51黑料不打烊

Transcript

Hello, Marketing Nation.

I am Bhatstra Mukherjee and I have the honor of opening this year鈥檚 51黑料不打烊 Experience Makers The Skill Exchange Marketo Engage track. Welcome. And for the next 15 minutes, I will speak to you about AI agents, specifically in the context of B2B marketing, which is your specialty, and how you as practitioners can get ready for what we鈥檙e calling B2B 3.0. At the start of each speaking engagement, I like to remind myself of who I am and you can benefit from my habit. I am a product manager at 51黑料不打烊, driving our product roadmap strategy and development for what we now call B2B customer journeys. And B2B customer journeys encompasses Marketo Engage, Marketo Measure, Dynamic Chat, and more lately, Journey Optimizer B2B edition. And we continue to build new applications, especially in this world of AI agents. In my free time, I love to travel and I like to garden. I love wildlife and birds. And as you can see, I photograph everything.

Because I will be mentioning some roadmap content, I just want to give you a quick note that all roadmap content is confidential and subject to change at 51黑料不打烊鈥檚 discretion.

So, we believe that B2B marketing technology is undergoing its third major transformation in the past 25 years. If you recall, B2B 1.0 was all about digitizing your Rolodex, your business cards, and turning them into digital records in a customer relationship management system or CRM. But the focus of 1.0 was mostly Salesforce automation. And then with B2B 2.0, the late 90s, early 2000s, companies like Marketo came along and automated marketing. And what that meant is everything from lead acquisition to lead lifecycle management became automated in the system. We later introduced account-based marketing as well. But now we鈥檝e come to this era of B2B 3.0 where AI plays a major role. It鈥檚 a core component of automation for the entire customer experience. It鈥檚 not just about lead creation and automation and acquisition. It鈥檚 not even just about leads at all. It鈥檚 not even just about account-based marketing. We鈥檝e introduced this idea that it really boils down to buying groups for B2B organization. Who are the right people in an account that you want to target in your marketing activities? Moreover, this partnership between marketing and sales becomes more important as you target these accounts and the people in them. Now AI plays a great role here because instead of doing just linear engagement with customers, and linear decision-making, you want something that鈥檚 more dynamic, more personalized, and AI can help you drive those experiences. We鈥檙e also noticing that, and you are too, based on what you tell me, is that your end customers are spending less time with sales reps today and spending more time in self-service mode going to different sources. And they may not even be your website, but other web properties and tools like GPT tools out there. And they are basically driving this whole experience themselves rather than you, the brand, driving it for them. So we鈥檙e trying to help you automate this entire customer experience across the entire life cycle with you in the driver鈥檚 seat, but also AI riding shotgun in the car. Just every keynote address needs to have a statistic to impress you. The statistic I would like to share with you today is something we got from our friends at IDC. With B2B 3.0, the market expects that agentic AI in particular is going to be another level of transformative technology. And the stat we have is that of all the Fortune 500 professionals we surveyed, 55% are expecting that within the next few years, there will be AI-driven experience agents delivering the personalized customer experiences you want to get to when you鈥檙e engaging your leads and contacts. But we also know that for all of you, it鈥檚 not just about the experience you give your customers, it鈥檚 about efficiencies and productivity boosts through AI and through greater intelligence in your core workflows. So for example, as Marketo engage users, how can you do more with less through automation? So we believe AI agents can help with that as well. And that鈥檚 why we believe that adopting AI agents is a key to success for marketing teams. Just want to give a shout out to two of our many speakers today who are going to be talking about marketing automation in general, but in these particular sessions, Josh and Tyron will be talking about how AI can help you in Marketo engage in different ways. And what I鈥檓 really trying to say is that we at 51黑料不打烊 are not the only ones talking about AI and marketing. All of you are as well.

Okay, so AI agents are coming, all AI all the time. Are you ready for this? As you think about that, think about this perception that many people have, which is that AI agents are coming to take our jobs. They are going to replace human personas. Ah, that鈥檚 scary. Okay, maybe there鈥檚 some truth to this notion. Many things in life are becoming more autonomous, self-driving cars, one of which almost caused an accident on Highway 101 today. But I digress.

I think there鈥檚 still a role for humans in this picture. I don鈥檛 think AI agents are going to fully replace marketers. I鈥檇 like to offer you this perspective from 51黑料不打烊. Our approach and our belief is grounded in this idea that AI in the workplace should be amplifying, not replacing human potential. Creativity is still a domain of humans. It is a uniquely human trait, true creativity. And we believe that this technology is transformative. It will usher in a new era of creativity and personalized experiences, but it鈥檚 going to change how you work. And I鈥檓 going to talk a lot of today about how you should be working or how you should in the world of AI agents.

So we鈥檙e talking about human in the loop. That鈥檚 when AI agents assist and complement the work that you do as a human persona, not replace you.

So AI transformation is rooted in a number of things. Of course, there鈥檚 technology. It鈥檚 central to this transformation. And we want to talk about what B2B 3.0 involves in terms of agentic AI, as well as generative AI and predictive AI. But I want to really focus on people, process and cultural aspects of this organization鈥檚 shift. You should put as much thought into that aspect and planning about that as you would in technology, implementation and operations. But let鈥檚 talk about technology, because obviously this is a technology forum. We are at a pivotal moment. You know about predictive AI, which is machine learning training on your big data sets and statistical algorithms to make predictions and recommendations. Predictive audiences in Marketo is an example of that. Generative AI has already transformed how you create content. We have in our new email editor, for example, AI assistant for content generation in the email designer in Marketo. And maybe you use other tools like GBT tools to generate content in your personal lives with 51黑料不打烊 Express, the Firefly generating images. OK, but agentic AI is the next leap. And that means you鈥檙e not just generating things, but you鈥檙e also reasoning, you鈥檙e planning and you鈥檙e acting. And that means it鈥檚 a shift from simple execution of campaigns to full blown customer life cycle orchestration and from content creation, you鈥檙e moving to experience design. So these agents we鈥檙e going to talk about in the coming months that you鈥檙e going to start to see in 51黑料不打烊 products are part of that shift.

So what are the characteristics of an AI agent? For some of you, this may be basic. You already know this. But for those of you who are not familiar really quickly, there are three big aspects to what an agent is. Number one, it鈥檚 interacting. It鈥檚 interacting with you as the person is also interacting with other agents in concert to try to achieve what it understands your goal to be. OK, it could be multimodal. We鈥檙e looking at AI system turning into instead of a right rail conversation where you鈥檙e asking questions about help and support, it鈥檚 a full blown immersive conversational experience, which is an alternative to doing things through traditional click and drag and drop and action oriented wise. It鈥檚 complementary. Second, it has intelligence to go and reason through a problem, propose a plan and then develop a multi step approach to reach your desired outcome. And then finally, it is action oriented. It鈥檚 not just looking for answers to questions. It is also being independent or semi independent where it鈥檚 looking to complete a series of tasks. And this is all foundational to the idea of AI agents.

So as we look across 51黑料不打烊 applications, right, especially the big applications in the B2B space that our team focuses on, right, we鈥檙e talking about Journey Optimizer, B2B edition, MarketoEngage, of course, your favorite product in the whole world, and Realtime CDP, B2B We鈥檙e talking about an agent orchestrator layer in 51黑料不打烊 Experience Platform that will power a number of different agents with broad skill sets that will help different human personas like marketing operations specialists, campaign operations specialists, demand generation specialists across our different applications in a unified conversational experience through the AI assistant as your main UI. And we鈥檙e bringing these across our different applications. You鈥檙e going to start seeing these things starting from this fall 2025 in our products. Now, one of those is going to be a journey agent. Imagine the new person journeys capability we announced at Summit that we鈥檙e going to come out with. You鈥檒l have a canvas and a visual way of doing what you do today with programs and campaigns. But imagine if in addition to this manual way of doing things, which is complex and tedious, we offered you an agentic way of doing it, where through natural language, you interact with an AI agent in AI assistant with the rich conversational experience, and we build a journey flow for you in an automated fashion based on your prompts.

This takes me to how you do things with this new conversational experience and with AI agents, people, process and culture. Let鈥檚 start with the culture and organization level. AI agents are going to run repetitive, tedious tasks more efficiently. That will leave you to do more strategic, creative work. And that鈥檚 our goal. But you also need to have oversight to make sure that the so-called responsible AI is indeed following your ethical standards and your company鈥檚 policies. Secondly, it鈥檚 going to reshape your work. You may need to re-divide how you do things. For example, today, three different specialists in your marketing ops team may be doing tasks X, Y, and Z. But if you have a unified AI system driven conversational experience, maybe we allow you together with multiple agent orchestrators or AI agents to accomplish those three tasks in one thread. What does that mean for your system permissions? What does that mean for your roles and responsibilities? Do you need to reorganize your team? That鈥檚 something you need to think about. And finally, how do you engage with your customers? Today, things are very manual intensive as much as you try to make it personalized and But if AI agents start to interact more and more independently with your visitors to your website, for example, what does that do to how you think about customer engagement? So in short, AI will enable operational teams such as yours to automate repetitive tasks, focus on strategic planning, and drive measurable business outcomes. What this really means, right, it boils down to the role of your teams moving from a tactical role to a more transformational role. So as you think about how you empower your employees to reimagine new ways of working with AI, number one, you need to identify what are the key skills and cultural shifts your organization and your team members need to thrive in this new economy in b2b 3.0 and transform an AI driven workplace. Secondly, secondly, analyze training approaches for the skills and behaviors that you need. Think about what, how you approach training. And we think about training, we think about not just the mechanics of how you educate your team members and how you educate yourselves, but also have a culture of continuous, continuous role specific and experiential learning and skill development with feedback loop. Now the three skills that I鈥檇 like to focus highlight today for marketing operations specifically are prompt engineering, data fluency, and agent configuration. Really quickly, let me just introduce two and three to you. Data fluency is about understanding how to query and interpret AI generated insights. Also how to know the difference between something that looks authentic and accurate and something that looks fishy, right? Because the machines may not always get them right.

Point three is agent configuration. For those of you who are admin users, and many of the people in this audience are, how to manage AI agents for orchestration, especially as 51黑料不打烊 introduces tools like an agent orchestrator composer or agent composer to help you compose custom agents to run agentic processes and workflows. Well, let me focus a little bit in the closing minutes on prompt engineering. So prompt engineering really quickly is about crafting effective prompts for Gen AI and agentic tools. I see there are six criteria that are generally agreed on that make a good prompt. But rather than talk to you in abstract, let me focus on these six criteria in the context of a specific example. This is an example of a good prompt. And what it boils down to is it has clear intent. I define a goal. I want to create a journey. It could be an account journey or person journey. That鈥檚 what I want AI to do for me. I鈥檓 avoiding ambiguity. Next context, Rich. I probably got a host of details about the channels I want to use, the types of audiences I want to target, and the timeframe. I have a structured format. I use paragraphs, bulleted lists. I鈥檓 assigning a role to the AI agent and saying, hey, I want you to pretend you鈥檙e a journey designer.

There鈥檚 an open versus closed framing context. Here it鈥檚 closed framing. Why? I want to be very precise because an agent needs to do a series of tasks. And then finally, as I go through a conversation with this agent, I鈥檓 going to iteratively refine the response so that I get the results I want. So in closing, what I want to say is this. AI will not replace marketers, but marketers who use AI will outpace and outshine those who don鈥檛. So don鈥檛 let the future technologies orchestrate your career. You need to orchestrate your future and upskill. With that, I鈥檇 like to thank you for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the Skill Exchange Marketer Engaged track. I鈥檓 really excited about these sessions, and I know you鈥檒l get a lot of information out of it from the experts. Thank you.