New skills, new mindset: Leading marketing in an AI future
MARKET VIEW
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Produced by:
Kate Cox
Global Marketing Leader at Guesty
about
Kate Cox
Kate Cox is the Global Marketing Leader at Guesty, a B2B SaaS platform serving the prop tech and travel tech space. She leads the entire global marketing function, overseeing teams across all disciplines as the company serves the short-term rental and vacation rental industry worldwide. With a strategic focus on AI adoption and workflow transformation, Kate brings a framework-driven approach to marketing leadership, balancing systems thinking with quality control. Her philosophy centres on empowering creators and strategists whilst maintaining brand integrity in an AI-enabled environment.
As AI becomes more embedded in marketing operations, what capabilities do you see as most valuable for marketing teams?
I think it splits into two distinct disciplines. We need systems builders—people who are good at building frameworks, processes, and automations between different platforms. And we need quality controllers and tastemakers—people who understand the nuance of marketing output and can see the bigger picture of where we're trying to get to.
The challenge with AI is that it becomes incredibly effective at doing lots of micro-tasks that we probably wouldn't have got round to previously. But you need to keep the bigger picture in mind about how you show up as a brand. There's always going to be a human-in-the-loop element to all AI processes.
We're spending a lot of time training AI on quality cues. Our early tests were just spitting out dross, slop. As a premium provider in our industry, we can't let slop out—it needs to look high quality. So it's really about putting information into knowledge bases about what's good and what's bad, and training the model accordingly.
How are you approaching the skills challenge as marketing roles evolve in an AI-first environment?
People who can build automations between systems are becoming really valuable. It's about understanding marketing and building those systems, knowing how to call internal knowledge banks, and understanding what information is available to assist in building processes.
You have to be a curious self-starter to thrive in this new world, but curious self-starters have always thrived in marketing. It becomes less viable to have a very small remit and just focus on that, because you have to think through the implications of all your decision-making.
What's interesting is that we've been building specialists for the last twenty years as complexity has accelerated with digital transformation. Now AI is pushing us towards ecosystem thinking—you have to understand how all the channels work together to become really good at AI-driven marketing.
How have you structured AI adoption within your organisation, and what advice would you give to others starting this journey?
We've chosen to embed AI across all functions. We started with a centralised unit in customer support. That was so successful that we've now put AI ambassadors across the whole business who are building workflows and supporting each function.
We also have our own AI marketing subject matter expert embedded in the team. They're hard to find, but one-person marketing teams who've been running everything on AI are very useful—that sort of start-up play with lean teams has created a lot of AI generalists. Our expert came from a company where he was running the entire marketing department with himself and AI.
My advice would be: think of a use case you can solve relatively easily, solve it, get it live, and measure it. Sometimes we try to boil the ocean, and that doesn't help get traction. Taking press releases and automatically turning them into LinkedIn posts is an easy one to start. It makes everyone feel comfortable because you've got human oversight, and it works.
How is AI affecting collaboration between marketing and sales, and what do you see as essential for making that alignment successful?
It's been hugely impactful. The challenge previously was a lot of anecdotal evidence on both sides about what's working. Now AI has given both sides the ability to figure out how to improve processes. We won a deal, so how do we take those sales calls, use AI to understand pain points, and feed that back into the marketing engine at a segmented level?
For example, all the customers we won from a certain competitor—how can we use that information to re-engage other potential customers using AI tools? It becomes really effective at that micro level. Then it's about figuring out the personalisation journey.
The essential ingredient is agreeing on the data signals and their hierarchy. At what point is it oven-ready for sales? A website visit in isolation is just one signal. But ten different users' visits from a big enterprise—that's quite interesting, a really strong signal. One webinar attendee is probably weak, but it could be strong if five people from the same company attended a differentiated topic.
What do you think will separate marketing leaders who navigate this transformation well from those who struggle?
You've got to be excited by the change. You've got to see the possibilities. These tools are putting the power in the hands of creators and strategists—people who can see a business challenge and develop solutions to fix it.
I don't think anyone's got the perfect answer, because the technology is so new. You think you've got an answer, and then a new development comes along. The rapid rate of change is going to upend a lot of processes.
But the people who can see the positivity in it, who are curious, who want to learn and try things—creators and innovators will love this new world. People will struggle who get satisfaction from having clear roadmaps and paths. The tastemakers and the systems builders are going to win. People who have a really good understanding of quality and can make subjective, taste-driven decisions, and those who can see how it all connects together—they're going to thrive.
about
Guesty
Guesty is a B2B SaaS platform operating in the prop tech and travel tech space, providing solutions for the short-term rental and vacation rental industry. As a premium provider serving property managers and vacation rental businesses globally, Guesty helps clients streamline operations and grow their businesses. The company is actively embedding AI across its product suite to enhance user experience and decision-making capabilities.
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.