Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Artificial Intelligence is rewriting every rule in business — and the old marketing playbook no longer works.
The Brand Humanity Show explores how B2B founders, CMOs, and operators can build brands that stay human in an age defined by machines — and how the humans behind those brands can stay grounded, creative, and whole while the world accelerates around them.
Hosted by Anthony Kennada and Scott Salkin, co-founders of Goldenhour, each episode features honest conversations with influential voices across business, technology, and culture — decoding what’s changing, what still matters, and how authenticity, emotion, and purpose become real competitive advantages.
Because in the age of AI, the most human brands — and leaders — will win.
- Awesome, Alex, how are you doing?
- Good, hi, thank you so much for having me.
Excited to be here.
- Thanks for being on episode one of the new season too.
This is gonna be a lot of fun to unpack this
and so much to learn from you on this topic.
So I'm really looking forward to it.
Alex, so I mentioned this in the intro,
you led marketing at companies like Expedia, T-Mobile,
Zoom, each of these at massive scale.
I'm curious now, stepping into the CMO role at G2,
what feels just different about marketing now
versus even, I don't know, three, five years ago?
- Well, I feel like every six months is now changing.
So the idea of kind of this three, 12 year,
it's just, it's all changing so fast.
But I sometimes describe being a CMO, especially today
as you're building this plane while also flying
not only through this like thunderstorm,
but almost like this AI generated thunderstorm.
It's a little dramatic, but I think it's the speed
of which things are changing right now is so real.
And as I mentioned, this is not just even what's in 12 months,
what's in six months, what's even gonna come out next week.
Every day, something new is being launched
and I think this is where we're constantly pivoting
and changing.
And so at Zoom, where I rebuilt our entire digital ecosystem
and at Expedia, that's where I launched at the time,
like what is personalization, a new customer data platform,
especially on your website, even then,
those fundamentals of really discoverability
were kind of stable.
It was you optimized search, you ran a funnel,
you measured clicks or your rankings,
but now all of that is changing.
And this new mechanism of really discovery itself
has completely changed.
And so at G2, we're seeing where 50% of software buyers
really start the research at AI chatbot components.
And that is up 70% from last year, which is huge.
So already we are seeing these changes
growing year over year.
But the question that I think marketers and myself
are asking over time and what's shifted is,
no longer like, are you ranking, it's are you being cited?
And are we trusted by these systems
because AI is definitely pushing us in this new direction.
- Yeah, it's really interesting that your background
coming up into the CMO role from performance marketing
and search is so, again, I keep using the word existential,
but it feels like it is so important to understand
how people are discovering, evaluating products and so on.
And I think I saw some research from Godard at G2
or a post that he made that G2 is actually
one of the most cited sources on the internet kind of period.
How did, just I'm curious your background from the search
and discovery kind of side of the industry
shaped your decision now to step into this role at G2
and kind of just what about kind of that body of work
feels just super important right now.
- My whole career has really anchored around how people find
and I think evaluate things.
And that's what I've always driven to companies
that are at the center of that.
So there was travel at Expedia, connecting the world.
There was collaboration and software with Zoom
where the world had to connect during a time
that was very difficult.
And so it's always been about, I think, solving for
how do you show up in the moment of the decision
when people need to make the decision the most
and have trust in that company.
And when I was searching for the next opportunity
and G2 reached out, it was really sitting at the center
of that shift and how people are now understanding
where you have to be in citations.
And G2 is at the center of that.
So as you mentioned, we are the number one source
for B2B software across citations, across chat GPT,
Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, all of them.
And we actually are in the top 20 cited domains
by AI models.
We're actually ahead of Instagram.
So I'll call us out as being a leader here,
but that's really what I was looking for
is not only that pivotal moment that we need to meet
right now as a business and a company,
but really also the culture.
You had mentioned GoDart.
I wanted to over index on culture and people
and that's really exactly what G2 delivers
in that marketplace shift of where we sit
as that number one review site in the world.
And now with our new acquisition that we had of Captera
and software advice and get app,
we now reached 3 million annual buyers.
And so I think this is just the beginning.
- It's been so wild just to watch the G2 press room
over the last two months here, three months in 2026.
The work you guys are doing is amazing.
I wanna get the provocation out of the way
'cause I'm dying to get your take on this question.
There's been this old adage in marketing
that people buy from people.
A whole lot of brand driven marketers like me
feel really compelled by that and say,
hey, humanity retains a very important role in the AI era
in terms of how products are bought.
But you're the expert on this topic
and now of course with G2,
powering a lot of that unique context.
From where you sit today,
do you think that will always be true?
This idea of people buying from people
or is there a world where a buyer side agent
and a seller side agent negotiate
and we're sort of just out of the decision tree
kind of all together?
- I think that becomes more true and not less,
more than ever.
And because while I think the mechanism
of like the machine mandated piece is there,
the human voice is the last defensible mode.
Like that is so important is that human aspect.
And I think there's this idea of like,
do you build for human, do you build for agent?
You need to build for both, that's not gonna be the way
but AI doesn't replace the trust component.
I think it just amplifies that the trust,
especially customer led voice
and the trust in the customer
is more important than ever.
It's around the authenticity,
the human user generated content,
all of that is what's feeding these models,
but now agents that are crawling and scraping
and understanding where that lives.
So it does become more true, not less,
but I think the human piece is still,
how do you build for that at scale
while also building for the agent mindset
that's coming in?
- Yeah, well, that's good.
I'm glad to hear you say that just 'cause I don't know,
I tend to be a human optimist
if you tell by the name of the show,
just in terms of kind of our role in this new world.
But I think it goes back even to your first point
around our need now as marketers to like,
like everything's changing so fast,
we've got to be able to speed on all this stuff.
We have to understand how we're producing content,
user generated or otherwise,
and how that's being used by these models.
So I think that's important to learn from.
AI is starting to your point to influence discovery,
shortlisting, what is the, to a marketer that's like,
okay, I wanna build for this world,
like what is the trusted input into what those models
are sort of decisioning on?
I'm curious if you had any kind of perspective on that.
- The trusted inputs I think are more clear now
than they were in the beginning.
At first, I don't think anyone really understood
how to build for it.
But now those verified reviews,
and for us kind of that pure voice
and real customer experiences,
that is what's feeding these models.
That is how we are getting these citations.
And if anything, we're not seeing our traffic declining,
like most other companies because of that.
And we're already seeing where AI chatbots
are the number one source to create software shortlist.
Review sites are actually the second.
This is something that we are partnering with Profound
to start to study and research.
And so the fact that review sites are number two,
this is a huge opportunity where everyone needs
to be focusing in this space,
especially around software B2B buying.
And consistently, we're showing up at the top source
of every stage from discovery to purchase,
because we're looking at that full lifecycle,
but also how are we building for the agent
and the human at the same time?
- Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.
It's like you have to write a review that,
or you have to write like, I guess,
as a consumer of technology,
like the idea is we're writing reviews
that are both readable by humans
and readable by machines ultimately
to kind of curate those trust signals.
- You can tell you collect them too,
where we are collecting that now
you can actually use voice dictation to write a review.
And we have AI writing for you.
And so I think there's also ways
where you're gonna see the collection of reviews
and the industry there change as well.
- And do you see how companies kind of operationalize this
kind of more broadly?
Like that's really interesting about how it's collected,
but thinking even beyond of like,
if I am a brand wanting to differentiate and stand out
and be discoverable in these platforms,
like how do I get reviews ultimately,
or not solicit, that feels so transactional,
but how do I sort of activate my customers?
- You have to collect at scale.
No longer can, I think we build in a world
where it's like just one-to-one,
there's that white glove effect that G2 even offers,
but also how do you grab these reviews at scale
so that you're able to produce so many at a given time
and collect from your customers
and understand like where you show up.
So I definitely think there are avenues
that are being built in real time
and actually having agents start to do this at scale.
I mean, think about it,
chatbots that you now engage with,
a few years ago, those are now agents today,
or outreach emails that are now agents today.
And so that's where this is gonna play a role
in how kind of all companies are collecting at scale.
- Yeah, super compelling.
You know, I feel like I have a personal mission
as a, I don't know whatever I am these days,
marketer, not founder, whatever,
and G2 around brand and the importance of brand
in this new era.
I think you all had a conference six months ago
or something where like brand discovery,
if I remember correctly or something along those lines
was sort of a main theme.
I believe the framing from the event was AI discovery
is the new brand frontier.
And so I'd love to just get a sense
'cause the term brand is something that I think
can mean different things to different people,
but how does G2 or how do you define brand
in this sort of new world for this new world?
- Definitely for this new world.
And brand used to live primarily as a human perception
of just how folks thought about your brand,
obviously the external perception that you put out,
but now it's also how AI systems are understanding
and representing your brand,
which is very different to build for.
This isn't just kind of the external brand awareness
or a billboard anymore.
That's still important, that's not going away,
but now you also have to view it from an AI systems component.
And so that visibility is shifting
from more of that click component
for brand discoverability to citations.
And that's where I think the measurement starts
to change as well of how you measure your brand.
What does truly awareness mean now or perception shifts?
And you also have to define what kind of brand perception
or awareness shift are you trying to play?
Because you have to build at different scales
for each of those brand components too.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, so brand historically deemed hard
to measure.
I believe that was the last episode we did in season one.
But because it's not just sort of this feeling or trust
or preference or these kind of emotive kind of components,
now we can quite easily, not quite easily,
but like we can measure discoverability,
we can understand distribution better.
And through the reviews, things like, you know,
sentiment and tone and going beyond just like,
do I show up?
But like, how am I perceived by specific kind of cohorts
of my audience or whatever the case is?
So it does become much more measurable,
which I think is oftentimes why people under invest, right?
And brand is how do I measure in it?
How do I measure?
Yeah, super interesting.
Yeah, so is that, do you get a sense that that now
is sort of a job to be done kind of for,
'cause I'm thinking about like the org structure too
and who are the teams that are actually working on this now?
Is this kind of a function of like,
does not showing up in search,
is that now a brand problem versus historically
kind of like a demand gen, marketing ops, digital?
I'm just wondering if you're seeing any evolution
of sort of ownership or thinking about brand
kind of in a bigger way.
It's both, it is transitioning.
I think before it used to be,
your brand team had very different measurements
than your demand gen team.
And then there was the evolution of brand to demand.
Now it's this evolution of like,
how is it all growth marketing at this point?
Because that is really what is needed.
And I think that's where you see the shift
of what a CMO role is.
That's the shift that you see of like,
go to market execution,
but brand is definitely now more in the organic space
component of how you're measuring more than ever.
And I think before we,
a lot of companies just didn't pair that together.
And that's the shift of seeing that's really a change
of how companies do have to measure,
but also how the teams are run internally.
I think no longer is it just,
only these channels over here operate separate
than maybe your organic social
and you need it all pairing together for the full journey.
Yeah, super compelling.
The idea of building brand to historic,
this one playbook perspective,
that historically meant things like,
okay, we're gonna host an event,
or we're going to produce a new sort of content program
or do something more editorial.
It felt like corporate marketing-ish I would say,
or adjacent, I don't know if there's a way to put it.
But you mentioned growth coming into play,
which at least I don't know,
within like the budget like arguments within the team,
typically it was like growth versus brand
or growth versus corporate or something to that end.
I'm curious, what do you think building brand,
like how does it look differently now?
Are these things kind of integrated
or is not organizationally,
but do some of the tactics and channels
kind of that historically have been more
on the corporate marketing side,
so events and things like that,
now fit in with this idea of discoverability and on search.
Or are they still kind of under the brand halo,
but kind of disparate jobs to be done doing different things
across the marketing organization?
- That plays a role of the go-to-market strategy,
but more around this brand visibility.
Where this becomes more important than ever is,
now you need to connect it to pipeline and revenue.
For the main end target goal is that
I think all companies are focused on
whether you're B to C or B to B,
but the shift is really moving,
storytelling's still a part of it all,
but how do you move from storytelling
to those trusted signals to then understand the investment?
And that's where that storytelling needs to be
in every touch point along the way,
tied all the way back to the revenue
that you need to be looking at
from the very beginning lens
of where you're showing up along the customer journey.
And so that's where this whole brand new NAN is evolving,
because I do think what's gonna happen
in the next even year is the shift of how
it's all being now done within the LLMs,
which we're seeing betas of paid advertisement,
like all that shift is happening in real time.
Your brand and your demand
are gonna be at the center of it all,
partnering with showing in these LLMs.
- Yeah, yeah, it's like the trend is
it's becoming so much easier to build product now,
that distribution and all of this
becomes the kind of the unanswered question
or the kind of major focal point
for businesses that wanna stand out.
For many marketers, a lot of this might feel like
overwhelming or like there's just so much changing.
You do a lot of advising today,
so I would love to kind of tap into your advisory
kind of thoughts on how do you unlearn
as a marketer the things that you've,
has been your playbook for your whole career
or just for certainly for the last kind of chapter.
And if you could coach them maybe on like one element
to really double down on or really invest in,
curious kind of where you would,
how would you would steer them?
- The unlearning, it's a real thing.
I think everyone is saying, what do you unlearn to relearn?
The entire tech stack of what even SaaS businesses
have been sitting on for years, it is very different now.
And all of that has to be unlearned to that capacity
to relearn what it should really look like.
And so the focus is still the trust,
the customer voice, the systems, that doesn't go away.
But I think this unlearn instinct to kind of,
how do you measure brand through old school impressions only
and reach and SEO to then rethink brand
is that muscle to track where and how your brand shows up
in the AI-related answers, that's the real shift.
And so your customers are truly,
I'd say your biggest advocates.
Like your marketing is important
because of your customer voice
and the reality of what's showing up
in answer economy today.
So I'd say the CMO mandate is really the shift
from this channel ownership and owning outcomes
to fully like, how do you understand all the data
that goes in, the full P&L,
and then how does that feed back up to the creative brief
that you're building up to the very beginning?
'Cause that shift is much more of seeing it holistically
and how marketing is part of the broader organization,
not just this like siloed action funnel anymore.
- Oh man, that's so true.
That seems to be kind of one of the bigger shifts
that I've observed too is that marketing is no longer now
like the pipeline hero or whatever.
Like our job is much broader and beyond that,
a lot of the, like we've gone from this world
where we've been leaders of people and leaders of teams
to this expectation of us having hands on keyboards
as marketing leaders, like shipping,
building things, doing work.
And so I loved your point on like familiarity
with the tools and the tech
and being kind of getting closer to the innovation as well.
So it does feel like so much is changing,
but in many ways too, it's exciting.
Like going over the hub of like, this is overwhelming
and I have to unlearn to like, wow,
we get to co-author whatever comes next.
And for folks that are curious or feeling like really,
I don't know, emboldened by that opportunity,
it feels like a really good time
to be kind of a marketer as well.
I think it's the most exciting time
because the role of the marketers,
not even just the CMO,
the role of every marketer is changing.
The world where we only used to execute campaigns
and then we'd have to wait on someone to build a creative
and then someone else to analyze the data
and we'd submit a ticket to engineering
to wait for them to pull data, like all that's changing
because we're gonna have access to kind of operate yourself
in many capacities of the speed and the velocity
and how you execute and how it's helping you get there.
We actually just launched our MCP for G2
for our customers, we've been testing it internally.
I mean, what even that unlocks for our day to day
of how our marketing team can now run our own MCP
on our own dataset to pull out key insights
that would have taken months prior to probably execute on.
And so like, this is where I get excited
because I just think the new opportunities
of where this is all changing
and how fast that a marketer can now be five different roles
kind of in one person that maybe you used to have to wait
to execute on is going to go away.
- Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely.
I've been using lovable quite a bit too,
just to try to like build stuff and build software.
And it's been kind of, we have like a family chores app
that we created to like try to manage like the family.
So it feels good to even like step outside
of the marketing function and be--
- I feel like that's probably what I need.
(laughing)
- I don't know, that's weird.
Like there's some weird, like, I don't know,
not satisfaction, but like it's actually kind of fun.
Like I've been enjoying like,
I guess vibe coding would be the term,
but there's something really like gratifying
around being able to build things.
And of course in the marketing context within, you know,
content events and web experiences and all that,
but even stretching beyond that
and, you know, finding new ways to learn.
- I think it's giving you the opportunity to,
and vibe coding, I've been doing the same.
It's giving you the opportunity to learn new skills
that maybe just even a few years ago, you're like,
oh, I would never have time for that.
All right, I'd have to sign up for a course.
Go find a mentor to teach me.
And now you're like, wait, I, in an hour,
let me just teach myself and try to,
people are almost starting over again in certain areas
of like places that you've always wanted to experiment
and test and learn.
- Totally, totally.
Well, I had one sort of closing question I wanted to ask you
because, you know, I mentioned it, we've been talking
about speed a lot.
We've been talking about like rewriting, unlearning,
like these are concepts that again, you know,
I think a decent part of the audience is really excited
and leaning in and energizing.
But I do know there are folks also that are just overwhelmed
and just kind of trying to process where they fit in
into this new world and kind of just keep up
with a pace of innovation that I don't know,
we haven't seen maybe in our lifetimes.
I don't know if the world's ever seen this pace of innovation
that we're kind of living in now.
Just how fast everything is moving.
I'm curious how you sort of stay grounded
in what's human kind of in your own work and find ways to,
you know, maybe add intentional friction
in the right areas as well.
- Yes, I agree that I don't think we've ever seen change
this fast happen in the workforce.
And, but where I try to stay grounded is,
I think you still have to be the most authentic
and human leader that you can be, you know,
whether it's peer or coworker,
that is just so important to still have that piece,
have that vulnerability, that realness
that I would recommend.
But I think on the flip side,
I would say my kids probably keep me the most grounded.
So I was vibe coding the other day,
I was so excited to show my 11 year old son,
like, look at all that I built in a matter of an hour,
something that would have taken months.
Very specific like PowerPoint and detailed report.
And like, I was able to just build it
with a click of a button and a prompt.
I was so excited to show him and he looked at me
and he's like, okay, and I'm like, no, you don't understand.
This would have taken, I would have had five people
to work on this months.
And it just kind of kept me grounded where
it's the world that they're growing up in.
And so it's also new to us, but he didn't even flinch.
And I think it's a good reminder of as we evolve,
the world is growing so fast with us.
And so, our kids are gonna see it very different,
but it keeps me focused on what actually matters
underneath the technology,
which I think is that human connection
and the rest and the real experiences.
And that's what's gonna last.
At the end of the day, he's like, that's great.
Can we go outside now and plan?
(laughing)
- Totally.
- Yeah, exactly.
Can we go be kids in?
- Yeah, can we just go be kids and I'll figure this out.
So yeah, I think that's what keeps me grounded.
- That's great.
Well, look, before we break,
is Arizona gonna win the national championship this year?
- Oh, I hope.
- Yeah.
- Of course, no.
They're my number one in the bracket all the way.
Sweet 16 kicks off today.
So, for any of the Arizona fans,
I'll be rooting for them all the way.
- We're filming from Arizona here.
So by proxy, we'll support them as well.
- Got it.
- Alex, thank you so much.
And again, for all the incredible things
that we're seeing from G2 just feels like,
we can feel the momentum on the other side of the posts
and everything that y'all are sharing.
So congrats on the new chapter.
Where can folks follow your story
and kind of keep in touch?
- Yes, definitely find me on LinkedIn,
Alexandra London, follow G2 as well,
'cause there's a lot of new products coming out.
And I think you'll be pretty amazed
of what we're building when it comes
to being the number one sighted in LLMs.
- Amazing.
Thank you so much.
And thanks everybody for watching.
And we'll see you next week.