Humans of Martech Podcast

244: How Anthropic thinks about build vs buy in the AI era, with Alexey Komissarouk

1K views · 1d ago · 53:45

Guest: Alexey Komissarouk

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Alexey Komissarouk, who leads growth engineering and martech at Anthropic. Summary: Alexey builds martech infrastructure at the company with the most reason to trust AI to build it for them. He unpacks how Anthropic uses Terraform pull requests, a data warehouse doing more work than any vendor, and a security review process that’s genuinely harder than the code itself.

Topics: In This Episode · How Engineers Actually End Up Specializing in Martech · Security Approval Is the Real Bottleneck at Anthropic · Why Anthropic Builds Its Own CDP Instead of Buying One · How the Vibe-Code Era Is Rewriting Build Versus Buy Math · Who Owns a Vibe-Coded App After Its Builder Leaves

📰 Mentioned news: 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas this episode

Mining the 'Why' Behind Silent Behavioral Data with Synthetic Users

7 views · 2d ago · 6:59

Guest: Synthetic Users

Behavioral data captures every click, scroll, and abandoned cart — but none of it explains the cognitive motivation behind those actions. John Whalen walks through how synthetic users can reach the audiences and answer the questions that traditional survey panels never could, including hard-to-recruit segments like high-net-worth buyers, and why every output should be treated as a testable hypothesis rather than a finding.

📰 Mentioned news: 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas this episode

What Gets Your Buyer Promoted Matters More Than Empathy

20 views · 5d ago · 6:46

Blog post version 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas from this episode All episodes

📰 Mentioned news: 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas this episode

The 3-Year, 5-Year, Deathbed Test

4 views · 6d ago · 4:25

How to decide what actually matters: Sharon Gai uses three questions to decide what deserves her energy. If the answer is no to all three, it gets none. Her filter is three years, five years, deathbed, which matters because it is a prioritisation framework you can run in ten seconds on anything competing for your attention.

Topics: How To Make Better Decisions in the AI Era · Personal AI Strategy and Thinking Time · Decision-Making, Judgment, and Human Collaboration · How To Decide What Deserves Your Energy · The 3-Year, 5-Year, Deathbed Test · What Actually Makes Work Feel Meaningful

▶️ Mentioned videos: Full episode with Sharon Gai

How To Get AI Content Past A Human Editor | Alex Halliday

111 views · 1w ago · 13:47

Guest: Alex Halliday

Blog post version 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas from this episode Alex Halliday on the hardest part of content automation: the human editor. AirOps shipped a three step article template early on. One Sunday morning he woke up to customers running workflows with a hundred plus steps. That gap is the difference between an output and an outcome, filled in with years of accumulated taste.

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📰 Mentioned news: 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas this episode

243: Is Chief of Staff the next big career move for marketing ops? with Lauren Stein

706 views · 1w ago · 1:00:14

Guest: Lauren Stein

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Lauren Stein, former Chief of Staff at GrowthLoop. Summary: Lauren has become one of the best-connected people in the martech community as an ops lead, ecosystem builder, and mentor to a ton of founders and operators. As a seasoned Chief of Staff, she's now seeing that title showing up explicitly in job postings recruiting straight out of marketing ops.

Topics: In This Episode · Is Marketing Ops Already Preparing You To Be A Chief Of Staff · Chief Of Staff Is About Trade-Offs, Not Just Bigger Scope · Building Trust With ICs Is The Real Entry Point To Chief Of Staff · Job Postings Are Splitting Marketing Ops From Marketing Chief Of Staff · Product Management Is Becoming A Core Chief Of Staff Skill

📰 Mentioned news: 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas this episode

Why Communication Beats Technical Skills In The AI Era

72 views · 1w ago · 7:36

Phil makes the case that communication beats technical skills in the AI era. Michele Martin does not take the bait, and her answer totally reframes the premise. Not more important, she says, just a different way in. The tools were built for people who don’t know how to code, and the intimidation is almost always self-inflicted.

📰 Mentioned news: 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas this episode

What Do Marketers Do When AI Builds the Ads?

12 views · 1w ago · 5:33

Full episode with Sharon Gai Blog post version All episodes Key points Photography did not end painting — it freed painters from copying reality and produced Impressionism, which is the closest historical parallel to what AI is doing to marketing The AI timeline has physical constraints that rarely get priced in — energy, chips, and scaling gains that are now incremental rather than exponential

Topics: What Photography Did to Painting · Abstraction in Marketing Work · Short on Energy, Short on Chips · The Future of Marketing Roles After AI

▶️ Mentioned videos: Full episode with Sharon Gai

Do These 3 Things Before You Get Laid Off

424 views · 1w ago · 14:37

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What Happens When AI Agents Join Your Marketing Team | Alex Halliday

55 views · 2w ago · 5:44

Guest: Alex Halliday

Blog post version 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas from this episode Alex Halliday maps out what a content engineering team looks like in three years. His view: marketing orgs onboard a new subteam, captained by one primary agent with subagents underneath it. Humans come in for a few extremely productive hours to exercise taste, add a point of view, and get caught up on what actually shifted in the market.

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📰 Mentioned news: 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas this episode

242: It's the end of Lifecycle Marketing as we know it and here's what's next, with Anna Gelfand

1.3K views · 2w ago · 1:04:31

Guest: Anna Gelfand

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Anna Gelfand, Director and Head of Lifecycle & Retention Marketing at Miro. Blog post version 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas from this episode All episodes

Topics: In This Episode · Why Lifecycle Marketing As We Know It Has No Future · How To Codify The Qualitative Side Of Lifecycle Marketing · Shipping The Criteria Instead Of The Campaign · Why Your Workflow Should Define Your Martech Tools · What Lifecycle Marketers Will Do When Agents Run Campaigns

📰 Mentioned news: 4 quotes, 0 chill, and 4 ideas this episode