What Happens When AI Does the Shopping?

Marketers must now reach shoppers whose purchases AI agents make. Jamie Domenici is Chief Marketing Officer at Klaviyo, with expertise in consumer CRM and AI-driven marketing. She explains how her team optimizes for both SEO and answer engine optimization (AEO), shifting content toward video, YouTube, Reddit and a website built to put visitors into the product fast. She also covers automating product launches from engineering code pushes into blog posts, release notes and internal alerts, and earning AI autonomy in email through A/B testing, with human review kept on campaign and promotional sends. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit ihereeverything.com.

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  From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate.

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  Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.

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  Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.

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  If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  60%. 60% of shoppers expect to use AI agents within the next 12 months, according to Kearney Research. When agents do the shopping, brands are no longer talking directly to the buyers. And most marketers haven't figured out what that means for their customer relationships. So how should you change your marketing strategy to market to both humans and agents? I'm Benjamin Shapiro, and joining me today is Jamie Domenici, Chief Marketing Officer at Klavio, the B2C CRM that helps more than 200,000 consumer brands turn customer insights into personalized experiences. And today, Jamie's going to explain how to market to agents without giving up control of your brand or your customers. Jamie, welcome to the Martech Podcast.

• 1:59Speaker 05

  Hi, thank you for having me.

• 2:00Speaker 04

  I can't believe we're doing this. Do you want to tell everybody or should I?

• 2:05Speaker 05

  I mean, you should tell, you should tell.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  I copied an English paper off of Jamie in high school. I think we both got a B, so she was a good student in high school and definitely better than me. And we've known each other for a long time and honestly haven't talked for, I think it's been 30 years, but let's say 20.

• 2:26Speaker 05

  I would say, don't, don't date us. Don't tell people how old we are, but it's been a while. It's been a long time.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  It's been a minute. So, you know, life is long and if you live long enough, the girl on the volleyball team in your high school English class turns into the CMO of Klavio and you might just get to interview her to talk about AI agents and how they're shopping with each other.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  Oh my God, we're in the future. What happened?

• 2:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. You know, it's an interesting time. Good topic, I would say, too.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  I'm excited to get into it. So, look, you know, when agents are starting to do the shopping, which is the era that we're seeing in e-commerce, life gets a little complicated. Who actually owns the customer relationships when the buyer is starting to outsource shopping to their agents?

• 3:14Speaker 05

  I mean, which is really happening. This is like the personal agent market just got a lot more accessible. So I think this question is very relevant.

• 3:23Speaker 05

  I think about it like this, I think an agent, they'll, they'll make the purchase, but the consumer decides which brand deserves its trust. They're training the agent, they're giving it its preferences. They're still saying yes and no. So I think, I don't think either personally owns the customer, but now I think you have to think about how you form that relationship and how you market to build that relationship a little bit differently.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  All right. So hypothetically, for now, the human's still in charge. Hey, good for us. The, I'm going to fight you on something, though. You said, well, the, the human's deciding, you know, who is, which brands are in considerations? No, we're, no, we're not. No, we go to AI and we say, which brand should I consider? And then it, it does the research for us. We're using it as our research, but it really serves as a filter in that top of funnel now, definitely more than it ever has and it's increasing, right? We're using AI for researching. So where you're like, well, the humans are saying which brands they want to consider. It's like, maybe we're adding brands to the list, but we're using AI primarily to start our research.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Just react to what I'm saying. Like, am I nuts to think that?

• 4:33Speaker 05

  No.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  The agents are in charge here?

• 4:35Speaker 05

  Well, geez, gosh, that's scary. I mean, maybe yes. I don't know if I was going to say this, I don't completely disagree with you, but I'll give you this perspective. Let's, let's look at it, let's go behind the scenes. I'm the marketer and you have to care about two things. One, yes, you have to care about how you show up, right? And I think in the old days, that would be SEO, right? Or paid media, direct, like, like those are the old days, weren't they great? But now you have to think about still those things and, and I, that's what I talk about with my customers. So now, and AEO, right? Which is how you're showing up in LLMs. And then, and how are agents searching? Where are they searching? What's making you relevant? So you have a lot more ands, a lot more places, a lot more surfaces. And you're right, the agents are very, very powerful, but they don't own 100% of the

• 5:18Speaker 05

  entire customer lifecycle yet. Should you prepare for that? Of course. But I still think a good marketer, their job just got, became more complex because now you still have to cover more surfaces. You still have to think about how you get to the buyer. But yeah, the agent has a very important part in that decision journey that wasn't there six months ago.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  I, look, I grew up to be a podcast host, so my job is to be a little provocative here. Of course, the humans are still in charge for now.

• 5:46Speaker 05

  Today.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  To, to, today. I want to hear from you, you know, we're starting to see agent buying behavior, though. So, you know, you see this probably more than anybody else because you're, you know, involved in the entire buying experience. Where and how, like, what are the apps? What are the services people are using to, are they building their own agents to purchase? Like, how is this actually, like, I want to say physically happening, but like, what's the mechanism where the agents do the shopping?

• 6:16Speaker 05

  So I still think we're early days on agents doing your own shopping. And, but I think it's becoming democratized. If you go back, it's so funny. You say like last year, oh gosh, no, we operate in days, weeks, months now. But I would say, you know, earlier in the year, I would say more proactive or technologically savvy people were using agents to actually do the purchase. Everybody's researching in LLMs, but to actually do the purchase, you would have had to kind of build your own agent, your clawbots of the world, right? And I would say a little bit more on the advanced side. The last couple of weeks is completely democratized. You know, Muse, you have Dots, you have like personal agents easily at your disposable, disposal, very accessible to the prosumer.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  So I would say in the last days, weeks, this market has shifted and now, you know, it's very easy to have your own personal agent at your fingertips doing work, making purchases for you. So I would think it's getting, becoming very different, if you'd asked me two weeks ago, than what I would say today.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  Okay. So back in my day, or the day, not to age both of us, people were scared to put their credit card into a website because they thought the card number would get stolen. And now, fast forward X number of years, which will not be named, we're just saying, hey, machine, go buy my groceries for me and don't even involve me in the process.

• 7:38Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  How, how far do you think this goes? Like, do you think people just outsource purchase behavior and they just start sending stuff back? Like, where do we draw the dividing line between a useful tool that does some stuff for me and I can't give up that much control?

• 7:58Speaker 05

  I mean, I, I can, I am not a future, a fortune teller here, but I, I think people are really trusting of the agents and I think they're giving over more and more control. Now, that's where, that's where the person using an agent to buy on their behalf. So I think that's really democratizing. I think in the world of agents doing your work, agents doing marketing for you, agents owning your brand, I would say a little bit, a little bit more conservative. I think you got a human in the loop. So there's agents everywhere. I think how and where you use them, moving very, very fast, but there's still sort of this onboarding and training experience across the board.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  How should marketers start to think about the difference between marketing to the human that they're trying to get awareness and consideration from, to an agent who doesn't really have the sort of ability to be influenced?

• 8:52Speaker 05

  This is like so fun. Humans respond to emotion, agents do not care. Agents have no emotions. I mean, yeah, I think that also will be influenced, interesting. So I still think you're still marketing to both, back to this, what we were talking about, agents don't yet rule everything. They probably will, but in today's market, you have to think about the human and you have to think about the agent. So brands, I would say, still are creating that human connection, but agents are what are doing the purchase. So you still have to think about your brand, how you show up, where you show up, SEO, commercials, you name it. And then you still have to think about now, your footprint in a different way. That's AEO, that's LLM search, that's how you index differently.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  So I think you have to do both. You have to think in, you know, art and science, which always has been part of marketing, but now even more so.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  How has agent-driven discovery changed the way your SEO team or AEO team or whatever, your EO team, whatever we're calling it now?

• 9:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  How has agent discovery changed the way that you think about search internally?

• 9:59Speaker 05

  It's completely 100% changed. And it's the kind of yes and, I'm realizing that. I keep saying you have to do both, but I do believe that's the case. I would say like SEO is still a much larger part of our pie than AEO. But we've been building for AEO because we see that that strategy is rapidly like growing and shifting more than ever in my marketing mix have I seen this kind of change? So we still are optimizing for, you know, ranking and traffic and discovery, but we're also really changed our content strategy. We have leaned heavily into video, really optimizing our YouTube channels, going and spending more time in places like Reddit.

• 10:44Speaker 05

  So really looking for different places where we find that we're more discoverable in the LLMs and kind of optimizing for both as we start to see the shift.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  I'm curious to hear you, you're talking about this shift from SEO to AEO. And I understand that SEO might be decreasing. When you talk about the increase in AEO, are you actually seeing traffic coming from AEO? Or are you just seeing more people coming through branded search because they're using LLMs to research and then showing up direct? Are they actually clicking on something and you're attributing it to a marketing channel? Or are you just seeing the change in buyer behavior?

• 11:20Speaker 05

  Um, I would say both, but I would say we're seeing a lot. AEO I would say is going small, but I would say our direct traffic has tripled. So more people are going and searching in an LLM and going from LLM to Klaviyo and then researching on our site. And I'd say what people are doing on our website has also significantly changed. You know, your website used to be like where you showed everything and you went on a journey, you're learning. Now people are coming, they're like, oh, I've already done all my research. I'm just want to see the product. So our website, we're more optimizing every single day. See if you're A B testing it for more of a in-trial experience from, from the jump. Like get into product, start using it, go faster.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  Cause people have already done their homework before they get there.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  And you said that you're leaning into video, you're focusing on YouTube, you're thinking about Reddit.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Reddit historically being tied to ChatGPT. What are some of the things that you've learned about AEO? And are you able to actually like move the needle? Or is it just we're doing everything we can to try to build the profile of the brand? And then, you know, we go the way the wind takes us.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  Oh God, I don't want to go the way the wind takes us. It's a scary road, but I would say there's a lot of testing and learning. I don't want to say I've cracked the code, but I think some of the things that we've done foundationally, like optimizing for video, optimizing our website so LLMs could search it or who we show up more in citations, like these types of things are moving the needle.

• 12:53Speaker 05

  But I feel like, gosh, I still do feel a bit at the mercy of, of the market. So citations are now you can, you know, use citations. They weren't here. Google changes algorithms. I still feel a little uncomfortable. Maybe that's what you mean by the wind blowing.

• 13:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 05

  There's a lot of unknowns.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  I've been, I'm trying to trademark brand 2.0 because I think this is the brand 2.0 era. We went from everything being performance marketing and trackable. And all we're doing is optimizing and it was very much data science was driving marketing. And now very little is actually attributable. And all we're doing is putting things out into the world and seeing if we're getting more direct traffic, which is actually very much a brand play.

• 13:37Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  And so I think that there is a new way to think about brand and it is the new demand generation tool that we're using. And so a lot of the channels, that's like, hey, I think this works, but I can't actually measure it. Well, you can't measure anything anymore. So now all of a sudden marketers are starting to feel like, ah, I gotta take some more strategic bets and have a little bit more faith than try to be more scientific and, and prove that something is working. You're actually one of the few marketers I've heard that's saying, look, I've been testing and we're actually feeling like we have some control of which way we're steering the ship. Most people are like, it's not even, I know which 50% of marketing is, it's, I don't know what marketing is working at all, but things are either just going well or going badly.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  Oh, see, I have a little bit of a different pivot. Look at me, I'm going to be provocative. Like one, um, one, I really agree with you around brand. I actually think that's what's going to differentiate because a lot of things are going to be democratized. And when I say that, I mean like SEO. Okay. In the old days, you optimize a keyword, you build a landing page, you put all the right words, right? You do long form content. We have automated all of that. So now with, you know, Air Ops and Versal and I don't no longer have long form editors, like copywriters, I just have one content engineer who manages the system and it's just churning out content to fuel that SEO engine. So I feel like a lot of that's going to be democratized. You still need to do it, but it's like democratized how you do it.

• 15:04Speaker 05

  AI has changed. And then you go over to the brand piece. And this is where I agree with you that I think brand's going to win the game and it's going to be the brands that differentiate, that are really focusing on top of the funnel, that are memorable, are going to create some differentiation in the market, which you're right, it's like a very old school thing. The marketer, the, the old marketer in me is very excited. So I'm like, what's old is new, that I know.

• 15:31Speaker 05

  But the one other area where I don't disagree, look at this is like agree or disagree or disagree. But the other thing is I think things are becoming more trackable and not, not necessarily like everything in brand has direct ROI. But hey, I can put like multi-touch attribution incrementality. I'm like A B testing things that at a speed and a capacity that I wasn't able to do a year ago. So, um, I don't think I have everything under control, but I have a little bit more insight and a little bit more in, you know, insight into what's moving needles, maybe 1%, 2%, 3%. I don't have like 100% movers, but I actually think analytics are going to get better. They have been getting better and I think they will get even better in this new.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. You've got a great point where the systems that used to be best in class and they were just hard to build and hard to implement now have become much easier. I, as a guy in his living room, recording a podcast can build an MMM system to understand how my marketing is performing and what channels are impacting it. That was never the case before. Those were $100,000 a year retainers that I couldn't touch. And there was no way. Now I could at least piece something together and do it on relatively on the cheap.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  But it's not the same sort of performance marketing. Someone clicked on this ad and then they came to the website and then they bought this product like where there is a disjointed part of the marketing funnel now. And so we don't have the same, I guess the direct response tracking is a lot of what was, has really been degraded.

• 17:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. I think that's fair. Um, my CEO yells at me about it every day. So I live this pain, but I'm also hopeful. See, this is the hopeful side of me.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Play them, play them this episode and let them know that you're, you're not alone and that you're, you're ahead of the curve. I want to talk to you about your email practices. How much are you actually letting AI run your email programs today?

• 17:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. Good question. Um, well, one, I think the goal is to get to autonomous, right? Where agents are doing all of our work and we're off doing some things, but I do not think we're there. So I, that's okay. It's a journey to get there. And, um, what I would say is I really believe in human in the loop and I believe in automating certain processes. So right now Klaviyo, like we have a, you, you, you, thank you for giving a little bit of background, but Klaviyo, everyone thinks started in email. We actually started as a database, uh, which does really good at connecting insights and uh, insights from your customers into one profile and identifying them. And on top of that, we built email and SMS and lots of tools that sit on top of it. So now it's just a relationship management system. Why that matters?

• 18:06Speaker 05

  Because now this new world is about agents, they're making decisions, they're taking action, they're making recommendations. And the role of the marketer has changed. So back to your question, what are we doing? Well, we use Composer, which is Klaviyo's marketing agent. And the agent wakes up and tells us, hey, let's audit your flows. Hey, you should make this campaign. Hey, uh, I say, hey, I want to make an email for our new product line. They will build it for me. And so, um, we're not at a place where that just happens while I sleep. But I would say there's a lot of parts of the email build around, uh, building the actual content, writing the content, building the segmentation, making recommendations. That part is 100% coming from agents.

• 18:51Speaker 05

  And then my team's now in the seat of approving, declining, training, informing, brand guidelines. We still play a heavy role, but it's changed what and how we do.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  If your brand is the most important asset, how do you decide when it's safe to let AI go through the entire process?

• 19:10Speaker 05

  I, I think autonomy is earned. I, I don't think there's like, there's a day where you're like turn it on, turn it off. But what I recommend is what I was saying earlier, test everything. This, this should become a very numerically driven decision. If you're making an email, I'm going to send it to these people, A B test it, what one works, what one doesn't. And when you become more comfortable with what the agent's building based on results, you continue to move off and move more to the agent.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  I agree, and I'm going to fight you on something.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  So much fighting on this podcast.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  Got to keep it spicy. Please don't hit me. The idea of building a marketing campaign, something that is net new and personalized needs attention and needs some artistry and crafting. When you get into the transactional emails, right? The, the templatized things, I actually think that you're better served sending some of that stuff as fast as you can to make sure that you're getting it out at the right person, at the right place, at the right time. And the only thing that I could think of as an example, you'll see this in two weeks after your episode is published, we give our download stats for how an interview performed to all of our guests. I don't want to have to come in and double check to make sure that the formatting of

• 20:27Speaker 04

  that email is right. We built a template. All that's happening is it's pulling from our database, putting in your download numbers. It's relatively templatized and formulaic. I'd rather have that get to you at the specific moment instead of waiting for me to come in and QA it. So do you think that there's cases where like, yeah, transactional emails should be automated and we've been doing that for a long time? It's the campaign stuff, the sort of personalization that needs to be checked, the one-off or the like promotional emails that you need to really make sure are in your tone and voice.

• 20:56Speaker 05

  I don't find that one that controversial. I agree. I agree.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  All right. Well, our fight turned into a peaceful protest.

• 21:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  Where do you still think that humans in the loop is really mandatory? And where are, where is AI struggling to sort of, I don't know, copywriting sound human? Like, what's the part where AI is still struggling?

• 21:18Speaker 05

  Um, I, I think, uh, I think copyrighting AI is doing a pretty good job. Um, I think actual formatting and visualization has been what's following. And then I think when you get into things like video, um, probably the hierarchy of where and how comfortable you can feel about turning over to the agent, I would say.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  It's funny, I kind of have those in the exact opposite order.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  Did you really?

• 21:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I take videos all the time. I record myself and I give it to my agent. And I say, turn this into a video and add these standard animations. And, you know, when I do a screen share, move the transcript over here. And it does a beautiful job of adding a ton of my videos to the point where we still have people that are editing the podcast. But when I'm doing like, sales promotional videos, like that's all AI that does it. It's great, and I don't even think about it. The graphics, the graphics are okay. And if you have a good template, it works. It's the copywriting. It's like, that doesn't sound like a human. And people joke about the M dash. I used M dashes before they were, you know, terrible.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  I think I might have even copied M dashes off of you in high school. The, the, the copywriting drives me nuts. I can't get the tone right to actually sound like not only just a human, but like me. That to me is the hardest part.

• 22:45Speaker 05

  Uh, well, I, yeah, I've had it for many students. I have found that it's easier to train on, uh, on copy, on tone. Uh, I think going in with, with the original concepts that we're building around. I still think there's some work to be done there, but it's on copy a little bit easier to train. Thanks to the L M's, right? They spend a lot of time, it's training, how you train it, what are the directions you give it? What's the, the sort of feedback loop? Video, I can get right, you could do a lot of basic video editing and like, geez. And even in the last 10 days, what's come out from the Higgs fields and Claude's of the world? You know, I, I had like product marketers over the weekend churning out 10 videos now. Um, but I think the more, more produced videos are still, you know, is that AI? I'm playing a lot of that.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  You could tell human cinematography from, uh, AI made video. But in terms of like your basic blocking and tackling of like how to communicate basic things through video, AI is like amazing.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair. Okay, look, see the story of compromise. Okay.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  All right, look, don't tell anybody. I, I deep faked my children where, uh, Christmas Eve, I'm Jewish, but my wife is not. And so we do Hanukkah and Christmas. And so on Christmas Eve, I used Grok. This was last year when Grok was the best in class for video. And had Santa's feet come down the chimney, kick open the screen. And all you could see was like the lower part, oh, my kids are behind me.

• 24:11Speaker 05

  Oh, no, oh, no.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Anyway, we should leave that in the podcast. Uh, but like, the video was good enough to at least fool a nine year old at the time.

• 24:22Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Uh, it's so funny, but my kids are in high school now and I, we just got a puppy. And I send my child a lot of like Instagram things that I see. And her response is like, mom, that's AI, mom, that's AI. I'm like, ah, I have to, oh, it's getting better, it's getting better.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  And to the point, to the point where it's a little scary that we might not even know that it's happening. It turns out that running agents cost a lot, lot more than my $200 Claude subscription. Uh, how do you think about spend allocation and, and where you're investing in AI?

• 24:54Speaker 05

  Ah, gosh, this is not an easy, straightforward question. I'll talk about it from the perspective of, um, me as a marketer, as a CMO. And, um, I am investing in tooling for my organization. So I really am trying to believe in a lot of testing and, um, a testing and building. And then, but then we're picking and we're investing. It's like, like we, we tested three of the same agents, if you will. And then saw which one was better. And now I'm like, okay, we get one. And I would say even with the tools we're just talking about, video tooling, et cetera. I'm still testing a lot, have a small budget for testing and then optimize and invest. I don't think we're at a place where I can say it's 10 to five or 15% of our budget. I just don't, I don't actually have that precision yet.

• 25:40Speaker 05

  But I know it's shifting. And when I think about Klaviyo, we're building out our pricing right now. And our pricing has always been consumption based. So on profiles versus number of seats, I think people who are in number of seats are trying to figure out, how do I shift my model? We've already kind of optimized there. So your usage and your profiles, you, our customers are already thinking that way. Like, how much do I use this? So, um, I don't think it's hard of a transition for them to think about their budget and that pie, because it's already how we've been operationalizing. Now hopefully you can start trading off some costs, so either productivity or growth in lieu of agents and, or AI investments. I think it's a broader category than just agents in this case.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  I understand that you have agents that, you know, you've got a testing budget and you're trying to figure out which tools are, are working. Where do most of the real operating costs live? Like, are, is it, I'm spending all my tokens because my agents are doing my copywriting? Or, you know, like, is it, uh, database cleanup? Like, where are you actually spending and finding actual value? Like, where have you invested in the marketing funnel?

• 26:46Speaker 05

  Great question. Um, well, one, like within tools that we've already used and then two in additional tools. So things like, if I think about my marketing budget, like profound, you know, measuring AEO. That was not in my budget a year ago and now it is. Great tool, by the way, or Versal. We're building and publishing a lot of our own apps. Um, so that's a new marketing budget. And really in Claude, in Claude co, uh, Claude cowork, like we're doing a lot within Claude. And, um, and then two, I would say last is actually tokens for building content is the smaller. It's more of the infrastructure costs that we're investing in right now.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  Uh, more of a platform play with some of us.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  We're, we're obviously in different ends of the spectrum in terms of the size of our companies. Like, all of my investment has been in building personal agents using Claude code. And ironically, my SaaS spend has gone down, right? I, all of the point solutions and all of the tooling and all of the, like, all the stuff I used to have to pay for. I've just been able to build myself. And so I've actually reduced my overall infrastructure costs by like at least 30% just by building, you know, I don't have to pay Fireflies for transcribing every call. I have Recall AI and it's three cents a minute instead of $20 a person.

• 28:11Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Have you seen, we're again, different levels of scale here. But have you seen infrastructure costs come down or has it actually gone net up?

• 28:20Speaker 05

  Um, I would say if I live in our install base, with 200,000 customers, it, it really runs the spectrum. Um, because you're, I would say you're on the advanced side. Congratulations, I'm giving you a nice compliment here. You're, you're building it all yourself, right? And I think some of the more savvy, um, folks are doing that. And I think it becomes easier and easier and more accessible every day. But a lot of our customers do not want to do that. They do not want to build and then they do not want to maintain. Cause I think that's where it gets a little challenging when you have an army of agents, who's managing the workflows, who's ensuring it doesn't break? As you grow, how does that scale with you? That's something a lot of our customers do not want to do. So I would say, um, it runs the gamut.

• 29:01Speaker 05

  I think customers who are building, they're, um, they're doing really cool stuff with, with Klaviyo. They're coming, they're using our MCP server, they're using their data, they're really, really redefining their tech stack and how they think about it. They're building out pieces out at a time to optimize everything from ads to landing pages to campaigns. So some really advanced and some others who are like, oh, no, no, do it all for us. So there's a big spectrum and that's why we've also been building on our platform to be as open and as flexible as possible. I think we have to kind of live in this new world where you can build your own, you can integrate more freely, um, or you can look for someone to build it for you. And our answer is to adapt, uh, and, and really allow you to leverage the most out of Klaviyo as a brain and adapt to it how you need.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  It's one of the things I've struggled with the most is I can build that, should I build it? And I, you know, I, I understand that not everybody wants, I think of my wife as being the, um, I don't want to say average, because she's anything but, but the, the typical AI user, she works at a big company. And she's like, oh, I just got Claude. Now we're not using GPT anymore, is it better? And I'm like, well, are you using Claude? Are you like chat, are you using coworker, using code? What model are you using? Like, have you done token optimization? And she's like, no, no, no, I just got Claude.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  You know, and it's like, okay, well, here's this, this little toggle. And there's a different like personality for each model.

• 30:27Speaker 05

  But that's where I think a lot of our customers are too. Where your wife is, is good. I mean, I guess I'm assuming she likes it, but.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  It's where everybody is, it's where the vast majority of people are.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  But it's creating a lot, that what's, what I'm struggling with as a CMO is I was like, everybody run. Similar, we have Claude, we have, we have Chachi Potato, we have Glean, you know, I'm going on and on, which I like. I think we were very open, um, and embrace sort of the new way of working. My main thing is I have so much tech sprawl now. I, everybody has created an app, everybody has created a workflow, I have redundant workflows. So my very lean team, uh, marketing ops team, there was all of two people, right? Their world did not get easier with all of these new advancements, because they have no way to manage that infrastructure or, or architect the right design.

• 31:15Speaker 05

  And there's so much local innovation, as I like to call it, that it's really hard to maintain. So that is another real thing.

• 31:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's interesting, even the, you know, let, let's call you a medium sized organization, have enterprise governance problems, right? Because one person now is as powerful as 10 used to be, maybe even 100, if they're effective at, at engineering. And look, you know, what happens if that person leaves? Nobody knows what the systems are.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's kind of like what's old is new. And that's back, uh, 10 years ago when we were talking about digital transformations, you know? And I think this is the new AI transformation, but how you maintain it, how you build it, how you implement and architect it are still real things that.

• 32:01Speaker 05

  You know, maybe someone like you, you're gonna do it all yourself and nail it. And someone like, hey, can you help me figure this out and redefine the way that I work? We're, we are here for both.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  Forecasting into the future.

• 32:11Speaker 05

  Oh geez.

• 32:12Speaker 04

  We're gonna talk about agent to agent marketing.

• 32:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  Right? Forget the human. When agents and agents start talking to each other, we already know how to optimize content for algorithms. We've been doing it for SEO for years. Why does agent to agent marketing feel any different than SEO?

• 32:30Speaker 05

  That's a great question. And I was talking about this with my CEO today. So I'm like, who didn't know who's doing good agent to agent marketing? He's like, I don't know anyone who's doing well, but like, it's coming, it's coming. And so when I think about that, we're moving from really optimizing for attention to optimizing for decisions. So it's that art and science again, which is you gotta be really good at the science, where you're searching how they're making decisions, what's training the LLMs or the agents in these cases. And I think the art part, which is more of influencing the buyer who influences the agents, is still important, but plays a really different role.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  You say that you don't know anybody that's doing it well. It sounds like you are doing it well. And, you know, we're not quite to the exact agent to agent marketing as a focus, but you're stitching together your marteching tools like Air Ops and Versale to create content, to publish the apps, which are then impacting how your brand is viewed, so agents are consuming it. And, you know, it's still under the guise that we're building all this stuff for humans, but, you know, it's, it's capturable and viewable by agents. I guess the question is, do we foresee a future where we are just making marketing specifically for agents? Like, are we actually going to feed content to an agent that is not consumable for a human?

• 33:54Speaker 05

  Well, humans might not wanna read it. How about that?

• 33:59Speaker 05

  Which is, so I like a lot of stuff that we create for SEO. You know, you're creating it for an algorithm, not for a consumer. So I think that's holds true in the future. So yes, but I think we're already doing that in some ways.

• 34:12Speaker 04

  So talk to me a little bit about your, your technology stack and how you're thinking about building agents for sort of your internal ops. Are you building things like a chief of staff, a sort of primary master type agents? Or are you building more point solutions that are doing like one workflow at a time and trying to stitch them together?

• 34:33Speaker 05

  Well, I hate it. I have a chief of staff and he hates when I talk about this. Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 04

  Like you have like a human chief of staff?

• 34:40Speaker 05

  Yeah. And he's like, please don't build that agent. I'm like, oh, shoot, I've been using these all day and, you know, Todd and like, I have a lot of agents.

• 34:49Speaker 05

  But aside from that, our approach has been more to go outline every single workflow that we have in marketing. Like every single like workflow, we have a spreadsheet with hundreds of lines. And then kind of going workflow to workflow. Now I prioritize them and some of them are really big. Like, think about a product launch. Oh my gosh, the product launch has been completely reimagined. In the old days, you know, most tech companies, you do like three releases a year and spend like six weeks planning for it. No, now I, we are launching features daily. And sometimes I don't know what they are or, you know, what they're gonna be within a 24 hour difference. I mean, it's, it's that, it's that shift of innovation. So now we've built a workflow that automates from linear.

• 35:33Speaker 05

  So when an engineer pushes code, that has created an entire workflow that creates a blog post, that creates an update on our what's new page, that pushes an internal slack to our entire CS community to make sure that they know what's happening, what's going on. That was like hundreds of man hours before, but now we're doing, you know, we, we spent a lot of time to build that workflow, but now it's okay. So I guess the answer is both.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  Let me ask you a question about the product release. You know, you used to do six weeks worth of marketing and have a big notable once every six week announcement of probably a couple of features that you were aggregating together for some sort of thematic launch. And it probably felt pretty big and pretty important because it was the once a quarter, twice a quarter launch. Now it's daily, it's probably pretty hard for people to keep track of all the different features that are rolling out. Do you fear as a marketer that you're losing some of that like announcement prominence? That, you know, the cadence of launch is actually hurting because you don't have something big to announce? It's just a constant stream?

• 36:39Speaker 05

  I obsess over this. So I think it has forced me to create marketable moments in a different way. I do not wanna slow down the pace of, pace of innovation. So I think about that, how do I ensure I'm creating a constant flow of information that someone can choose to consume? And I push out the things that matter in app. I don't want our app to get spammy within Klavio, but okay, you could go here and self serve. Or I'll push you the things that you need to know, or I'll make big moments around big things. We just had KBOSS, which was our, you know, our annual user conference in Boston. And yeah, there we announced some big things, you know, our agent, agent 2.0. We moved to a headless platform.

• 37:21Speaker 05

  Like, so those are big moments that I still saved for a stage.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  But honestly, I'd rather to create a more create marketable moments in addition to having a constant stream of information to buyers.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, we're in this world where there's constant needs for attention. And we're, there, there's, it's so hard to stick out because there is so much marketing going around. And I do kind of wonder, you know, does it make sense to try to save some bullets in the holster and, and be specific? Or just go in what everybody else is doing and constantly be talking and constantly pushing information out? I'm sure it's a challenge for you as well.

• 38:01Speaker 05

  I mean, we both live here in the Bay Area, you drive down the 101. Every billboard is agent, agent, AI, agent in print. It's just like, it's becoming a sea of sameness. So we just did a big ad campaign and we hired a celebrity. We talked about being your, you know, being your best friend and really tried to go a different angle where we, we appealed to the humanity of people, not just agents in print, you know, AI.

• 38:29Speaker 04

  I, I feel like it'd be a great time for a CPG brand to get into out of home just because that Pepsi ad would stick out like a sore thumb in San Francisco amongst the AI billboards. It's, it's overwhelming.

• 38:41Speaker 05

  I know. I also think that's what B2B marketers have to learn from B2C right now. And I think we're, I think that trend's gonna become, that's my bet, is that it's gonna become more B2C like in the B2B world because it's just all become the same thing.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  All right, Jamie, it's time for us to move on to our lightning round. We're gonna ask you a couple of questions about your career, about your experience, and just some personal stuff as well. Are you ready?

• 39:04Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  This one's a no brainer, since we both went to high school together. Who are the five most famous Burlingame High School grads in your opinion?

• 39:14Speaker 05

  I have five? Okay, well, you and me, there's two.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  I don't think you could put both of us at the top of the list. Maybe we're starting five, four?

• 39:23Speaker 05

  Well, I would say Mark Benioff is probably right up there. And then wasn't Diane Dyer, she went to Burlingame, right?

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. You worked at Salesforce. Any, any good Mark Benioff Burlingame High School stories?

• 39:37Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh, that was one of the weirdest things I've done in my career. I, I was, short version, I was at an award ceremony. I was kind of having fun at dinner, talking to my friends. And next thing you know, my name was called, I won an award. I had no idea. I walked up to receive my reward, award from Mark. And most people just say thank you in their speech. I turned to him and said, Mark, we both went to Burlingame High School. Go Panthers. And I took my award and left and he just looked at me like, what? But you know, Panther pride, Panther pride.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Look, I, it was a great school and I, we, I used to live at Burlingame. I still live at Burlingame. Coincidentally, I think we both moved away and came back. You can't beat it. And we just need two more celebrities to fill out the list. All right, here's a fun one. What did growing up in the family mortuary business teach you about being a CMO?

• 40:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, first of all, it's a pretty interesting and unique business that I grew up in. I think one of the most important things to be a mortician, you really have to listen to people and you have to understand them and you have to relate. And you have to build trust. It's a really tough time in anyone's life. So building up trust, being there and be authentic and creating that, you know, that relationship really matters. So I think same with marketer. I'm trying to build trust with my consumers, build a relationship. And so I think some of those, like way you connect human to human are really transferable skills.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  I'm really trying to make a terrible knock them dead joke and I can't figure it out. But I feel like in marketing, you have to be good with the timing and the messaging. And I feel like a well-placed, you know, mortuary business will knock them dead tagline. It's just waiting there for me to figure out what the copy is.

• 41:23Speaker 05

  You're so close. You're so close.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  It's so bad. I'm so sorry for this. Okay, let's move on. Why did you spend three years in customer success at Salesforce?

• 41:32Speaker 05

  Oh, I think every marketer should do this. Well, the reason I did it is because I was at Salesforce for 10 years. And after seven, I had worked on every product, every segment, every customer. Like, I just needed something else to do. And so I was recruited over into customer success. I'm so glad I did. There, I worked on really their adoption at scale. And what I realized was, wow, pre-sales and post-sales is very similar. I'm marketing at scale, I'm informing people about what's new. I'm getting them to use a product and using a lot of the same techniques. So that was good. But two, I had a much deeper appreciation for the customer, for what happens after they buy, the pain points they experience, what it's like to onboard, how they're using the product,

• 42:15Speaker 05

  which I think in turn made me actually a better marketer. So I always recommend do both. You'll really have a 360 view, which will make you better at your craft.

• 42:24Speaker 04

  Fundamentally, marketing is about understanding the customer. It is about building the market and without that knowledge, you can't do your job. Customer success seems very tied into what you're doing. I'm sure it was a great experience.

• 42:36Speaker 05

  It was great. I highly recommend it.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  All right, last question for you. On another podcast, you teased a pro sports team dream. Tell us about your dream.

• 42:48Speaker 05

  You might dream of owning a sports team?

• 42:50Speaker 04

  Let's hear it.

• 42:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, when I, yes, you can't tell from my podcast, you know this, but I am six feet tall. I played volleyball. I played basketball.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  You were a great volleyball player, by the way.

• 42:59Speaker 05

  Thank you. Thank you. Um, so yeah, I really thought I was going to go at that time into the NBA or play volleyball and, uh, uh, well, those dreams fell short. So I am, but I'm a great marketer now who still loves, loves the game. So yeah, of course, like owning a professional sports team would be like my dream. The intersection of competition, business, brand, community, bringing it all to life would be great. So big aspirations, but it's okay. I have a 13 year old volleyball player. I get my fill.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  We, we've got, uh, you know, the NBA, the WNBA is as popular as it's ever been.

• 43:37Speaker 05

  Oh, wow. Valkyries, yeah.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  Are we, are we picking a sport? Are we picking a specific team, a location? What makes a good NBA team for you or a sports team for you?

• 43:46Speaker 05

  Um, well, you got to be more passionate about it, you know, the Warriors, they're already taken. So I, but I love the Valkyries. If you've gone to a game, they are so fantastic. I have two daughters, so it would have to be female sports, either basketball and San Francisco is getting their first professional volleyball team. So, you know, one of those two, gotta love them.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  There we go. All right. Well, look, you know, we got to get you on that ownership group and you could work your way up and.

• 44:10Speaker 05

  Do a lot more marketing. Okay. Do a lot more marketing.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  Well, it seems like you're doing great and you've come a long way since our high school English class. It's great to reconnect. Thank you for coming on and being my guest.

• 44:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to see you.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  All right. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Jamie Domenici, the Chief Marketing Officer at Klaviyo. If you'd like to get in touch with Jamie, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit her company's website. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or visit us on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right. That's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast and I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit ihereverything.com.