Marketing As Product: How AI Is Changing Everything

[00:00:00] Tessa Burg: Hello and welcome to another episode of Leader Generation, brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host, Tessa Burg, and today I am joined by Alan Kipust. He is Mod Op’s newest Executive in Residence, and we are so excited to have him. Alan brings decades of experience in product leadership and product management at some of the biggest brands in the world.

[00:00:22] Tessa Burg: And today we’ll be jumping into how do we reinvent? The value of marketing and the marketing profession through a product lens. Alan, thanks so much for joining us.

[00:00:32] Alan Kipust: Thank you, Tessa.

[00:00:34] Tessa Burg: So I alluded to this in the intro, but your background is wildly impressive and we are so lucky to have you here at Mod Op to bring this product mindset and product leadership.

[00:00:44] Tessa Burg: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your role now here at Mod Op.

[00:00:49] Alan Kipust: Yep. So I’m very happy to be here. Thank you. I’ve had a great career spanning some of the top brands from Amazon, Chewy, Ford Motor Company, Uber, where I’ve had the chance to build, and in some cases actually run some large divisions.

[00:01:06] Alan Kipust: Very customer facing, customer obsessed businesses. So I’m very proud of what I was able to build with some extraordinary teams, and I’m taking some of those experiences and bringing it to Mod Op. Looking at customer obsession. What are the customer pain points and how do we go through sequentially and build tools and solutions to delight our customers and our own internal needs, delivering extraordinary solutions for Mod Op to consume also.

[00:01:37] Alan Kipust: So that’s what my role is all about. How do I champion and drive roadmaps internally and externally? Of course, powered by AI solutions.

[00:01:49] Tessa Burg: And I’ll say, I’ve worked at agencies in the past where they’ve wanted to build a product, and most often it’s a dashboard. It’s like, oh my gosh, if we could just build the greatest dashboard in the world, all the clients will flock to us.

[00:02:05] Tessa Burg: At one point when video production technology was becoming more accessible, a lot of people wanted to build a product or productize something around video and video production and making it more accessible. But now in this era of AI, having that product mindset, having products, feels like it is a necessity or where agencies are going.

[00:02:28] Tessa Burg: Can you give us a little bit of insight into how you’re seeing agencies evolve and what the role of product or productization might be in the future?

[00:02:41] Alan Kipust: I think we’re all chasing what AI can be, and that’s true of everybody in this industry, not just marketing and digital agencies. It’s evolving so quickly. We’re trying to consume the potential tool ourselves, change our mindset, find the right processes to automate. And we’re all going through this gyration of how to deploy, how to, how to manage the change.

[00:03:08] Alan Kipust: It’s really change management with a very powerful tool, not that unlike other automation tools that have affected our industries and businesses in the past, whether it’s the internet or mobile apps, or Microsoft Excel. Each were transformative and we are right on the verge of that transformation right now, but we’re chasing it.

[00:03:31] Alan Kipust: It’s happening very quickly. We’re learning the capabilities. Those capabilities are changing even faster than we can consume the existing technology, and we are trying to change the mindsets within our organizations to absorb and embrace these tools and master them. So the world of product is now just absorbing a very powerful tool, one that’s more nimble than many of the other tools that we have in our product management tool set.

[00:04:05] Alan Kipust: And our roadmaps are going to shift to more frequent intervals, so shorter sprint cycles. Because the tools are more nimble, we’ll be able to solve tasks. Stitch those tasks together one day to build ultimate systems. But today, we’re very much in the world of let’s just solve tasks so that that’s where the industry is overall.

[00:04:34] Alan Kipust: How it affects digital marketing agencies? Well, the organizations are embracing it just like all others. It is a very powerful tool for marketing. The, there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity in customer service, marketing, and other skills where there’s repetition in their responsibilities, in the workload that are natural for bot automation, natural solutions for analytics.

[00:05:08] Alan Kipust: So the organizations are going through a transformation as they look at the skills, as they look at the tool set and mapping it towards a different future. These organizations are seeing a world where employees may not have to take on some of those daily tasks and they can focus much more on the strategic opportunities within the business.

[00:05:33] Alan Kipust: That’s what’s happening in Mod Op right now. That’s what’s happening in marketing. We could focus on the big picture and some of the tasks are just gonna happen much easier.

[00:05:45] Tessa Burg: So I think. When we speak to clients, one of the things that we notice is they assign what’s gonna happen with tasks or what’s gonna happen in general with AI and their company as outside of the marketing realm.

[00:06:01] Tessa Burg: Like AI is really core to our company, and it’s happening with our company’s product, with the product we bring to market, and the engineering and the IT teams are working on that, and often they’re like, well, I’m using ChatGPT. And AI’s use is associated to the use of tools. And when we talk about AI’s impact on marketing, you are saying there’s stuff within the marketing services themselves within how marketers operate.

[00:06:32] Tessa Burg: That can be wholly automated. But where do I start as a marketer, thinking about how AI affects how my department operates. How can I become a part of the solution moving forward?

[00:06:51] Alan Kipust: That’s a good question. First answer is, I don’t know of a single role in a corporation today that should not include AI in its daily use.

[00:07:05] Alan Kipust: So everybody should be using AI. It’s just where the bar is. That’s where the expectation is. You should be using the most powerful tool to get your job done, and that includes AI. So in terms of marketing specific functions within marketing, we see great opportunity in the world of analysis. We see great opportunity in the world of very repetitious tasks, optimizing content, optimizing marketing campaigns, brainstorming, doing industry research.

[00:07:45] Alan Kipust: These are fundamental tasks we all take on on a daily basis, and we should be using AI tools for that. And if those tasks build and turn into repetition. Repetitious products. Even better. Now, you can transform a whole department or a whole process, potentially eliminate all the work tied to it, and it turns into an automated task that you manage, that you run and you drive.

[00:08:12] Alan Kipust: So how do you start? You start by using it every day in the, in your daily responsibility. Then reach out to your friendly IT department or product management team to find out what equipment, what tooling, what training do they have available for the company. ’cause you wanna make sure you use the proper and the endorsed tools for the environment you’re in, so your data stays protected and in partnership with your internal product team.

[00:08:47] Alan Kipust: You go in, explore your most complicated tasks, your most expensive tasks, and burn down that list through experimentation, prototyping, and you’ll see it’s a very easy process to move through this journey of work elimination or work simplification.

[00:09:13] Tessa Burg: Yeah, and I think a lot of marketers are able to work with teams like UX/UI, and map out the entire customer journey.

[00:09:23] Tessa Burg: Like they understand their customers, they understand their customer needs, and they have gotten really good at, and have led the industry of and using AI tools within their existing process. But the examples you just gave. Brainstorming, analysis, collaboration, even probably populating reports like those highly repeatable tasks, updates, statuses.

[00:09:49] Tessa Burg: I think marketers need to look at their day to day and treat themselves like they do their customers and do that exercise like they do for campaigns and map out what are you doing on a day-to-day basis, what are the steps? And then. As you put, where’s the cost? Because it’s not that your role is gonna get eliminated, it’s that, or you, maybe not.

[00:10:19] Tessa Burg: You as a person get eliminated, but there are certain aspects of your role where you can level it up and do it better. But you first need to understand everything that’s encompassed in your role, and I think that’s really hard for people to kind of separate. Themselves out and look at their own journey, just like they do customer journeys for the audiences they sell to.

[00:10:44] Alan Kipust: Yeah, I agree. And that takes a product mindset to break down the tasks and understand the journey, whatever their journey might be, but what’s the sequence of tasks and what’s automatable or where there might be an enhancement along the way. Um. Hackathons are phenomenal ways to challenge organizations to take that on.

[00:11:09] Alan Kipust: But it really does start with just use it. Just use it in your daily routine and you’ll find an adaptation, automatic adaptation of your naturally start leaning towards this tool. ’cause it fits in so many ordinary use cases. And then you build from there. So let’s get everybody in every organization using utilization at a hundred percent for simple tasks and then start specializing in some of the more complex processes.

[00:11:41] Alan Kipust: So step one, get the organization to use it everywhere. Step two, take on the deeper, richer processes that need to be process mapped that may need data architecture. To, uh, support it and start building those that might take some development work, but worthwhile development work.

[00:12:03] Tessa Burg: Yeah, and I think this also points to, you said it takes a product mindset.

[00:12:07] Tessa Burg: A question we get a lot is, you know, what skills should I be building and the age of AI? Do I need to become a developer? And then you hear another headline that, we’ll, we’ll not even need developers in a few years. But he reality is, and what we’re seeing in the research and what everyone can already see in the headlines, companies are going to cut headcount ahead of these automations truly being ready to take on all of that work.

[00:12:38] Tessa Burg: And if you start developing product skills, showing the ability to be a part of. Not eliminating headcount, not eliminating roles, but eliminating tasks that could be performed faster, better, smarter, or at a higher level. It’s worthwhile, like you will be in a position to be the person who knows how to use the AI and then.

[00:13:08] Tessa Burg: Knows how to identify the opportunities where AI helps level up and drive growth and revenue wherever you’re working. And this has really just come a lot faster than I think any of us were anticipating. And it’s clear now that like boards and CEOs and leaders, they want to see cost cutting right now.

[00:13:33] Alan Kipust: Yeah. So I have a few comments on that. First is. Anybody applying for a job right now looking for work? It’s expected you have some familiarity with AI, and if you’re in a technical. Or even in a marketing role, it’s expected you’re somewhere closer to expert than just familiar. The world has changed, and recruiters filter for that.

[00:13:59] Alan Kipust: Why? Because they need it and they know they can find it, and they’re rewarding those candidates. So it’s a necessity today. It’s a necessity in the future. So everybody should be equipping themselves and depending on the role, might be certain levels of sophistication that are required. In, in terms of, um, shifting the organizations, my, my thought here is it should start top down.

[00:14:34] Alan Kipust: We should set ambitious goals within companies. We should be looking at what. Opportunities could be, whether it’s sales or optimization, efficiency, optimization, and we should be pushing, companies should be pushed by leadership downward to absorb these tools and leverage them to their maximum. Otherwise, adoption will be slower.

[00:14:58] Tessa Burg: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:59] Alan Kipust: Adoption will be accelerated if it’s forced, and this is a unique opportunity for these companies. Who are willing to force the adoption and see the benefits even sooner. So you hire the people who are trained to use AI You train those who are not, you make the tools available. You equip the product teams to enable light up the organizations with, with the right types of automation, and you set aggressive goals.

[00:15:32] Alan Kipust: They will find a path to meet those goals, whether again, it’s efficiency or sales optimization. The tools have the potential to achieve both. It’s top down. You have to push the organization.

[00:15:47] Tessa Burg: Yeah. When I think about, you know, we have, uh, strategic consulting wing and we’ve been through large digital transformation projects.

[00:15:58] Tessa Burg: Both on the client side, like I also come from the client side and then here at Mod Op and the process by which you do that is really not that different. But I think that with AI and what you mentioned earlier, the impact is everywhere. So if you are thinking about, oh my gosh, well, how am I gonna survive in that type of environment?

[00:16:23] Tessa Burg: There are already trainings around digital transformation, change management, goal setting metrics. How do you determine which KPIs for your initiative? It is one thing to know how to use the tools, but what truly sets leaders apart today are those who know how to design, define, and lead the change.

[00:16:49] Tessa Burg: And that’s all people power. And I feel like sometimes that gets lost. And yes, it means you do have to operate differently and you do have to build new skills on top of also learning to use, uh, baseline AI tools. But that has always been in any technological change. The requirement, you know, designers live this.

[00:17:13] Tessa Burg: When Adobe came through, I started in internal IT and gave folks who had been on typewriters, their first computer, and, and a lot of them did not want to learn that change, but we’re going through another massive technological wave. It just happens to be impacting every single role at every single organization.

[00:17:39] Alan Kipust: And it’s gonna keep on changing because the tools are gonna become more powerful and we’re gonna find more use cases. It’s only the start. It’s a very exciting start.

[00:17:53] Tessa Burg: Yeah. And I can see you smiling because you’re a true product person. So like this, it’s what gets product people really excited. It’s like, holy crap, this challenge is huge. And huge challenges mean huge opportunity for innovation. That’s also like I worked at American Greetings. We had hack days. That was my favorite time of the year. I joke I really liked American Greetings, but I joke that that’s why I stayed and I almost wanted to stay longer than I did simply because we had the best hack days on the planet.

[00:18:27] Tessa Burg: But it, it allowed folks who had that natural product mindset to imagine. How we could deliver value differently. And that is really the edict. Now, it’s not how do I automate tasks? It’s not how to automate my job. It’s can you imagine how to deliver value differently and ask as a part of that and not be scared that the answer is you’re gonna automate out some of your tasks.

[00:18:55] Tessa Burg: You might automate out your entire role, but guess where you’ll be? In a new space with new skills and leading something that has never been done before, if you do it really well,

[00:19:06] Alan Kipust: Right. So as a product leader, we run towards technology. We run towards solving customer issues. We run towards finding innovation.

[00:19:19] Alan Kipust: And this is just the most powerful tool in my lifetime that I’ve seen to drive that type of transformation. So it is an exciting moment, and it’s gonna be, we’re just at the start of those profound changes, but I, I like how you framed it. There will be, uh, career opportunities for individuals as they can put aside the ordinary tasks because that happens through some automation.

[00:19:51] Alan Kipust: They can work on what they really wanna work on now. They could work on the strategic activities, they can work on inventing a new brand. They can get deep into solving the customer issues. Unlocking a, you know, a great new marketing campaign, but they haven’t a, a partner in this, which is called AI. They have an assistant.

[00:20:14] Tessa Burg: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:16] Alan Kipust: And an incredible array of tools to help make that happen. So that’s my, that’s how I visualize it. I’m not intimidated, I’m not fearful of what the future is. I’m excited by it. I’m excited by the change in output. We’ll be able to see in quality and efficiency and wherever we point that, especially in marketing.

[00:20:37] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I, this is why I always come back to marketing. Like I feel like every time, if I’m making like a job change, I’m like, oh, I go all into product and I’m working at a SaaS company. But what draws me to marketing is that it’s the closest to the customer and the customers experience, like you said.

[00:20:55] Tessa Burg: Product people love solving those challenges. When we look ahead at how this is evolving marketing, do you have any predictions? What is going to happen? What are some of the fundamental shifts we might see or trends that might emerge in 2026 and beyond?

[00:21:13] Alan Kipust: Personalization is gonna continue to be. At the forefront, thanks to AI, we’ll know more about who the customer is.

[00:21:22] Alan Kipust: We’ll be able to target who that customer is with the offer. That is ideal. We’ll be able to maybe have the content optimized as well as the offer for that individual or that cohort with incredible precision and fidelity. Optimized faster than we could do that with teams of people, but now systems can take that on.

[00:21:48] Alan Kipust: I believe that’s a 2026. It’s happening today, but I believe it’ll happen a lot more. It’ll be much more prevalent in the near future. Um, I think the whole world of prototyping and ideating, that’s, that’s already changed and it’s continued to evolve where you can. Understand your customer. Come up with a strategic plan, get insights into the customer, into the industry, and do all this manipulation and research at your desktop in just a few minutes.

[00:22:24] Alan Kipust: So this concept of coming up with very powerful, rich thoughts. Is going to elevate. Once again, it won’t take weeks to work on an idea and now may take hours or days and your idea will be even stronger and more crystallized. ’cause you’ll have the support of some very powerful tools. And other than that, but the list could go on and on.

[00:22:50] Alan Kipust: But those are the two that come to mind that I’m most excited. Now, underneath all that is also the ability to analyze data. And AI does an incredible job to make it available data insight to any user that will continue and that powers some of the use cases I just described.

[00:23:11] Tessa Burg: I agree. The data insight and analytics and the democratization of that really excites me when I think about all the time we spend in manually pulling reports and manually moving data.

[00:23:25] Tessa Burg: You know, one thing we’re doing here at Mod Op is investing in bringing all that data together, but we’re also helping our clients do that. And that is really why dashboards were so popular in the past is ’cause people just wanted more access and easier access to the insights. They didn’t wanna wait for all the data to be collected.

[00:23:43] Tessa Burg: And we are at that point where we can architect the data for the long term and create agents. That help us consolidate intake process, make sure we have the quality, all those things that we’re doing manually today, and then have it be more accessible across teams and and to clients. I and I stink and hated designing dashboards like the vein in my existence because you stand it up, you do exactly what was asked, and people use it twice, and then it’s like, oh, well, can it also do these other 90 things?

[00:24:15] Tessa Burg: Well. It wasn’t designed to do the other 90 and then you have to go back to the drawing board, but we’re in such a different space and it, that was really the problem that people are always trying to solve was the democratization of the insights at the time they want it, and it is a really exciting time to have that fuel in your marketing organization today.

[00:24:37] Alan Kipust: Consumers are also benefiting by this data. What used to be only search results to find your e-commerce solution. Now you have robust research that could go on at your fingertips changing the dynamics of what we, the products we pick, the insight around the products that we are going to pick. That world of search and search engine optimization is about to see, you know, a very different future, but one that’s incredibly helpful for customers ’cause they’re gonna be more empowered than ever before to make decisions and have better selection.

[00:25:24] Tessa Burg: Yep. I agree. Well, Alan, we are already at time, which is crazy. Went by fast. Uh, we’re very excited to have you on the team and for our clients to have access.

[00:25:35] Tessa Burg: To you as they work through their own roadmaps and how they’re going to define and design digital transformation in their organization. But if people wanted to find you and reach out to you personally, where can they contact you?

[00:25:49] Alan Kipust: They can contact me at. I should know my email address here, but I don’t just yet ’cause I just started.

[00:26:01] Alan Kipust: Um, but maybe we’ll put that into the

[00:26:03] Tessa Burg: Yeah.

[00:26:04] Alan Kipust: How about we do that? I just got the-

[00:26:06] Tessa Burg: We can.

[00:26:07] Tessa Burg: I also, you know, the me overseeing IT thing as well. It’s Alan dot Kipust, that’s KIP as in puppy, [email protected]. And you’re also on LinkedIn because

[00:26:20] Alan Kipust: Yes, I am.

[00:26:21] Tessa Burg: Look through your impressive background there. And for all the listeners who wanna hear other episodes of Leader Generation, you can find that at modop.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[00:26:34] Tessa Burg: Uh, we’re on Apple, Spotify, and you’ll have more episodes coming up ’cause we’d love to have you on additional episodes, Alan, and we’ll, we’ll do some round tables and track this journey as not just Mod Op. Uh, changes and evolves, but we help our clients reimagine how we deliver values to those that we serve.

[00:26:52] Tessa Burg: So thanks again for joining us.

[00:26:54] Alan Kipust: Thanks for having me, Tessa.