New skills, new mindset: Leading marketing in an AI future
MARKET VIEW
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Raine Pell
Marketing and Communications Director at Sopra Steria
about
Raine Pell
Raine Pell is the Marketing and Communications Director at Sopra Steria, leading the health vertical with responsibility for growth and reputation management at a strategic level. With oversight of both marketing and communications functions, she is currently restructuring her team to future-proof it for an AI-driven landscape, implementing a hybrid model that blends in-house expertise with agency support. Raine brings a pragmatic approach to AI adoption, focusing on freeing teams from transactional activities to concentrate on strategic, customer-centric value creation.
How are you distinguishing between activities that AI can handle versus those requiring human expertise?
The distinction I apply is between transactional and value-add work. Transactional activities include extracting customer experience data from multiple sources, conducting A/B testing on emails and content, and preparing presentations for bid responses or initial client engagement. These are areas where AI can handle the repetitive questioning and analysis that previously consumed significant team capacity.
The value-add work centres on understanding customer needs, solving complex problems, and developing nuanced value propositions. This requires human judgement, creativity, and relationship-building capabilities that AI cannot replicate. This framework has informed how I'm restructuring my function – moving towards a more senior-level team composition where foundational activities are AI-driven, while strategic expertise is retained and enhanced in-house alongside agency partnerships. The goal is creating headspace for the team to focus on work that genuinely moves the needle for the business.
How are you using AI to strengthen your customer-centric approach?
Many organisations, including ours, can default to being product-centric rather than customer-centric, with product development driven by internal assumptions rather than validated customer needs. AI provides an opportunity to challenge that by testing whether products and services genuinely address what customers require.
We've been using AI to examine our customer segments and ideal customer profiles, and the results have helped us refine our understanding significantly. Historically, our segments weren't far off, but AI has enabled us to add precision and confidence to that picture. The practical application involves taking our product portfolio and assessing propensity to buy against validated customer profiles combined with market data.
We started with straightforward prompts in ChatGPT, progressively making them more sophisticated as we learned what generated useful outputs. Rather than designing by committee, I asked my head of marketing to experiment independently, iterating until we had something worth sharing with the wider team. Each product manager then built on that foundation with their specific domain knowledge.
The next evolution is ensuring we position ourselves to solve problems rather than simply promote individual services. Using those validated profiles, we can present ourselves as one business solving one problem with a suite of complementary offerings, rather than appearing fragmented to the market.
How is AI affecting the dynamics between marketing and sales?
We work closely with our sales team across the entire funnel, from initial awareness through to qualified lead handover. One dynamic I'm navigating carefully is managing expectations around speed and volume. AI does enable faster delivery, but there's a risk of creating unsustainable demand for campaigns, content, and activities simply because the capacity appears to exist.
Given our sales cycles can extend to 18 months or two years on major contracts, the pressure points tend to emerge around upsell and cross-sell opportunities where teams see potential to accelerate pipeline. Sales colleagues are naturally eager to capitalise on any efficiency gains, which is understandable given their targets. However, balancing that demand while maintaining quality and strategic focus requires careful management and clear communication about what's realistic.
The key is ensuring AI enhances our efficiency without compromising the thoughtfulness that complex B2B relationships require. Speed without strategy rarely delivers sustainable results.
What factors are influencing the pace of AI adoption in your organisation?
There's sometimes a gap between how organisations position AI externally and how readily they adopt it internally. We talk about AI with our customers and include it in business strategies, but applying it to our own corporate functions requires overcoming natural caution, competing priorities, and resource constraints.
One specific challenge is ensuring analytical capabilities have a marketing lens. We have centralised analytics resources, which makes strategic sense, but the specialist skills needed for marketing insight require domain-specific understanding that isn't always available through central teams. I've been careful not to impose a single vision on my team – instead, I've encouraged my heads of service to identify where they see the greatest value from AI tools. For marketing, that's been personas, customer insight, and intelligence work that enables better decision-making rather than simply processing data more quickly.
What will separate marketing leaders who navigate this transformation successfully?
The difference lies in whether you choose to shape the change or have it imposed upon you. Every technology shift creates this dynamic – some leaders proactively use new tools to advance their objectives and demonstrate value, while others find themselves reacting to decisions made elsewhere in the organisation.
Marketing has a particular imperative here. We communicate with customers who are using AI daily in their personal and professional lives. If we cannot speak their language and understand their evolving expectations, our messaging will miss the mark entirely. Demonstrating value to senior stakeholders, whether the finance director or the board, requires showing tangible outcomes from AI investment. Leaders who can articulate how AI improves both efficiency and effectiveness will be better positioned to secure ongoing investment and build credibility for the marketing function as a strategic driver of growth.
about
Sopra Steria
Sopra Steria is a major European digital transformation consultancy and technology services provider, delivering IT consulting, systems integration, and managed services across multiple sectors with a significant presence in healthcare. The organisation helps public and private sector clients navigate digital change and operational efficiency, working on contracts that can span up to 18 months to two years.
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.