Benjamin Ard00:00 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Jerome. Jerome, welcome to the show.
Jerome Stewart00:05 — Great to be here, Ben.
Benjamin Ard00:06 — Jerome, I'm excited. This is a timely discussion. It's going to be a ton of fun just getting to know you for a couple of minutes. I think the audience is really going to love this. But before we dive in, Jerome, let's get to know who you are. Let's let the audience kind of get to know your work history and all that kind of fun stuff.
Jerome Stewart00:21 — Fantastic. So Jerome Stewart, great to have this opportunity to connect with you, Ben. As you and I have discussed in the past, my career history started in something not at all related to technology. After college, I became a Peace Corps volunteer. And I went back to business school after completing the Peace Corps. And then I entered sort of a deep B2B, primarily B2B technology business experience. I started as a product manager with Microsoft and then over time I morphed into a couple of different roles, ultimately really embracing marketing as my career path. I lived in the Seattle area for quite some time. I lived overseas while working with Microsoft. And then almost precisely 10 years ago, my family and I decided to move to the San Francisco Bay area, which is where I currently live. And I've had a really wonderful, you know, the second chapter to my career, the Bay Area chapter, working with again, B2B SaaS companies, dominant, you know, players in the analytics realm, observability. And that's kind of been where I've been, that's the zone where I've been sharpening my skills over these past 10 years. But something that you and I share and certainly a focus for today's conversation is how things have changed and how we predict they might change in light of the arrival of AI. And I know that many podcasts are really digging into this these days. And so there's the sort of traditional conversation, how is AI improving our workflows? But I'm also really interested in talking about how humans, the people that we work with, what is the role for humans in the loop in these processes. So I think that there's really a need for this conversation right now.
Benjamin Ard02:09 — Yeah, I love that. And you've had this really interesting experience where you, again, I'm curious to hear the story where you were either were forced to do it or needed to do it or whatever, but you took a team of 12 and transformed it to an AI focused team of four. What was the premise of this story? What happened? How did this all start?
Jerome Stewart02:27 — So, yeah. Well, I think it starts when you work with deeply technical companies, you know, with founders who themselves are deeply technical. And you don't have to be a deeply technical person to understand, embrace, appreciate the impact of AI. But I think it's, you know, these types of organizations are more prone to doing that. So most of the products and the companies that I've worked with for the past 10 years have had at their core, their core value proposition, AI has been central to that value proposition. So I have been marketing AI technologies as a primary function for the past 10 years or so. With the arrival of ChatGPT, like everybody else, three and a half years ago, I instantly became curious and I jumped in and I started using ChatGPT, as most of us did, a little bit of dabbling, like how is this going to help me? Wow, what is a prompt? Now that I understand prompts, how can I improve what we're now calling workflows? So I was a curious dabbler for maybe three years. And that creates a point of delineation, and this is, for me, really critical. Up till the end of 2025, and starting around December or January 2026, things really started to change. We're all jumping into these technologies afresh, essentially, with monstrous expectations. And again, back to that technical company that I worked for, they were just ahead of the game, recognizing that many functions, marketing is one of those functions, but not just marketing. Marketing is often one of the first functions to kind of enter the crosshairs, so to speak, but we just recognize an opportunity for us to rethink our process, and an agile team, an agile company, a deeply technical company wanting to ramp up even faster. And again, just inherently understanding how AI works and how LLMs can improve processes, we quickly determined that we didn't necessarily need a large sized marketing organization. So I determined that the best approach would be, I'm gonna use kind of an analogy that I really shouldn't because I'm not a baseball player, but it's cover your bases. And I still believe that currently, you know, May of 2026, things will change, but in May of 2026 it's still highly valuable to have, you know, your creative zone covered by a human, your communications and content zone covered by a human, your marketing operations function, your demand gen function, perhaps your PMM function covered by humans. And if you start to remove too many humans, you're then going to be asking your creative person to really lead demand gen. And right now, May of 2026, I think that that is a little bit of a disconnect. So we've been able to really boil down marketing into its essential oils, covering those bases.
At this point, I think there's a little bit of risk in cutting it a little bit more thin than we currently are. But I'll say one other point. I work with smaller organizations that have one or two marketers. They're in a different position. They're not even envisioning ever expanding to a 12, 40, 100 person marketing team. They're in an advantageous position to say, hey, how can we do all of these things with a team of one or two people. And so I'd say that's a little bit more comfortable place to be, because you're not having to remove roles and ultimately remove people, but you're able to do a hell of a lot more with less, which is, I think, one of the promises of technology, certainly for the entirety of the time that I've been working within the sector.
Benjamin Ard06:06 — I think it's a really cool definition. I love the analogy there. Also not a baseball player, but I also get the analogy of covering your bases, things of that nature, having the experts inside of those areas, enhancing their abilities with AI. So with all this experience though, lots of hands-on expertise, lots of experience with it, interestingly enough, there's not a perfect system. There's cracks that start to appear when everything is based off of AI, especially when it comes to content, going and doing this transition and relying so heavily on AI. Where were the cracks? Where did they start to form? Where did you notice that? And how did you start to maybe shore up some of those deficiencies using that system?
Jerome Stewart06:35 — There's a few cracks that I'm noticing. I think we're all noticing several of them, and in some cases, proactively shoring them up, as you say. But in other cases, I think it's still a work in progress. Great example would be content saturation. If I ask myself, or I ask you, or any of the listeners, how many emails are you receiving? How many LinkedIn outreach, you know, requests are you receiving? And how many of those do you think are AI generated? And then if we were to ask this question again in three months, I think the numbers are going to change, and they're going to increase, their percentages are going to increase. And it's because people are generating a ton of content. Many of those emails, especially from large organizations, perhaps even all of those emails, the social requests, they're all driven by AI. And so we're approaching this kind of content saturation, and there's definitely this point of content saturation. There's some benefits to it, but I think we're also starting to kind of experience a little bit of a yuck reaction. Classically, people recognize when there's an abundance of emojis. Another grammatical element that I actually love, and I lament the fact that it's going to be hard for me to use it, the dash, that's becoming like really obvious, you know, that this is AI generated content. But again, I think that that's really where we're seeing the friction starting to surface. And I believe my thesis is that moving forward, I think people are going to want and demand more of a human touch in addition to all of the AI generated content and marketing that we're producing.
So that's one example. I'll give you just a couple others because I think this is a really interesting conversation. I very much believe this to be the case. I have the fortune, I love working with earlier career stage people. Perhaps it has something to do with my age, but my mission right now professionally, as much as anything, is to up level, uplift the people that I work with. I want them to be successful with their careers and their lives. So when I look at the current generation entering the workforce, Generation Z, what I see is amazing AI fluency. Most people who recently finished high school or college are pretty adept at using AI tools. That's how they made it through college. And so when you invite them to the workplace, they're able to get up and running faster than many other employees, and in many cases, faster than many of the execs, which I think is great. So we execs can learn from this new generation.
So strong AI fluency, but they haven't spent much time at all on fundamentals. They might have, especially people who are just graduating right now, if you jump back five or six years, indeed in high school, they were forced to write those long form essays, so they have some writing skills, but they haven't really formed the business writing skill. They don't understand the nuances that separate good writing from bad writing, or even good visuals from bad visuals. And AI can step in and get you to 80% amazingly quickly. In seconds, you're like, oh my gosh, here's a super well-written email, here is a nicely polished PowerPoint presentation, here is a really attractive landing page or whatever, but it's at 80%, and that 20% difference between good and what's really required to be differentiated, especially as we move forward, if everybody's hovering around good already, getting to excellent is going to become the challenge. And again, back to the new generation, I see a gap. And so I think, and this is a little bit of a conundrum, what elements of this gap are still relevant? Do you even need to know how to write an email? Just a question, we don't have to answer it. But some of those elements I guarantee are going to become really critical. So back to summarize, ton of content, there's increasingly a skills gap, positive and negative. People who have AI skills, people who don't have AI skills, people who have experience, people who don't have experience. We need to pay attention to these signals.
Benjamin Ard10:50 — I love the definitions. I love the perspective. I think this is super cool. With that said, my next natural question really comes to mind: how do you fix it? I mean, you talked about human in the loop, how do we kind of solve this? A lot of the times as marketers, we see the AI slop and the content saturation that you talked about, and we feel this pressure: I've got to produce twice as much content, things of that nature. How are you, I don't know if it's bucking the trends or beating the trends, how are you utilizing AI in meaningful ways to kind of stand out and harness the advantages of AI without really being suckered into some of the crazy efficiency things that everyone is kind of, you know, doing, the LinkedIn posts, the massive emails? How are you doing that?
Jerome Stewart11:36 — Let me talk about first what I see as some of the massive benefits of AI: the foundational elements, the foundational assets that frankly underpin business, not just marketing. And I'm going to use some marketing terms that are cliche to the audience, but I'll also point out that as soon as you move outside of marketing, I've experienced people start to roll their eyes at concepts like mission, purpose, vision, your messaging, your positioning statement, your brand identity, your visual identity. Those, I have long believed in, messaging in particular. That's always been kind of my home base, back to the baseball analogy, that's the first thing that you've got to nail. And my process for doing that historically has involved a lot of internal collaboration with teams across the organization, making sure that I'm understanding the critical voices and how, you know, people like the CEO, people like the head of product, CTO, how do they define the business? How do they define the moat that separates the business and the product from the competition? Who are we trying to reach? Who is our ICP? Historically, again, back to the generational gap, my process for creating, you know, these assets and this understanding has involved those internal conversations, customer conversations, a lot of conversations and engagements with customers, partners as well, hands on. And then you go back to your keyboard and you write out these documents. So I have a deep respect for the time that people have spent historically developing this. But now flash forward to today, how I am doing it today. And again, I'm thankful that I have that hardcore foundation, you know, honed over literally decades, but now I'll take existing documents, blogs, transcribed podcasts, websites, take this content that those key players internally have blessed as accurate, as an accurate representation of the business, as an accurate representation again of the core differentiating value that the company and the product is delivering to its customers and its partners. I now take those assets, pour them into a tool, which I can talk about, my tools of choice. And then very quickly I can create, you know, I actually wouldn't create that messaging framework necessarily, I might create a skill, a brand skill, I might create a PowerPoint skill, I might create a social media skill. So there's still the foundational elements. I'm now going to use another analogy, you know, Legos, like Lego blocks, you're kind of stitching them together, and the brand skill and the PowerPoint skill communicate together to create a really elegant presentation. And so, again, how I got there: I'm taking existing content, pouring it into the tool, and then I'm creating a skill. And then I'm using my experience, and hopefully some expertise, to fine tune it and get the skill from 80% pretty good to hopefully closer to 100% excellent. And that's really what my process is right now, and it's very different than it was in the past, a lot faster.
Benjamin Ard14:36 — So you're educating the AI to be more productive. You're giving it the tools and the resources to go out and build a PowerPoint how you want. You're giving it the resources to understand your brand. You're giving it the knowledge and expertise that only you have about your business. And what's cool about that is now AI is very specific to your needs. And I love how you mentioned the skills, ChatGPT and Claude are utilizing that terminology, and the ways that we can force, every time this is a company PowerPoint, I want you to reference these skills, I want you to use them. That's what, don't use the em dashes, all that kind of fun stuff that you can build into it. Yeah, exactly right.
Jerome Stewart15:09 — Yes. You build that into the skill, you don't have to worry about it anymore. Yeah, no emojis, no dashes. Yeah.
Benjamin Ard15:19 — So with all of that, that's super cool. And what's nice is the human in the loop part though, right? You have your bases covered. You have people that are utilizing these skills in AI. How do you use humans to get the rest of the 20% of the way there? Obviously AI is getting you, like you said, 80%, hopefully with skills even further. When does the person jump in? Are they editing? Are they the ones publishing? Are they continually training? How do you effectively use human in the loop?
Jerome Stewart15:24 — Yeah, that's right. There's a few areas, and I'm just going to brainstorm a handful of examples, but I love that there are many others, and I think this part of the conversation very much interests me. But where are humans still critical? Accuracy. Again, it's amazing how quickly AI, if you're pouring in the right source material to create that messaging framework or that brand skill, how accurate, how easy it is to get from 0% to 80%, I'm amazed. But humans are still the ones that own the truth. What are the key elements that differentiate the business? If you haven't been a part of that business, you're not necessarily going to understand those elements. And that's where extra human eyes and human brains are really going to be helpful moving forward.
Something else, and again, I'm aware of the fact that, here we are today in May of 2026, if we were to have this conversation in August or September, I think a lot of my hesitations will disappear because AI is becoming better and better at such a fast pace. But there's other elements that I think no matter what, no matter how long we spend, are always going to require a human touch: trust. We were talking a little bit about some of the risk associated with too much AI. Content is a great example, social media posts, outreaches to prospect customers, we're all inundated with this flow of information, but that's not establishing trust. Somebody recommending, like, hey, I think you should have a conversation with Ben, that's going to go a long way. That's worth like hundreds of emails and hundreds of social outreach. And when you actually have the opportunity to meet somebody in person, how do you show up? How firm is your handshake? Do you follow up? How quickly did you follow up, and how meaningful was that attempt to follow up and establish the relationship? So I think relationships are a really good example of where humans are forever going to be required.
Quality, as we said, I think again, this is associated with accuracy. So accuracy would be, what is your value proposition, and are you really nailing it with this marketing asset? But quality is a little bit different: is this content something that a human will actually want to read? Is there a story that is compelling? Not to nerd out too much on the story, but where's the friction, where's the drama, where's the solution, where's the unique angle that's going to catch somebody's attention? Just a little trick that I'll throw into this, and again, talk to me in a few months, we'll see my perspective on this, but if I were ever to write a blog, yes, I do use AI. Hasn't always been the case, I did a lot of blog writing before AI, but now I am using AI. But I have a storyline that I present to the AI as the starting point. I don't ask the AI to just go develop the story for me, I come in with the perspective, and then I use the AI in this case very much as a companion, because I'm trying to do something that's personal to me. It's not personal on behalf of the business, it's a story that I want to tell. So I'm helping to craft that story, and then AI is a great augmenter of my skills. But quality, trust, relationships, accuracy, those are areas that I think humans are still going to need to be in the loop.
Benjamin Ard18:55 — I love that. That's incredible. Okay, Jerome, one final question. We're almost out of time. I like to end these episodes with tactical advice for marketing leaders who are building their team, building out their tech stack. How should they be setting this up? What should they keep in mind? What should their human AI split look like? What would your advice be as marketers are trying to adapt to this new system?
Jerome Stewart19:16 — Hmm.
Benjamin Ard19:21 — And honestly, this new way of performing marketing activities and ultimately achieving our marketing goals.
Jerome Stewart19:27 — Yep. Maybe three elements to my response, if I can keep track of my three in my head. Just because you mentioned tech stack, I think one of the steps for marketers and marketing leaders, frankly, right now is to review your tech stack. I made decisions, I brought on board technologies maybe a year ago, and things have evolved so quickly that I currently believe some of those decisions that I made, they were right at the time, but they're wrong today. So I think we all need to review our technologies and say, hey, are these outdated? Are we paying for something that we no longer need to pay for, that one of the off the shelf AI platforms can do for us? So that would be one of the first, just, reactions to the question.
Second and third: second one would be embrace an AI platform. This, I think, is an interesting one, and I'm about to contradict myself, but at work we adopted the concept of, let's pick one of the AI platforms and let's go really, really deep in our use of that AI platform. And that is because consistent use of the platform starts to train the platform, and if you break away and start using another platform, you're training that other platform. So pour your training and your experience into that single platform. That would be something that I would suggest. I said I was going to contradict myself because you start to consume tokens, and so sometimes there's a way to use a couple of different AI platforms to save your spending. But anyway, I digress.
But the third element to my response is sort of delineating what is going to remain, and probably should remain, human led, and what really should become automated or AI led. So kind of drawing that line. Currently I still believe that there is a role for humans in things like developing the narrative, the messaging, understanding your ICP, and really understanding with precision what differentiates the business from all of the other players in your space, in your category. That, I think, tends to be a human skill set. Creative direction: there's a lot of AI slop, and videos are a great example, an animated, whatever it is, fake human that's representing a business. I think we're quickly going to have a yuck reaction to that, because they're talking to humans. So unless you're making fun of the animated fake human in your storytelling, in your video, I would just be a little bit hesitant to do that. So having a smart creative who understands good versus bad, I think, is definitely helpful. Similarly, a strategy for communications and content, you need to have a person at the helm of that strategy currently. So there are human led functions that I think for the foreseeable future will remain human led.
But now on to the flip side, what are the areas that we should focus on automating? While content strategy, comms strategy, I believe is human led, content production is a great example of where AI can play a leading role, as long as you're paying attention very acutely to slop and doing your best to avoid associating your brand with AI slop. Another area where AI is fantastic: research, summarization, reporting, coming up with a KPI rubric, and then feeding that into your AI platform of choice and making sure that everything you do is aligned with those metrics and those outcomes. Reporting and insights are becoming a lot easier right now. And then operationalizing, that's a bad word, that's too marketing, but creating reusable workflows. Content is again a great example: producing videos, blog posts, PowerPoint presentations, very much heavily leveraging AI. I think those are great examples of workflows that we can automate, and there are many others.
Benjamin Ard23:15 — I love it. This has been awesome. Jerome, thank you for the insights. Thank you for sharing your personal experience. I love how relevant this is to today and marketers today. For anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Jerome Stewart23:29 — You can find me on LinkedIn, that's probably the easiest way to do it. So, Jerome Stewart, you'll notice me from my hairline, perhaps. Anyway, I don't have too much hair if you're just listening to this. But anyway, I would love to connect with you, reference the podcast so I know where you're coming from, and let's pick it up from there.
Benjamin Ard23:46 — Love it. For everyone listening, scroll down to the show notes, regardless of what platform you're on. You'll see the link to Jerome's LinkedIn profile. Again, like Jerome said, mention that you came from the podcast, that would be awesome. Jerome, again, thank you for the insights and everything you shared today.
Jerome Stewart24:01 — Ben, thanks for the invitation and thanks to the audience for taking the time to listen. Have a good day, everybody.
