based on this persona, what recommendations would we send to you to get you to further your journey and your adoption of learning a new learning tech. So, um, very, very much a different process than it looked like two years ago even, and I, I would say it just starts top down.
[00:37:24] Emily Pick: Um, you have the buy-in from leadership, you have the time to make it happen, you have alignment on tools, you can move fast.
[00:37:31] Jillian Hoefer: I was just gonna say, Emily, with a project like this specifically, to dig even a little bit deeper into the weeds of it, 'cause I know some people who are listening are probably like, "This sounds great, but, like, h- how do you even get something cross-functional like this stood up and get the right people involved?"
[00:37:44] Jillian Hoefer: Who, in this particular instance for this project, who kind of took the lead there and said like, "Hey, we're all gonna get together and we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna drive the project forward"?
[00:37:53] Emily Pick: I mean, this one was to the point of somebody in-house in marketing being it. It was our demand optimization, uh, manager, Amanda, who was like, "Hey, I have this great idea.
[00:38:03] Emily Pick: I recognize that the market is changing, that customer expectations are changing. I would really like to try this." And again, having a CMO like Kyle Lacy, who is, A, really big on experimentation in general, he cares very deeply about the craft and the types of brand experiences we're delivering. He said, "I want you to take this.
[00:38:22] Emily Pick: I want you to run with it. Everyone, get on board and go."
[00:38:26] Jillian Hoefer: And I love it. And Ashley, I know you, you're a direct manager and leader of people. So tell me a little bit from, like, a leadership perspective, how are you encouraging your team and how are you enabling your team to do these experiments to divide code more often as they're getting more comfortable with it?
[00:38:43] Ashley Ward: Yeah. Um, Katie Dunlop, She's on my team. Um, she's really been amazing at sort of leading the charge on this, at least from our team. She, her work is so cross-functional within the marketing team, but also across sales and customer success. And I think when you, you know, have work that spans across especially multiple teams, you can often hit friction in ways that you don't want to.
[00:39:07] Ashley Ward: Um, and so we're always, you know, talking about, okay, what are processes that are painful for us? Like, they're necessary, but they're painful. Where can we use Claude, um, or other tools that we have to make this less painful? So I think it's just this constant, um, you know, s- constant conversation that we're having about, like, how do we solve these problems, you know, and make our lives easier a- and allow us to move more quickly.
[00:39:33] Ashley Ward: Um, and so we're doing all sorts of things, but it's really, I think for us, it's especially those things that are really cross-functional that we're trying to see how do we, how do we do this? And she's been great at, like, doing these things and then building trust across the teams, where it's like, okay, Katie is, like, doing this thing and we trust what she's sending us.
[00:39:51] Jillian Hoefer: Mm.
[00:39:52] Ashley Ward: It's going quickly. It's helping other teams move more quickly, too. Um, so that's been really great.
[00:39:59] Jillian Hoefer: Scott, out of curiosity, in the teams that you are kind of working with and observing and everything, uh, is there, is there a type of function within marketing that's typically the hand raiser that's going, "Ooh, I, I will kind of drive this vibe coding initiative forward"?
[00:40:13] Jillian Hoefer: Or is it really all over the place from your experience?
[00:40:16] Scott Brinker: I mean, it, it can come from everywhere. I would say most of the cases where I see it, it's coming from someone who's in either, like, a marketing ops role or a, a role that's kind of marketing ops adjacent, like a, a go-to-market engineering or- Mm-hmm
[00:40:30] Scott Brinker: you know, rev ops or depending on that. Just because they've often been the ones who have been closest to trying to work with these systems and get this data and be able to like, you know, pull the reports or create the dashboards, and all that sort of pain, you know, that Ashley yeah, was talking about, you know.
[00:40:48] Scott Brinker: And this ability to just be able to simplify that and accelerate that, you know, is an incredible unlock. But then again, because these interfaces are natural language interfaces, they start showing it to their team members, you know, and team member's like, "Well, I'd really like it to do this other thing."
[00:41:03] Scott Brinker: And you're like, "Okay, well, why don't you just ask it?" You know? And they do. And then it's like, oh my God, this is incredible.
[00:41:10] Ashley Ward: Uh.
[00:41:11] Jillian Hoefer: Well, it's interesting 'cause Emily, you shared that story kind of a cross-functional use case that you guys brought all these teams together. Ashley, I know that you kind of had a use case as well that you guys, it was a big unlock for your team understanding that cross-functional as well.
[00:41:22] Jillian Hoefer: So if you wanna share that use case, that would be great to hear.
[00:41:25] Ashley Ward: Um, yeah, I think there's, uh, it's funny, like listening to you guys talk earlier, there's a couple of things I was thinking about and the MCP really is what has unlocked so much for us. And there's actually kind of two directions I think this has helped our team.
[00:41:38] Ashley Ward: So number one, you know, we're customer advocacy and I think the, the old way of customer advocacy is, you know, you create all this content which takes a long time often. Um, you create all this content and then the hardest part is getting sales to be able to find it, putting it somewhere where they actually can find what they're looking for.
[00:41:58] Ashley Ward: Um, I thought I was so, I mean, I was like seven years ago when I started here, I put everything in an Airtable and I had all these filters and it was like so good. Um, and I had it connected to Salesforce, it was awesome. But like still nobody found stuff and they were constantly messaging me and asking me, you know, "Do we have a story about this?
[00:42:17] Ashley Ward: Do we have a story about that?" Um, and so we started using user evidence about a year ago, which I had been trying to bring it in for so many years because I knew it was gonna be awesome. So now we have a, um, we've created hundreds of pieces of content since using user evidence. And so we have the content we're creating through user evidence which is a lot of like quotes and stats and data points which are really valuable, but we also have our traditional case studies, reviews and things like that that we're also generating.
[00:42:48] Ashley Ward: And so what we've been able to do is first in user evidence we've been able to pull all of that into one place. So instead of an Airtable or a spreadsheet, everything lives in user evidence. Um, and then with the MCP now, what's happening is now that's integrated into our sales team and their processes.
[00:43:06] Ashley Ward: So now they're using Claude for everything, for call preps, for building decks, for just everything. And so everything that they're pulling together is automatically pulling in customer proof points. Um, and because we've been able to generate so many proof points with user evidence, there's so much more for them to choose from.
[00:43:26] Ashley Ward: Um, but I, like I'm not getting those requests as much. Um, and so that's just been so amazing for me but also to see our sales team like be so excited about customer proof points that they can use as they're talking to prospects or existing customers. Um, but on the, the other side I was thinking about when I heard you guys talking is The other thing that's helped us is we've been able to use it to find good customers for speaking or case studies, because now we can get all the call recordings, all of the notes, like everything, uh, product usage, everything we know about those customers, we can pull into one place.
[00:44:07] Ashley Ward: So we're able to, like, figure out who are the customers we should be reaching out to. I'm able to even often put together, like, a first draft of a case study before I even meet with them, um, just to be like, "Here's kind of what I was thinking based on what I know. Let's go through and make sure this is all accurate and, you know, the story that we want to tell."
[00:44:26] Ashley Ward: But just being able to move so much more quickly in that, like, identification and content creation has been huge for our team as well.
[00:44:35] Jillian Hoefer: It flips the script on it. It really is. I mean, you guys have definitely... It's been so cool to hear even your sales team come forward and say how they've been enabled with this MCP, um, that, you know, they're able to pull things for their sales prep and they're able to do stuff for competitive.
[00:44:49] Jillian Hoefer: And, I mean, I do feel like that's kind of the MCP unlock that all of us are feeling on our teams. I know, Emily, You had mentioned that you guys at Docebo are using Glean MCP. Can you maybe share a little bit about, like, what that is and how it's used at the organization?
[00:45:02] Emily Pick: Yeah. So I mean, first of all, Ashley Hearing you talk about how you have used the UserEvidence MCP to streamline all of that. We recently signed our contract with UserEvidence, also a big fan, have wanted it for years. Very excited to have it, but I, I'm immediately taking mental notes to share with our customer marketing manager, Lizzie, of, uh, all the things that I want us to build, um, having that MCP in place.
[00:45:30] Emily Pick: I think one of the great things about MCPs is that there are so many. Um, the reason we tend to use Glean quite a bit just because Glean is a knowledge management system, and so it connects a ton of external data sources that you can already query within a single layer. Um, and then now with the MCP, we've standardized that we all use Claude within our organization.
[00:45:53] Emily Pick: Um, we're able to connect that to Claude, and that's able to pull in even more information. Um, I think one of the things I've actually been thinking a lot, even as we are talking, it's been top of mind for me, it's something I'm working on, um, I've been having a lot of coffee chats, uh, with other people who are working on it as well, is, um, as great as all of this vibe coding is and how much we're all using AI, like the importance of having that context layer underneath an AI.
[00:46:21] Emily Pick: So yes, it's great that we have a Glean that can pull in information from anywhere with- across our systems, but is that information trusted and validated? Not always. Um, so that's, that's a project and an OKR we're actually closing out this month, which is our product marketing team is rebuilding the entire marketing context layer that underlies all of this tech.
[00:46:44] Emily Pick: So great if you can go out and vibe code, but making sure that everybody, every single person in our organization is aligned to our ICP, our personas, our segments, uh, making sure that all of our product lines, our message house, our narrative, our brand guidelines, our, our content guidelines, our manifesto, all of this is connected in a single place.
[00:47:05] Emily Pick: And we're still trying to decide how that's going to manifest, if it's something we build an agent for first, if it's something actually create our own MCP for, but I think that's one of the things that as we're all thinking about what can we build with vibe coding, making sure that you have something underneath that's connecting it all, because otherwise you run the risk that I think we've seen for years in marketing, which is, um, everybody taking their specific understanding of what they think you do, uh, and trying to scale that out.
[00:47:38] Emily Pick: So I think this is a super exciting time for us because for the first time there's, there's all these jokes going around in the product marketing community, on LinkedIn in particular, that's like, "PMMs finally got someone to use their messaging doc. It's an agent, but somebody's finally using it." Um, and it hurts, but it also hits home very much because I'm like, "Please, we spend so much time working on this," and now to see it distributed across everything.
[00:48:07] Emily Pick: If, for example, if I'm Ashley and somebody's coming to me and they're like, "Hey, you know what would be great is if ... Do we have a customer story for someone in fin serve, uh, who also, uh, you know, maybe they have a B2B layer, uh, they're actually in EMEA, they have really specific GDPR regulations that we need to worry about, um, also they're a 50,000 person company."
[00:48:29] Emily Pick: Like, do you have anything specific to a single use case?
[00:48:32] Emily Pick: Maybe a, maybe a C-level person that they want to talk
[00:48:34] Emily Pick: to. Yes, yes. Do you have that? And they're
[00:48:35] Jillian Hoefer: left-handed.
[00:48:37] Emily Pick: Yeah. Can ... It's, it's you guys just have a, a case study, customer story ready to go for that, right? Um, now we're giving people with all of these connections the ability to see, hey, this is what we have.
[00:48:49] Emily Pick: Here's how what we have can be tailored. Um, so I think we're in such a new era and it's so exciting. And of course my dog decided to start barking. Uh, so hopefully you can't hear him, but, uh, Apollo- I was
[00:49:01] Jillian Hoefer: hoping, I was hoping for the dog insights, honestly
[00:49:05] Ashley Ward: I think he also
[00:49:06] Scott Brinker: got- The dog approves. The dog is as excited as we are about this.
[00:49:10] Jillian Hoefer: The, okay, I do have to call it though, Scott, the context layer, when Emily brought that up, you did get excited. Talk to me a little bit about, like, why ... Are you seeing that widely, or is that something that you're like, "Oh my gosh, I wish I saw it more 'cause it's brilliant"?
[00:49:24] Scott Brinker: Well, I think, uh, I think there's a lot of companies that, uh, like I would say, Emily, you are clearly ahead of the curve on this, but there are a lot of people who wanna follow your lead on that.
[00:49:34] Scott Brinker: Mm-hmm. Um, I've been joking a bit that I think context is, uh, already MarTech word of the year, uh, for 2026. Everybody's talking context in a variety of, uh, different contexts. Um, but yeah, I mean, the use cases you're describing are absolutely perfect. And this is kind of that variation of what we were talking about earlier, you know, in these findings here, where we've had all this amazing data, you know, but it really has only now been with the, these AI capabilities that we can unlock it.
[00:50:02] Scott Brinker: It's not just classic data, you know, like in, you know, standard databases or, you know, size apps. It's all of that data around, like, messaging docs and case studies, uh, you know, and all the user evidence, uh, you know, content that, you know, you can now get through your MCP. I mean, so much value there that unfortunately, sadly, has largely been untapped just because, yeah, people didn't know how to either access it or didn't wanna take the time to figure that out, much less synthesize across many different things of like, oh, well, how do I pull the data from here and the content from that and, you know, the case study from there?
[00:50:39] Scott Brinker: Oh, man, making that just so easy,
[00:50:42] Jillian Hoefer: I wanted to just pose the question to all three of you, and whoever has, you know, the quickest brain can answer first, then we can popcorn from there. Um, in, you know, in, in your time vibe coding or, or, you know, being in the space and seeing what's happening on, on teams, in your perspective, Scott, what would you say has been your biggest learning so far, and kind of a, something that you think is important for people to take as they're continuing on in their own journeys, whether they're at the beginning or, you know, pushing through that trough of disillusionment like we were talking about?
[00:51:18] Scott Brinker: All right, I'll, I'll take a stab at it. Yeah, go
[00:51:20] Jillian Hoefer: Scott. Use, use your brain.
[00:51:22] Scott Brinker: Um, honestly, the thing I have always loved about marketing is its creativity. It is a creative discipline. And obviously so much of what makes marketing the magical profession it is, is the way we apply that creativity, you know, and how we engage the market and tell the story of our company, you know?
[00:51:43] Scott Brinker: What is fascinating to me is the, all the work behind the scenes of operations for marketing has just been so constrained by the tool set that people have had to navigate, you know, the skills that were required from like, you know, engineering or IT professionals to unlock it. This vibe coding AI capability, it is letting marketers take all that amazing creative talent and energy they have, and now also apply it, you know, to like, oh, well, how do we actually get things done?
[00:52:14] Scott Brinker: How do we actually build stuff? Mm. How do we work stuff? How do we wanna flow it? Um, and you can already tell just from the examples Ashley and Emily were sharing, I mean, like, wow, we're already coming up with, like, some pretty awesome creative ways, you know, to do this. And yet we're, what, barely into this, you know?
[00:52:30] Scott Brinker: I just get so incredibly excited about what all the creativity of marketing and marketers are gonna unlock with this stuff, yeah, over the next few years ahead.
[00:52:39] Jillian Hoefer: I love it. Emily, Ashley, anything from you guys?
[00:52:42] Emily Pick: Yeah, I think just speaking to that, that
[00:52:49] Emily Pick: trough of disillusionment, illusion, wow, words, trough of disillusionment point, um, I, I think my biggest advice to marketers is just to keep going and to push through. I think that there is almost an expectation, especially if you spend any time on LinkedIn, you hear from people about all these magical use cases and workflows and how they've completely replaced their marketing team or whatever it may be.
[00:53:11] Emily Pick: Um, but, uh, for those of us who are in the tools every day, you're aware of the constraints and you're aware that it's changing every day. Um, and so to the point of Ashley saying there are things that maybe you couldn't do two days ago that you can do now, um, keep iterating, keep tinkering. Um, I think that the opportunities are going to be there, in particular for marketers, um, who keep pushing through and keep thinking about what this new future looks like.
[00:53:39] Emily Pick: I know with my team, um, we have an OKR that they have to build a new AI teammate, assistant, whatever it may be, uh, one per month. Um, it doesn't matter what it is, uh, but we need to identify what are the workflows and then how do we make sure that we're able to track the improvements and report on those things.
[00:53:58] Emily Pick: Um, and that, of course, an immediate benefit to the business, but it's also a benefit to you long-term in your career. The things that you can show, I know that I was interviewing, um, a few months, like, not a few months ago, before I joined Docebo, I was interviewing with a few different companies and, um, the question consistently came up, "What have you built with AI?
[00:54:19] Emily Pick: What have you done here?" So we're all early-ish in our careers, mid-career. Um, I think we all know that we're not at our final stop and our destination, so, um, not only should you be looking at this as how can I improve my life day-to-day now, but how do I keep pushing through that I can show in the future where I'm going and how do I make myself more marketable, um, within this broader ecosystem?
[00:54:43] Emily Pick: 'Cause it's only gonna get smarter, it's only gonna get faster, so how do you prove that you can keep up?
[00:54:48] Emily Pick: Yeah. I think
[00:54:49] Ashley Ward: was going to add to, like for me and my team, and I feel this so much, it's like sometimes it feels like building it with AI is gonna take longer, be a little bit harder than it is just to go do it the way you've always done it c- and it's more familiar that way.
[00:55:04] Emily Pick: So I think just, and I'm so guilty of this, but just really setting aside the time, block off your calendar, whatever it is that you need to do, um, and just go try it and see what happens, because this time it might take a little bit more time, but next time and the time after, like it's gonna be so much easier.
[00:55:21] Emily Pick: And so you just have to really set aside that time, and it doesn't have to be perfect. It's gonna keep getting better. Um, so you just got to set aside that time to go do it
[00:55:30] Jillian Hoefer: would love to know thoughts on how you all got your security teams on board with enablement here. Have you, uh, you know, were there any sort of like internal legal or compliance hurdles that you had to get over?
[00:55:39] Jillian Hoefer: Or was it really just kind of like we're all learning it at the same time, so we're going forward?
[00:55:44] Ashley Ward: Yeah. For us it's been that, like really top-down from our CEO to all of our leadership, like this is something that we are all in on. Um, so our legal team, our compliance, IT, everybody's all in, so they're very helpful.
[00:55:58] Jillian Hoefer: That's great.
[00:55:59] Emily Pick: Everyone is all in, and we are constantly being watched and reinforced. And, uh, if, if you have new tools or ideas, we have processes for who to go through and how to get there. I think we're, um, Docebo is a public company, so we do have some fairly specific scrutiny around, uh, making sure that we're adhering to a lot of the compliance standards.
[00:56:22] Emily Pick: Um, so our team is pretty hawkish. Uh, they are watching, and they are making sure that we are only using approved tools and that everything must go through IT. Um, I will say our IT team is very open. Again, it comes from the top down. Um, one of the great things when I joined Docebo was that we already had an AI org in place internally on our IT team, and their whole purpose is to make us faster, more efficient with AI.
[00:56:47] Emily Pick: So we have full buy-in, we just need to make sure we follow the process.
[00:56:52] Jillian Hoefer: I love it. "How do you plan to maintain the context layer at Docebo and make sure that it doesn't go stale?"
[00:56:57] Emily Pick: right now we're planning on quarterly maintenance.
[00:57:00] Emily Pick: So, um, at the end of each quarter, there will be a week of dedicated time from my team, uh, in particular to make sure that the information that is within the context layer, uh, is still up to date. I think there is a world, hopefully, uh, in the future somewhere where, uh, agents get smart enough that they can help us maintain based on all of the different information that we know is gonna be published.
[00:57:24] Emily Pick: Um, but for the time being, we're putting in a human validation checkpoint quarterly. Um, if that proves to not be enough, um, it's something we'll look at. But we are actually hiring, uh, for an agentic operator on the marketing team, uh, which we're super excited about. Uh, and this person is going to be responsible for maintaining all of these systems and making sure that we're in check, uh, if we start to see any drift, if we start to see performance impact, uh, that it's immediately flagged.
[00:57:53] Emily Pick: So, um, very fortunate, again, top-down buy-in that this is important, and we're actually putting the head count in place, uh, to support us through this.
[00:58:02] Jillian Hoefer: I would say if you are interested in what it looks like, organizational buy-in from a vibe-coding standpoint, just go to Docebo's, uh, recent job postings. Just see what they're putting in there, 'cause really, uh, it is embedded in everything that you guys are doing on the hiring side over there as well, which is really interesting
[00:58:18] Jillian Hoefer: Scott, Ashley, Emily, Thank you all. Have a good day.