I'm Back! Here's What's Changing With the AI-Driven Marketer

AI moved from an emerging marketing advantage to ordinary marketing reality faster than I expected. Nearly every marketer now has AI in the bio, the tool stack, or the daily workflow. That changes the question this show needs to answer.

The original journey was to master AI for marketing. That journey is still moving because the technology and its uses keep changing, but the show is narrowing its focus. The next season is about how to navigate AI as a marketing leader and as a team.

From individual mastery to team leverage

Most of us do not need another list of prompts or a generic promise that AI makes one person equal to ten. We need to know how to use it together without losing the human work that makes a marketing team effective.

My own team is small: two full-time employees plus a regular bench of contractors. The practical question is how a small team can go farther and faster without asking people to become robots. How do we create technical systems that make people more productive while protecting their judgment, creativity, and relationships?

That is the work ahead. It means looking at AI through the needs of marketing leaders: how to make decisions, create workflows, develop the team, and get growth work done when resources are tight.

Staying practical while moving up a level

I will keep rolling up my sleeves with the technology. Practical workflows, tools, and real experiments are still part of the point. But I also want to step back and ask how the parts work together: what should be automated, what should stay human, and how can a team make the most of both?

The audience has always included a wide mix of people: CMOs, marketing directors, solo marketers, business owners, freelancers, and CEOs. The new emphasis is aimed most directly at marketing leaders, especially those managing a small team. It should still be useful to anyone responsible for growth.

I also expect to bring in more interviews. I have more questions than answers about how to lead this transition well, and the goal is to learn in public with people who are doing the work.

The next journey is not simply mastering AI as an individual. It is mastering AI as a team for growth and for marketing.

Dan Sanchez: Hello and welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. My friends, call me Danchez. And it's been a while, y'all. I know a few of you have kind of been looking for this episode every week for a while and just skipping on by because I haven't published anything. Man, I got a story about that. But first, let's talk about what this show has been and where it's come from. Because man, two and a half years ago, I set out to just master AI. And as a podcaster, I I started a podcast about it because I wanted to just document the journey of learning how to use this thing called AI for marketing. It was pretty obvious to me back then. I remember when I saw the writing on the wall and I was like, man, AI's gonna change everything. And so I decided I needed to learn a lot about it. So I did what a good podcaster does and I started interviewing people who seemed like they knew some stuff about it. And that evolved and we've gone through a bunch of different formats and seasons together as we've learned all the new tech and tools that have come out. And honestly, I think I got to the point maybe a month, month and a half ago, where I just started burning out. I think it was the rate of a bunch of different things for me. I don't know about you, but like the rate of change with AI started to become a little overwhelming. I was like, my gosh, I can't keep up with all the tool fronts anymore. I had a pretty good handle on it before January. And then just the onslaught of stuff came. That night I took a full time job and that changes things, right? It's one thing when you're working for yourself and you can dedicate a quite a bit of time into learning these things so you can, you know, talk about them and then execute them for clients and manage and have a looser schedule. But once you start like working for yourself and you still got some side projects going on, like it gets harder to stay up to date in in in addition to actually like pushing out content about it. even with all the AI tools helping you do all the stuff. And I was like, Man, I'm having a hard time staying up to date. I I mean, I'm trying to execute at work. And I started to run into new Challenges. And I think this is where this really starts to get interesting because before I was like a solopreneur with, you know, with partners. I worked with Ken and I worked with my brother on some things. And it was it was smooth going. But I was learning how to execute AI for myself. It was like me and my AI team, and that was it. But now that I'm working as a lead marketing leader in a company, I have not just me and my AI stuff, I have my team members and their AI stuff. And it's a different thing. We have various degrees of AI literacy within the team. And so it's a much different dynamic. We have real-world pressures. We're trying to bring up revenue, trying to build systems, trying to do the work of the that's coming on daily and weekly on top of building systems that will last a while. all while trying to figure out how to coordinate and work AI into the system. So it's created a whole new challenge. At the same time, I was feeling burned out on the front of like just learning all the new. AI tools and updates and all the different news to stay on top of, I started wrestling with a whole new set of problems. And I was like, ha, you know what? I think I've gotten to a good place with my own personal mastery of AI. And while it is harder to stay on top of, I've really figured out something good with codecs. I've really figured out good for my own personal productivity, my own personal marketing. But taking those and translating them to a company where there's a whole team doesn't always translate as cleanly as you would hope. It's been great for individual marketers. It's been great for solopreneurs, certainly your small business owners. I know I have a wide variety of people listening to this show and I've been known as the practical AI guy. So what people have introduced me up on stage, it's what people have said on social media. So I was just kind of like, yeah, I guess I'm that guy. I'm the guy just learning how to do it and sharing what I've learned of how to implement practical AI systems for marketing. But now I find I'm myself in a different season, and it's shifting the way I'm thinking about how to create content for this show. So I want to talk to you about what to kind of expect from the AI-driven marketer moving forward. another thing that's going on is that like there's a I knew this would happen, but it happened faster than I expected. I knew when I launched this show called the AI-driven marketer that eventually everybody would be AI-driven. It would be kind of like, Calling yourself a digital marketer. Like, duh, everybody's a digital marketer. Pretty much 99% of marketing's digital now. Okay. It's not a no thing. And I knew that would happen for AI, but it happened faster than I thought. We went from like crossing the chasm to like hitting the early majority to like getting into like the late majority really fist fast. I feel like it happened within like an eight to 10 month window. And now every marketer uses AI. Everybody's LinkedIn bio says AI in it. Everybody. Like I it's hard to find exceptions to it. The only people not doing it are the laggards now. As the only people that haven't rolled up their sleeves and started using AI from a marketing standpoint, at least to a small degree, where they're but to it still even the people that don't use it a lot are still doing it pretty substantially to the point where they're using it at least in a small way every day, and in a major way, probably once a week. That's still significant use, even for those who are on the late majority of adoption. So what do we do with this show? There's lots of AI shows. There's lots of YouTube content. Every marketing show out there is an AI marketing show. So then what do we do with this show? Well, I feel like this is a personal show. This is my journey. And the original journey was to master AI. And I feel like to a large degree, I've done that. But again, that goal keeps moving forward. AI keeps changing. The way we incorporate it in marketing continues to change. So I'm gonna shift, I'm gonna narrow it down. Instead of going broader into AI business, I'm going down. So for the future of the AI driven marketer, we're gonna start to have a bit more of an emphasis on how to navigate AI, not just as an individual marketer, but as a marketing leader. How do you do this with the team? Mainly because this is where I'm at in my journey right now. And I think it's relevant to a lot of people. And I've talked to enough of you. To know that I have CMOs listening to this of small big and small company C CMOs, have marketing directors, I got solo marketers working for B2B, B2C. I have small business owners, I have freelancers. It's such a wide mix of people. Shoot, I have CEOs listening to this of small companies sometimes. So it's such a wide mix that I'm actually going to narrow it down to marketing leaders, people who are managing teams of three specifically, because that's what I have. I have two full time employees and a a bench of contractors that we use regularly that are kind of like on almost like part time. Some of them actually are part time and some of them are just contracts that, you know, have their monthly thing that they do. So I have a small team. And I think the goal is how do we use AI together? Not as individually, but how do we make the most of it together to make a team of three feel like a team of thirty or forty or more. Right? Because this is going to be the future. Most of us are probably losing teammates in this season. The economy's been uncertain and it's been hard. And I find a lot of companies are cutting back. So how do you make the most of the few people that you do have with AI? Not just as a leader. Not I'm talking not talking about the book, The AI Driven Leader, which is a good book about how to think strategically with AI, but how do you create technical systems? in order to get the most out of AI and the human teammates that you have. How do you make the most of their humanity while also making them as productive as they can be with AI without pushing it too far and your company just feels and can feels like a robot. We don't want that. But we do want to be able to go farther and faster together. And that's what a big emphasis of this show is going to be on moving forward. It's still going to be practical because I'm just a You know, I can't help myself. I have to roll up my sleeves and deal with the tech myself. I'm just a practical guy. I have to figure out how to learn it. And I think a lot of you are the same. but I'm going to be coming up a level and thinking about it strategically, holistically, with teammates in mind. So if you're not a marketing leader and you're still a CEO, CMO, I mean, a CMO is a marketing leader, but you get my I what I'm trying to say here. Like if you don't fit kind of that definition, maybe you're a solopreneur, this show might still be for you. Because everybody has to do growth. So stick around, listen to a month or two of episodes and see if you like the new direction. It's aligned to where I'm trying to go. I'm probably gonna be doing a lot more interviews because I have a lot to learn when it comes to how to do this well. I've asked I have way more questions than I have answers right now when it comes to how to do this well. So stick around and let's see where we can take this together. This is the new journey. It's not how to master AI. It's how to master AI as a team for growth, for marketing. This is the next season of the AI-driven market.