Future of Marketing

Sheila Vashee, CMO at Figma and product-led growth veteran, riffs on community-driven growth and AI-native product storytelling. She explains how collaboration and in-file sharing sparked network effects. She discusses Config as a craft-forward community signal, turning user love into enterprise momentum, and Figma Make as a fast AI-native prototyping entry point.

Kate Johnson, CMO of Dscout, a leader who blends revenue, data, and customer insight. She debunks single-source attribution and explains deal storytelling and influence touchpoints. She outlines small, outcome-focused pods, cross-functional sales-marketing alignment, and when synthetic research works. She also discusses AI as a copiloting tool that frees people to think, not replace them.

Sara Varni, CMO of Datadog and former Twilio and Salesforce marketing leader, shares her playbook for developer-first and enterprise go-to-market. She discusses balancing developer and executive messaging. She explains how AI should automate low-value work while preserving authenticity. She highlights community as a long-term marketing advantage.

In this episode of Future of Marketing, hosts Ethan Smith and Mada Seghete sit down with Dave Steer, CMO of Webflow, to explore why trust has become the real competitive advantage for brands navigating an AI-driven market. Drawing on leadership roles at PayPal, eBay, Cloudflare, and Webflow, Dave shares the trust equation modern CMOs need to survive, why most marketing teams fail to prove incremental ROI, and how AI is reshaping the marketer’s role into something closer to a go-to-market engineer.Learn more about how Webflow helps marketing teams create, manage, and optimize personalized web experiences that drive real results. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureofmarketing.substack.com

Lena Waters, CMO at Notion who blends product-led growth with enterprise motion. She talks about AI as an autonomous teammate and rethinking workflows instead of just automating them. Lena explains showing users live product experiences, building custom AI agents, and using community and storytelling to scale brand and adoption.

In this episode of Future of Marketing, hosts Mada Seghete and Ethan Smith sit down with Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of Samsara, to unpack what it actually takes to build an AI-native marketing team. Meagen shares how marketing deployed live AI agents across marketing ops, web, field marketing, growth, PR, creative and more. The conversation goes beyond tools into culture, accountability, and why creativity and human connection still matter more than ever. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureofmarketing.substack.com

They dig into how AI is being used — and misused — across marketing workflows. Conversations cover AI for creative ideation, SEO pattern discovery, and practical personal tools. They debate authenticity versus over-personalization and where storytelling still wins. Tips include finding early adopters, using Reddit for market signals, and when to rely on human judgment.

Future of Marketing explores how B2B marketing teams are actually using AI at work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureofmarketing.substack.com