AI Won’t Replace Marketers - Kris Lande

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Chris Landy. Chris is the Chief Marketing Officer at OutSystems, an AI-powered development platform where she leads global marketing, brand, and growth. She's built her career at the intersection of product, marketing, and community with their rare ability to take complex, highly technical ideas and turn them into stories that actually resonate, not just with developers, but with business leaders driving real outcomes.

0:54Now, before OutSystems, she spent more than 13 years at Salesforce, holding leadership roles across product marketing, community, and Trailhead, the learning platform that became a cornerstone of Salesforce's ecosystem. Now, she didn't just help grow a brand. She helped build one of the most powerful communities in enterprise tech, turning education and engagement into a true engine for growth. With over two decades in high growth sass, Chris brings a perspective rooted in clarity, team building, and the belief that companies that win are the ones that connect great products to real human impact.

1:33I got to read that again. Powerful communities and enterprise tech turning education and engagement into true – I'm sorry, I read that wrong. Companies that win are the companies that connect great products to real human growth. Pardon my jumbling all this up, but I had to read it again. Real human impact. What a novel idea. Chris, welcome to the show.

1:53Kris Lande:Thank you so much, Steve. You know, I've listened to your podcast a few times and I know you do a killer intro. And so that was so fun. Thank you so much for having me. Even with my stumbling over, you know, I just keep it real. So we all have real because I will be stumbling through this as well. Now I got my, I got my favorite beverage. You got yours. We're just going to have some fun. I got my coffee. All right, here we go. I want to start with AI and careers, if that's okay. Now, there's a lot of fear out there with AI replacing marketers. We all know that, right? But you see it differently.

2:27What are marketers doing today who are actually becoming more valuable because of AI?

2:32Kris Lande:Yeah, yeah. I definitely see this differently. I come from a background where I started out my career as being a one-person marketing machine. I ran marketing at a startup and I basically had to do all of the things. We were a 20-person company. I was the one marketer. I had to wear every hat. I learned every single marketing function. And I think something that I have been instilled in me from that experience is being a problem solver, knowing the importance of owning the outcome. And I think those skills today are so important because today I think becoming more of a generalist is where the edge is going to be.

3:15Kris Lande:And I think if you think about like AI really reduces the friction for doing the tasks. So like think about as a marketer, you're drafting content, you are creating the creative, you're running reports, you're analyzing performance, you're doing landing pages. AI can do all of that for you. And so what's important now is that you elevate above all of those tasks and you really think about how you own the outcome across all of those tasks, how you connect all of those things, how you define the right things, define the strategy, and how you really own the business results. So I think it's like, it's a shift from being a task owner to being a more of a generalist.

3:59Kris Lande:Like, and I keep on thinking, it's like, you have to think like a CEO. You have to think about the whole process end to end. And, you know, it's from a marketing perspective, it's not just like, oh, I'm building this campaign. You have to up level to, I am driving pipeline for the business. And how am I going to do that? And you think about that outcome and think about the entire thing end to end. And so I think that's the difference. I don't see AI replacing marketers. However, I do think that AI will expose the difference between people who are task owners and people who can see the whole problem and own the outcome and orchestrate across all of those things and orchestrate across systems.

4:41Kris Lande:I think that for all of us, not just in marketing, but I think we're seeing this across development as well. That is the mind shift that you have to have of not just owning a task, but leveling up to orchestrating across the systems and owning the outcome. And from a development standpoint, I think this is extremely important as well. You have to think about how do you architect a solution across systems. It's not just about the code anymore. It's about how do you look across the systems and actually build that solution. and use the AI tools to make you stronger and use that as a multiplier for you.

5:17Yeah, and you talk about that shift, right, from task to outcome ownership, and I love that, right? But specifically for you, now you've been very channel-focused, right? So what does that shift actually look like in practice?

5:28Kris Lande:Yeah, you know, I think that shift in channel focus is, it's a lot of experimentation. You know, and I think this is something, shout out to all of my B2B marketers in tech right now, because we are going through a hard time. If you have a friend who is a CMO at a tech company, make sure you give them lots of love and support because things are changing so fast, especially across channels. The things that we did last year, five years ago, they're changing. Like our regular marketing methods aren't working as well anymore. They're changing and we have to continually change with them. And I think this is where as a marketer leveraging AI, this can give you an edge because AI can really help you elevate above and it can help you do things quicker and experiment quicker that would have taken weeks, months before.

6:19Kris Lande:Like if you wanna try out a new channel, five years ago it would have been like, okay, we're gonna try this TikTok thing and we're gonna see how it goes. Now you don't have to spend a bunch of time creating a campaign brief, creating a bunch of videos, creating messaging. You can use AI to do that and experiment fast. And I think this is where as marketers, we need to go. We need to be constantly experimenting and constantly trying out new things because the world is changing so quickly in marketing. And it's an exciting time to be in marketing. It's also really hard because it's changing a lot.

6:54Kris Lande:We're learning every day. You have to be in a learning mode. Yeah, I really like what you said earlier about, first of all, I agree with the concept. It's not going to replace marketers and it's going to expose or highlight. And I don't mean to be negative, but in a way it is going to expose because it frees to me, it frees up marketers to really stretch themselves. Right. And just push those boundaries that we could never three, five, seven years ago, like you said. Right. OK, I don't have to spend two weeks developing a plan. I have it in five minutes. Right. So that free time, quote unquote, to me is gold.

7:30So like I'm going to just push my limits and hopefully my leader like you is openly hearing these kinds of things. That makes sense?

7:37Kris Lande:Sure does. Yeah. And it's, I think there is a, you know, there's this era of experimentation that is happening right now. And this is something I'm pushing my team on a lot is, you know, no idea is bad, throw it out there. And especially I'm, I'm also encouraging people to like, you know, share what's, what's working. If you see something cool out there, you see an awesome campaign, see an awesome video, share it for inspiration. Cause I do think this is, this is where we're at right now. Like what, again, like what worked last year or worked the year before might not work anymore. And so we need to be constantly experimenting.

8:06Kris Lande:and we need to be able to experiment and fail fast is the key. Exactly. If you're advising a marketer right now, say in the middle of their career, what are the one or two capabilities they think they should really be doubling down on? Yeah, it's a great question. I'm going to give a vague answer, but I do think the ability to problem solve. I think it's so fascinating the amount of people that I come in contact with that don't have the ability to problem solve, to kind of think through, okay, like if I don't have someone to go to, how do I just think about this problem? How do I start taking it apart?

8:40Kris Lande:How do I use AI to like bounce some ideas off of the problem? And I think that is something like, I think to survive and thrive in this next era, we all have to become problem solvers. You know, you think about like the people who operated in their silo and it's like, oh, well, I go to that team to help me with this. I go to that team to help me with that. I think now we need to like be able to think across all these teams and systems and think through the problem and how we actually solve that problem. I remember reading something, gosh, it might have been through the end of last year and it might have been in the journal or somewhere else, but these very, you know, very reputable research and they talked to leading higher education institutions and they identified these durable skills, right, that graduates just don't have and employers like, Like, please teach them.

9:31And one of them was creative problem solving. So there's a dearth there.

9:36Kris Lande:Yeah, I think that's exactly it. And, you know, skills are changing so quickly. You know, and even just thinking about, like, the company that I work for, we are putting out new product every single month, every quarter. That is new skills that our customers learn. And those skills are changing so quickly because it's changing at the speed of AI. and those skills are not taught in high school or community college or in traditional education because traditional education can't keep up with those skills and so you need to be someone that has this like this learner mindset and a problem-solving mindset in order to be able to stay on top of the latest skills because ai is not slowing down it is only going to keep on going faster and you have to have that mentality because i think unfortunately gone are the days where you went to college and learned technology skills.

10:27Kris Lande:Like technology is changing too fast. We need to be constantly learning on the job. We need to be constantly learning new skills. And you have to have that durable problem solving and creative problem solving mindset to do that. Yeah, you're right. I mean, think about it. It's a great point. A freshman learning AI in college is going to be old by the time they're a senior. 100%. Exactly. It's scary. Exactly, it is, yeah. I want to kind of pivot because really what you're talking about It's not just the shifted skills. It's really shifted how marketing shows up, right? And I know you've said before that authenticity scales trust, especially in tech markets, right?

11:04But what's the difference between, in your opinion, I can't wait to ask you this. What's the difference between a brand that says it's authentic and one that actually is?

11:12Kris Lande:That's a really great question. I think a brand that is actually authentic shows it through its people. It shows it through its culture. It shows it through its community. because when you think about your brand and how you show up, that's really just like, it's a creative expression of your culture. It's how your people show up, how your salespeople work with people. It's how your community works with each other. And so I think the difference is like, do your people, whether that is your customer community or your employees, do they show up with that human impact as well? And I think something I'm very passionate about is our customer community, Out Systems has an incredible customer community of over 900 ,000 people who are in this community and they're helping each other.

11:59Kris Lande:And so when you are a new customer, you come into this community and you automatically have this whole group of people who want you to be successful. They want to help you succeed. They want to teach you the skills that they've learned because someone did it for them. And so it's this kind of this nature of giving back and paying it forward. And I think that is the ultimate of how a company has impact, how it has heart, how it's human. It's the humans at the end of the day. It shows when you are interacting with the company when you are buying the product. And it shows when you're a customer how it feels when you are part of that customer community, how it feels when you show up to that annual conference and how customers treat each other, the excitement that they have, how they're learning from each other.

12:47Kris Lande:I think that customer community is really an amazing way of showing that human impact, that trust in the community and in the company. So I think it's kind of both internal and external how we can show up. Yeah. Trust, it's a good segue to what I want to ask you about. And that's about how companies market outcomes, like their magic tricks almost, right, without showing the how. So why is it so important right now to bring people kind of inside the story, behind the curtain? Yeah, I think this is, especially in the AI era, this is especially important. And I think we are all beat over the head right now with so much AI noise, so much hype, so many promises of what AI can do for us.

13:30Kris Lande:But I think a lot of that is promises right now. And I think where we really need to look and what is more exciting to me is real proof. Like how are real customers actually using real AI to have real outcomes? Because at the end of the day, like you can do as many pilots as you want. You can have as many visions as you want for how AI is going to help your company. But if you're not having that real people, having real solutions and real impact, then it doesn't matter. And I think it's an interesting time right now because when you were previously considering buying enterprise software, the things that you would look at, you would go look at the analyst reports, you go look at data sheets.

14:13Kris Lande:But again, this stuff is changing so fast. The analyst categories are changing so fast that it's hard to know even what category to look at. It's hard to understand where can you go to have the latest information. And I think, you know, one thing that I really look at, so peer reviews are amazing because you can actually hear what are customers who are actually using this software? What do they actually say about it? Are they having real impact? Are they delivering real value? And we were really excited to be featured as a leader on G2 recently because this is like the ultimate validation, especially in the AI era that is moving so quickly.

14:50Kris Lande:Like this is of real people using the product and having real success. So let me, let me turn the lens inwards here, right? From a leadership perspective and standpoint, how do you create a culture where your team feel safe telling those real stories as well? Yeah. You know, this is, I think really the heart of our marketing is we have a robust customer marketing engine. We, um, you know, and I think it's twofold. You, you do need to, I'll just like take you through like how we would do a keynote. You need to show up with that vision of what AI can do and the promise and like, oh, you can do all of these super cool things.

15:25Kris Lande:But you need to complement it with a customer going on stage and saying, yeah, I did that and it works. You have to have both. You can't just have the fluff on stage and not have the actual impact that backs it up. So you need to have both. And this is something that definitely in my team, we are focusing a ton on. We have so many great customers who are using our AI, using our AI agents and having real tangible proof right now and real tangible outcome. And we almost can't keep up on the customer stories, which is an exciting place to be because I do think that true differentiation is how you really showcase that real customer impact.

16:09Kris Lande:And that's like we're putting so much momentum in that because we have so many great customer stories and so many great outcomes. But it's like, how do you do that balance of, you know, keeping ahead of the trends as well? Because a lot of the things that we are launching, like we need to also stay ahead of our customers. And so we want to, like AI is again changing so fast that we need to be ahead of things. So our customers have that next landscape to go to. And so we're always constantly staying ahead with our product, but then making sure that we are marketing and showing the real customer success that people are having today with our products.

16:46the converse of that as you know is you know no one hits a home run every time right so the customer stories you're going to have some who they had an issue they had a problem whatever right but you want to share those as well to show how you dealt with them right it can't just be all

17:02Kris Lande:you know sunshine and rainbows kind of thing yeah and I think I think that's that's real and you know one of the things that I've learned I've led um developer marketing at times throughout my throughout my career. And I remember stepping into the developer marketing role. This is midway through my career at Salesforce. And I had previously been a product marketer most of my marketing career. And I was used to marketing of like, this is awesome. This is going to change your life. This is incredible. That kind of message doesn't work for developers. They see right through that. And they're like, okay, yeah, I know you say it's awesome and incredible, but like what's the real story like i know it's not all sunshine and rainbows and i think you know what i quickly learned is with a developer community the way that you grant you gain credibility is by being honest like yeah this is awesome but here's here's some things to watch out for here's some things that can go wrong here's some things that you need to work around here's some lessons learned from other developers in the community and that's honesty because i don't i don't think anyone expects anything to be 100 perfect all the time but you need to be honest and transparent with that.

18:10Kris Lande:And that's, I think, a big lesson that I've learned from being in developer marketing is, you know, developers don't like to be marketed to. And I think that lesson applies to so many of our personas that don't like to be marketed to. They want to know the truth. Like, how does it actually work? What's great? What's not great? Give me the truth. So when we talk about authenticity and transparency that way, it really starts to connect to something bigger, right? Which is trust. You know, those lines are blurred, of course, with everything happening in AI. We said rapid warp speed. But to me, not many people are talking about trust when it comes to AI capabilities.

18:45And I'm curious to think, let me ask you, when you think about not only out systems in your own work, but what does earning trust actually look like in a category like this that moves so fast?

18:55Kris Lande:Yeah, you know, I think it's honesty again. I think it's honesty, but I think it's also, you know, I'd like to think that our marketing messages play a big role in how enterprises trust us. But at the end of the day, it's hearing from the people who are actually doing the work. You know, and I look at our community. We have our MVPs who are getting on stage constantly. They're getting on calls with our customers constantly. And they're actually showing and sharing how they're using this software, how they, the thing, the pitfalls that they've seen, the things that they've watched out for, the awesome success that they've seen.

19:33Kris Lande:Because I think that that is what matters the most is hearing from the people who are actually using the technology, the people who are building real solutions. They have real use cases to share. You know, and I'll just, for an example, I recently attended one of our community meetups. It was one of the end of year meetups for the London community. And it's fun because you have this agenda of lots of community people getting on stage to share their knowledge. And I just remember one of our MVPs got up on stage to talk about a use case that he had built, where he had built an OutSystems AI agent with Agent Workbench and had this awesome thing.

20:11Kris Lande:And as he was getting up on stage to share this, it was almost like a celebrity was coming up on stage. The crowd was so excited to hear from him. That wouldn't have happened for an OutSystems employee. But when you have someone who is in the community, they are building real things. They have made a name for themselves and a brand for themselves building these real things. And like they, they come up on stage like that message coming from that MVP means so much more than coming from an employee because it's real. It is real. And, you know, I think we all know that it's like trust travels faster peer to peer than it ever will by brand to buyer, like peer to peer.

20:50Kris Lande:That's how you develop trust. And so that's something like, you know, I love about our community is that there is this, this inherent trust and there's this engagement that that happens like just again the wit in seeing this was was very cool and seeing this this user group where people were getting on stage presenting to each other until about 10 45 at night and wow the excitement didn't go away it was just it was really incredible to see how people are engaged and they want to hear and learn from each other and that's that's that trust like they really they really trust the the solutions that are presented because they know it's real they don't work for the company So we all, and there's no shortage, right, of hype around AI, right?

21:29And magic elixirs and everybody promising the world. How do you decide what to say no to so you don't kind of get pulled into that hype cycle?

21:37Kris Lande:Yeah, that's a really great question because there's, you know, there's so many great tools out there. I would love to try and experiment with them all, but you just can't. And I have to say, like, if I get one more of like the very long responses to one of my questions that was clearly written by AI. And you can tell by the formatting and the, and the big headers. And I think, I mean, it's, it's awesome that people are using it, but I think it's also like, okay, what are we actually, are you actually going to read everything and take the ideas from it? What are we actually going to implement?

22:11Kris Lande:So I think it's like you, like now I kind of start having my AI filter on. I don't know if you do too, but because you know, like, you know, the things where someone didn't think they just put a short prompt and they have delivered a solution you're like did you actually read this solution um because now you're asking me to read it and so i think we all kind of have to have a little bit of this this um ai lens on things of like and this is i think maybe it comes back to the trust too what to trust and what to actually try and what to not like these long um ai prompt responses that i get i'm like okay well if you actually try the things on this list and you show me real proof i would love to talk about it but if you're just asking me to read read this long thing like no i want to see again coming back to that real proof like show me how this is working and you know we're we're hearing things all the time about like you know a one person marketing team who has got 500 500 arr um 500 million arr and it's like okay awesome show me what they're doing show me a demo i want to see actually how this works like that's exciting yeah i know it's the hype is just it's it's literally it's it's out of control and my fear it not my fear my belief it's going to get out of just keep going yeah yeah agree and and as a cmo you know this you get not just from internal your your team but outside vendors and everybody promising the world and they like you just said the the 500 million arr and i have one team i have one person and let me show you how and like Like weeding through that, like you almost need an agent just to get through the agent.