New skills, new mindset: Leading marketing in an AI future
MARKET VIEW
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Produced by:
Elizabeth Maxson
Chief Marketing Officer at Contentful
about
Elizabeth Maxson
Elizabeth Maxson is the Chief Marketing Officer at Contentful, where she leads the company's go-to-market strategy. With extensive experience in marketing leadership, she has guided Contentful's transition from a product-led growth model focused on developers to a sales-led approach targeting marketing leaders. Elizabeth champions the "full-stack marketer" concept, building teams that combine strategic thinking with technical fluency and essential human capabilities.
What does the "full-stack marketer" concept mean to you, and how are you developing this capability within your team?
We believe a new generation of marketers is emerging. We call them "full-stack" marketers. This is someone highly proficient across the entire marketing lifecycle who is equal parts strategist and builder. These professionals are growth drivers with strong AI fluency, comfortable navigating prompts and leveraging data to inform creative decisions.
Developing this capability requires a two-pronged approach. First, we invest significantly in upskilling our existing team. At our recent company kickoff, the marketing sessions focused entirely on storytelling, covering everything from public speaking to creating custom GPTs and using AI for imagery within our brand guidelines.
The second element, which may be even more impactful, is how we approach hiring. Beyond technical skills, I prioritise soft skills. Is the candidate genuinely curious? Can they operate effectively amid ambiguity? I seek people who question assumptions and know how to leverage tools to extend their capabilities. Too often, leaders focus exclusively on AI skills while overlooking curiosity, empathy, and judgement. These are precisely the qualities AI cannot replicate, along with lived experiences and human insight.
How has AI influenced your content strategy, particularly as buyers increasingly research through AI summaries before visiting websites?
Many companies are experiencing declining website traffic as audiences gather information through alternative channels. There is now a new competitive landscape around how brands appear in AI-generated summaries. However, organisations that create content optimised for AI consumption while maintaining quality are seeing more qualified leads.
The logic is straightforward: visitors have already completed substantial research before arriving at your website, so their intent is significantly higher. Despite a reduction in overall traffic, the visitors reaching our site are considerably more qualified than they were twelve months ago.
Our approach focuses on serving both human audiences and AI systems simultaneously. Video content is delivering stronger performance, prompting increased investment in product explainer videos. We are also implementing structural improvements, such as ensuring blog posts include tables of contents, which AI systems can parse more effectively. Rather than creating entirely separate content streams for different audiences, we concentrate on formats that serve both effectively.
How is AI enhancing collaboration between marketing and sales, and where do you see opportunities to operate more effectively as a unified revenue team?
We operate as one integrated go-to-market team. My partnership with our Chief Revenue Officer and product team is fundamental to our effectiveness. Regardless of AI capabilities, presenting a unified front is essential.
That said, AI is substantially improving our collaboration around transparency and accountability. We use Momentum, which provides visibility into sales conversations. When we introduce new messaging, I can analyse AI-generated insights from sales calls, compare them against our positioning, and understand what resonates. This reveals both whether sales teams are adopting the messaging and how prospects are responding.
We also use PeerBound to capture sentiment from prospect and customer conversations, providing marketing with direct quotes to inform our messaging strategy. These tools bridge information gaps that previously existed. My team cannot attend every sales call, so accessing AI-generated summaries and creating custom prompts to test hypotheses has become invaluable for understanding market response, accelerating decisions, and adjusting course when something requires refinement.
How are you approaching website personalisation, and what opportunities do you see in this area?
Personalisation has existed for years in email marketing. Receiving an email without your name would seem remarkably impersonal. I believe websites should meet that same standard. We should recognise whether a visitor is a marketer, understand their location, and tailor the experience accordingly.
A compelling example from our own data: we discovered that 26% of website visitors were clicking the login button, indicating they are existing customers. Understanding this allows us to present appropriate messaging. Rather than explaining why they should purchase Contentful, we can focus on how they might expand their usage and derive additional value from the platform.
Given that visitors now arrive with higher intent, having completed preliminary research elsewhere, we are directing them toward middle and bottom-of-funnel content designed to encourage deeper engagement. This approach has delivered substantial improvements in content performance.
What will distinguish marketing leaders who navigate this AI transformation successfully from those who struggle?
Too many marketing teams are stuck in a perpetual experimentation phase, trialling new AI tools without a clear direction. My advice is to step back and clarify objectives. Are you aiming to improve efficiency, reduce costs, increase pipeline, or expand reach? Clear goals for AI adoption should come before tool selection. Otherwise, teams end up collecting tools and trying to retrofit them into workflows that were never designed for them.
Strong leaders also focus on building a culture where AI adoption is encouraged, supported, and continuously improved. That means empowering teams to experiment, share what works, and rethink how work gets done, not just adding another tool to the stack. When marketers can confidently offload repetitive work to AI, they gain more time for strategy, creativity, and high-impact initiatives. Teams that embrace this mindset will move faster and unlock far more value from the technology.
The pace of technological change is unprecedented. I experienced something similar during the mobile transformation, but not at this speed. AI is rapidly redefining how marketing work gets done, and leaders who think critically about implementation early will create a meaningful advantage.
about
Contentful
Contentful is a leading composable content platform that enables enterprises to create, manage, and deliver digital experiences across any channel. The company provides AI-powered content infrastructure, including intelligent translation and personalisation capabilities, helping organisations scale their global presence. Contentful serves major brands worldwide, empowering marketing and development teams to build and optimise digital experiences with speed and flexibility.
About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.