#50 - AI promised marketing leaders more time. So why do so many of us feel busier — and more stretched — than ever?
That’s the honest question at the center of this conversation. Two experienced CMOs sit down, peer to peer, to make sense of what marketing leadership really looks like in the AI era — past the hype, the hot takes, and the tidy frameworks. It’s less playbook, more candid conversation about staying irreplaceable, leading teams, and protecting your edge when the ground keeps shifting underneath you.
Heidi Darling has spent her career in marketing — from luxury hospitality, to founding and funding her own startup, to scaling B2B and consumer tech companies, including one that went public on the Nasdaq. A genuinely AI-forward operator, she recently moved from fractional CMO work to go all-in at Savo, a platform built on the belief that human intelligence should sit above AI, not beneath it.
In this conversation, Heidi and Mandy get into:
- Why “work is not finite” — and how AI raises the bar instead of handing you time back
- The “sameness problem”: why feeding identical inputs to the same models flattens B2B strategy, and why human intelligence is the real moat
- What to expect from your team (and yourself) when sustainable performance beats burnout-fueled output
- Orchestration and agentic teams — and whether to hire a human or build an AI team first
- The traits, like curiosity and grit, that outlast domain expertise in the AI era
Chapters
- Heidi’s Move Back In-House
- Why Work Is Not Finite
- Raising the Bar Without Burnout
- Orchestration and Agentic Teams
- Traits That Outlast Expertise
Links & resources
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Growth Activated is produced by Mandy Hornaday.
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