When an AI tool "doesn't one-shot it correctly," a lot of marketing teams assume the tool failed. Neil Tewari, Co-founder & CEO of Conversion, says the failure is almost always upstream — in the plumbing that feeds AI agents context, not the prompt itself. Tewari has a front-row seat to hundreds of marketing teams modernizing their stacks, and he's seeing a clear split between the ones scaling output 5–10x and the ones stuck blaming the model.
In this conversation, he explains why CMOs now need to understand their own Salesforce objects, why legacy platforms like Marketo actively restrict data portability, and why he expects token spend to outpace advertising spend within five years.
3 Takeaways:
- The teams getting 5–10x output from AI aren't better at prompting — they've built infrastructure that gives agents full context (deal signals, call transcripts, account history) before a single draft gets written.
- Marketo's limited APIs restrict how much data can leave the platform, which Tewari argues is prohibitive for marketing teams trying to build composable, AI-ready systems.
- Tewari predicts token spend will overtake advertising and marketing spend within five years, following the same adoption curve engineering and sales teams already went through with AI tooling.
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Chapters:
(00:00) Intro
(00:40) What Winning Marketing Teams Do
(02:47) Context and Agentic Campaigns
(04:09) Where to Start With Infrastructure
(06:18) Modernizing Legacy Stacks
(08:05) Composable Data and Open APIs
(09:51) Token Spend and Pricing Shift
(11:29) Future Agentic Team Structure
About the Guest:
Neil Tewari is the cofounder and CEO of Conversion and sets the vision and strategy for the company. He and James started Conversion after living the broken MOps workflow firsthand, fighting legacy tools just to reach their own users.
Before Conversion, Neil was a partner at Gryphon Ventures, investing in early-stage startups. He studied electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, where he met James during the first week of orientation.
Connect:
Neil Tewari: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neiltewari/
Sara Faatz: www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Progress: www.progress.com
Conversion: https://conversion.ai/
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