K
Katie Austin
Guest
ICYMI: Amanda Cole on AI’s marketing reset and why content + data strategy matter more than ever.
“Now we have an opportunity to really overwhelm the agents … with information and make sure that they have the tools to actually build context and respond.”
Amanda Cole, Chief Marketing Officer at Bloomreach, joins 10 Minute Martech host Sara Faatz to unpack what a lot of marketing leaders are quietly thinking: AI isn’t just a new tool, it’s forcing a total reevaluation of roles, workflows and the systems we’ve all spent years maintaining.
Amanda’s take is both honest and practical. She’s not claiming we’ve solved the “future of work” questions (we haven’t). But she is clear on what changes immediately: how marketers should think about value, how websites and content behave in an AI world, and why data hygiene is still a problem nobody has magically fixed.
If you’re trying to figure out where humans fit, what AI will actually automate and how to prepare your stack for agentic experiences, this episode hits the real pressure points, without the fluff.
Amanda describes the tension many leaders are feeling: if AI can automate or replicate large chunks of what marketing historically did, what’s the value marketers bring next?
Her answer isn’t that marketing disappears, it’s that marketing shifts back toward what makes companies unique: product differentiation, customer ecosystems and the human creativity required to build belief and loyalty.
Meanwhile, a lot of “marketing work” that became database and system maintenance is likely to shrink dramatically.
Amanda doesn’t pretend otherwise: AI is the headline transformation, and it’s accelerating existential questions about roles, teams and personal value at work.
Even in an AI world, marketing still has the same mission: get the product into the hands of people who love it and build an ecosystem of customers who advocate for it.
Amanda points out that many marketing and digital marketing roles drifted into system maintenance and database management. That’s exactly the type of work AI will reduce.
On whether the industry has nailed clean data: “No way.” She’s blunt: if she claimed we’ve solved data cleanliness, she wouldn’t be credible.
It used to be possible to hide pages, block crawlers and control packaging. Now AI absorbs what it finds, repackages it and reframes it, and you don’t control how it presents your information.
Amanda sees an opportunity: use your website’s structure such as navigation, facets, filters, content architecture to feed AI more signal and more context, so it can respond with richer, more accurate answers.
She believes LLM-driven enrichment unlocks a chance to manage and enhance unstructured data at scale. A leap forward from legacy data management capabilities.
Amanda raises a difficult question: if being effective with AI requires subject-matter expertise, and AI reduces junior “apprentice” work, how do we train entry-level professionals into experts? No one has solved this yet.
Amanda shares two tangible examples:
Marketing runs on structured workflows and templates. Segmentation, automation, campaign mechanics and AI can automate huge parts of that, leaving humans to apply creative judgment and brand nuance.
“Rethink everything.”
Amanda calls this a “throw the baby out with the bathwater” moment not because everything old is wrong, but because AI creates a rare opening to ask: what if?
Her challenge is simple: give yourself permission to design for the future, not patch the past.
Greg Kihlstrom, Principal of The Agile Brand, joins the show to talk about the practical side of AI adoption in martech, balancing experimentation with guardrails, avoiding tool sprawl and why starting small and failing fast is key to long-term success.
Here’s the full transcript to keep you transfixed. Every insight, every quote, unedited and unforgettable.
Sarah Faatz: I’m Sarah Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10-Minute Martech.
Amanda Cole: Now we have an opportunity to really overwhelm the agents, if you want to call it that for AI, with information and make sure that they have the tools to actually build context and respond.
Sarah Faatz: That’s Amanda Cole, Chief Marketing Officer at Bloomreach. Let’s get started. Well, thank you for joining me, Amanda. Curious to hear what’s keeping you up at night right now.
Amanda Cole: Yeah, I mean, I would be remiss to not say AI. I think that’s keeping everybody up. And we have an event next week, so that’s keeping me up some. But I do think there’s this huge transformation that’s happening in the space, obviously catapulted by AI, but it’s really requiring us to rethink what do we really do with our teams, our technology, and then I think maybe even some more existential questions. What is my value in the company if a lot of what historically has been marketing can be automated or replicated by AI? Maybe in short, I’m not sleeping.
Sarah Faatz: I don’t have anybody sleeping right now, so I totally get that. Yeah. Curious, though, what is your thought if you had a crystal ball? If we’re having this conversation a year from now, do you think, where do you think that human plays a role, right? We still provide value. What is the value, do you think, that most marketing people bring to the table in an era of AI?
Amanda Cole: Yeah, I think that will always be what it is. If you think about, we primarily work with a lot of e-commerce companies and so their product ultimately is the thing that makes them unique. The way that they get to market can be a competitive differentiator, but how they build a customer base and the reason they exist is because they have an incredible product, and they need to get that product in the hands of consumers who love it and build an ecosystem around it of consumers who are willing to tell other consumers about it and that still really is the job of marketing even in an AI world. And I don’t think it’s going to change the expectation of humans. But a lot of the human jobs especially if you think about marketing and digital marketing, have become system management and maintenance and database management, and that’s not going to be necessary anymore and so we’re going to have to rethink how do we actually bring this unique creativity to the market with a new tool set.
Sarah Faatz: Yeah. And do you think, especially when you talk about database administration and things like that. Do you feel like we as a collective marketing Martech space world, do you think we’ve nailed data hygiene? Data cleanliness? Do you think our…
Amanda Cole: No way, absolutely not. If I said that I would be, everybody would stop listening, I’m immediately not credible.
Sarah Faatz: Yeah. But I think when we think about things like where AI fits in and things like that, you have structured data, you have unstructured data, which adds to the complexity of everything. And I think I personally have concerns about how do we make sure that all of that is in the order that it needs to be in for AI to discover it. So it’s discoverable and how do you take legacy… For so long it was our role and job to make sure we had this massive amount of history of content and information out there, so you had authority. But that also means you have some really out of date potentially information. How do you combat that?
Amanda Cole: That’s right. Yeah. I mean I think that that is a challenge that we’ve always dealt with. I do think LLMs are giving us a significantly greater opportunity to deal with that en masse. And when we also look at the way that we can really rethink how we approach it, let’s take the content example. It didn’t matter, you could hide pages, you could tell SEO not to crawl content and those kinds of things. And we’re seeing a ton of that change. And what’s happening is AI is absorbing all of the information and then it’s repackaging it and presenting it in a way that it wants to. You don’t have a lot of control over how it actually reframes the information that you have.
Amanda Cole: And so I think that it will really push us to get a lot more critical of ourselves. But I do think there’s an opportunity if we think about the website and its facets and filters and its navigation and its content that we have decided how to package. Now we have an opportunity to really overwhelm the agents, if you want to call it that for AI, with information and make sure that they have the tools to actually build context and respond. And to go back to your previous question about data, the data enrichment capabilities and the tools that we have now that we did not have for unstructured data are tremendous. And so really rethinking your strategy and applying that new set of tools, I absolutely think we have an opportunity to leapfrog where we’ve been from a data management capability.
Sarah Faatz: Yeah, that’s great. And where do you think the human does play in that though. I mean, because you still have to have somebody who can organize, coordinate all of that, whether you’re talking about the database or you’re talking about content as your data. You have to have that oversight. You may leverage AI for it in a different way, but you still have to have that oversight. Do you see that as a new role or is that an expanded role for somebody who’s doing that kind of work already?
Amanda Cole: I do think it’s potentially an expanded role, an expanded set of capabilities. We hear this conversation a lot about it’s essentially the managers or the leaders of these teams who have a broader set of capabilities and a more strategic mindset. But then you don’t need the team members underneath as much. And so we’re really going to have to do a rethinking of where do we bring in entry-level career professionals? How do we actually train people moving forward? If you need to be a subject matter expert in order to be effective at training AI, how do we create those subject matter experts?
Amanda Cole: I mean, this is what everybody’s talking about and none of us have an answer for. But I also think we’re all living in a reality where we haven’t actually seen this take out major portions of people yet. We haven’t seen it reshape jobs. While a lot of us are pontificating on the impact, we’re not seeing it happen in reality yet. And I think that’s why it’s difficult for us to envision new roles because we can’t exist without the old ones yet.
Sarah Faatz: Right. Well, and brilliant point. But to that end, are you seeing AI being used today in ways that you think other people could learn from or something like that? That’s a really smart way for us to do X, Y, or Z. Are you seeing things in practice? We might not have the answers to everything or how it’s going to change the world, but are you seeing real world examples today?
Amanda Cole: Yeah, I am a board member for a nonprofit called the Mock Alliance and it is an organization that’s bringing together technology partners, brands, and system integrators to develop technology that’s already integrated. And one of the use cases we have, for example, is how to do fraud detection for brands. How do we actually use agents to go out, find where there’s duplicative sites or products, surface that, and then actually initiate a takedown process? That’s a fully agentic capability that some of the partners at Mock Alliance developed. As the CMO at Bloomreach, and we work with all these e-commerce brands, another thing that we’re doing with one of our customers is a conversational shopping assistant on their website. Today, you land on bands, you’re maybe looking for a shoe, the way that you find that shoe is you use filters. Instead, you can actually have a conversation and say, I have an event or I’m looking for, I’m going skateboarding. Clearly, I’m not this target persona. But you have a conversation and you actually get an expert shopping assistant to help you find a product that you’re looking for. That’s conversational and agentic.
Amanda Cole: And I think we see that in the ChatGPT world. And in marketing, we’re seeing marketing is very structured. Workflows and automations, I mean, we all use the same set of workflows and templates. And then we add our creative license with the content and the visuals. AI is actually able to automate a tremendous amount of those workflows and segmentation and even content creation. And so we’re doing that both for our customers and in our team in the marketing side.
Sarah Faatz: That’s great. Where are you going right now for your inspiration or information?
Amanda Cole: Well, I do love the Marketing AI Institute. That’s great. And there’s another influencer named Allie who’s incredible. She runs a content series and then also posts a ton on social media. On the B2B side, Liza Adams is great. But I do think there’s so much information that it really is about being open and curious. And I’d say the other thing that I really learned a lot from has been demoing tools. Our team has demoed over 100 tools in the last few months. And I’ve done at least 30 myself. And there’s been a tremendous amount of learning of positioning, like what are people actually saying and able to do? And then also the new terminology and vernacular and what I should be thinking about and expecting from either my current technology partners or those I evaluate in the future.
Sarah Faatz: Great. And what is your Martech hot take right now? I mean, we’ve talked a lot about AI, so it might be in there, but do you have one? Do you have a Martech hot take?
Amanda Cole: Yeah, I guess the hot take is rethink everything. I do think this is a throw the baby out with the bathwater moment, and I would challenge yourself to set a really strong vision and say, just give yourself the opportunity to say, what if? What if AI really could do the things that people are saying that it can? How would I rethink systems, retrain people, and do things differently in this future?
Sarah Faatz: Great. Well, Amanda, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. I appreciate your time.
Amanda Cole: Thanks for having me.
Continue reading...
“Now we have an opportunity to really overwhelm the agents … with information and make sure that they have the tools to actually build context and respond.”
Amanda Cole, Chief Marketing Officer at Bloomreach, joins 10 Minute Martech host Sara Faatz to unpack what a lot of marketing leaders are quietly thinking: AI isn’t just a new tool, it’s forcing a total reevaluation of roles, workflows and the systems we’ve all spent years maintaining.
Amanda’s take is both honest and practical. She’s not claiming we’ve solved the “future of work” questions (we haven’t). But she is clear on what changes immediately: how marketers should think about value, how websites and content behave in an AI world, and why data hygiene is still a problem nobody has magically fixed.
If you’re trying to figure out where humans fit, what AI will actually automate and how to prepare your stack for agentic experiences, this episode hits the real pressure points, without the fluff.
Amanda’s Big Idea: AI Forces Marketing to Rebuild Its Value Proposition
Amanda describes the tension many leaders are feeling: if AI can automate or replicate large chunks of what marketing historically did, what’s the value marketers bring next?
Her answer isn’t that marketing disappears, it’s that marketing shifts back toward what makes companies unique: product differentiation, customer ecosystems and the human creativity required to build belief and loyalty.
Meanwhile, a lot of “marketing work” that became database and system maintenance is likely to shrink dramatically.
Amanda Cole’s 10 Memorable Moments on 10 Minute Martech
1. AI Is Keeping Everyone Up
Amanda doesn’t pretend otherwise: AI is the headline transformation, and it’s accelerating existential questions about roles, teams and personal value at work.
2. Marketing’s Core Job Still Exists
Even in an AI world, marketing still has the same mission: get the product into the hands of people who love it and build an ecosystem of customers who advocate for it.
3. A Lot of Marketing Became ‘System Management’
Amanda points out that many marketing and digital marketing roles drifted into system maintenance and database management. That’s exactly the type of work AI will reduce.
4. Data Hygiene? Absolutely Not
On whether the industry has nailed clean data: “No way.” She’s blunt: if she claimed we’ve solved data cleanliness, she wouldn’t be credible.
5. LLMs Change the Content Control Game
It used to be possible to hide pages, block crawlers and control packaging. Now AI absorbs what it finds, repackages it and reframes it, and you don’t control how it presents your information.
6. ‘Overwhelm the Agents’ with Better Context
Amanda sees an opportunity: use your website’s structure such as navigation, facets, filters, content architecture to feed AI more signal and more context, so it can respond with richer, more accurate answers.
7. Unstructured Data Is Finally Getting Real Tools
She believes LLM-driven enrichment unlocks a chance to manage and enhance unstructured data at scale. A leap forward from legacy data management capabilities.
8. The Hard Part: Talent Development in an AI World
Amanda raises a difficult question: if being effective with AI requires subject-matter expertise, and AI reduces junior “apprentice” work, how do we train entry-level professionals into experts? No one has solved this yet.
9. Real Agentic Use Cases Are Already Here
Amanda shares two tangible examples:
- Fraud detection through the Mach Alliance: Agents identify duplicate sites/products and initiate takedowns.
- Conversational shopping assistants: Replacing filter-based browsing with an expert-style dialogue to find the right product for the user.
10. Marketing Workflows Are Ripe for Automation
Marketing runs on structured workflows and templates. Segmentation, automation, campaign mechanics and AI can automate huge parts of that, leaving humans to apply creative judgment and brand nuance.
Amanda’s Martech Hot Take
“Rethink everything.”
Amanda calls this a “throw the baby out with the bathwater” moment not because everything old is wrong, but because AI creates a rare opening to ask: what if?
- What if AI can do what it’s starting to do?
- How would you rebuild systems?
- How would you retrain people?
- What would you stop doing entirely?
Her challenge is simple: give yourself permission to design for the future, not patch the past.
Amanda’s Recommended Reading List
- Marketing AI Institute
- Allie (AI marketing creator/influencer)
- Liza Adams
- Demoing tools (hands-on learning through real product demos)
Listen to the 10 Minute Martech Episode Now
Next Up in the 10 Minute Martech ICYMI Series!
Greg Kihlstrom, Principal of The Agile Brand, joins the show to talk about the practical side of AI adoption in martech, balancing experimentation with guardrails, avoiding tool sprawl and why starting small and failing fast is key to long-term success.
Full Transcript: Amanda Cole
Here’s the full transcript to keep you transfixed. Every insight, every quote, unedited and unforgettable.
Sarah Faatz: I’m Sarah Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10-Minute Martech.
Amanda Cole: Now we have an opportunity to really overwhelm the agents, if you want to call it that for AI, with information and make sure that they have the tools to actually build context and respond.
Sarah Faatz: That’s Amanda Cole, Chief Marketing Officer at Bloomreach. Let’s get started. Well, thank you for joining me, Amanda. Curious to hear what’s keeping you up at night right now.
Amanda Cole: Yeah, I mean, I would be remiss to not say AI. I think that’s keeping everybody up. And we have an event next week, so that’s keeping me up some. But I do think there’s this huge transformation that’s happening in the space, obviously catapulted by AI, but it’s really requiring us to rethink what do we really do with our teams, our technology, and then I think maybe even some more existential questions. What is my value in the company if a lot of what historically has been marketing can be automated or replicated by AI? Maybe in short, I’m not sleeping.
Sarah Faatz: I don’t have anybody sleeping right now, so I totally get that. Yeah. Curious, though, what is your thought if you had a crystal ball? If we’re having this conversation a year from now, do you think, where do you think that human plays a role, right? We still provide value. What is the value, do you think, that most marketing people bring to the table in an era of AI?
Amanda Cole: Yeah, I think that will always be what it is. If you think about, we primarily work with a lot of e-commerce companies and so their product ultimately is the thing that makes them unique. The way that they get to market can be a competitive differentiator, but how they build a customer base and the reason they exist is because they have an incredible product, and they need to get that product in the hands of consumers who love it and build an ecosystem around it of consumers who are willing to tell other consumers about it and that still really is the job of marketing even in an AI world. And I don’t think it’s going to change the expectation of humans. But a lot of the human jobs especially if you think about marketing and digital marketing, have become system management and maintenance and database management, and that’s not going to be necessary anymore and so we’re going to have to rethink how do we actually bring this unique creativity to the market with a new tool set.
Sarah Faatz: Yeah. And do you think, especially when you talk about database administration and things like that. Do you feel like we as a collective marketing Martech space world, do you think we’ve nailed data hygiene? Data cleanliness? Do you think our…
Amanda Cole: No way, absolutely not. If I said that I would be, everybody would stop listening, I’m immediately not credible.
Sarah Faatz: Yeah. But I think when we think about things like where AI fits in and things like that, you have structured data, you have unstructured data, which adds to the complexity of everything. And I think I personally have concerns about how do we make sure that all of that is in the order that it needs to be in for AI to discover it. So it’s discoverable and how do you take legacy… For so long it was our role and job to make sure we had this massive amount of history of content and information out there, so you had authority. But that also means you have some really out of date potentially information. How do you combat that?
Amanda Cole: That’s right. Yeah. I mean I think that that is a challenge that we’ve always dealt with. I do think LLMs are giving us a significantly greater opportunity to deal with that en masse. And when we also look at the way that we can really rethink how we approach it, let’s take the content example. It didn’t matter, you could hide pages, you could tell SEO not to crawl content and those kinds of things. And we’re seeing a ton of that change. And what’s happening is AI is absorbing all of the information and then it’s repackaging it and presenting it in a way that it wants to. You don’t have a lot of control over how it actually reframes the information that you have.
Amanda Cole: And so I think that it will really push us to get a lot more critical of ourselves. But I do think there’s an opportunity if we think about the website and its facets and filters and its navigation and its content that we have decided how to package. Now we have an opportunity to really overwhelm the agents, if you want to call it that for AI, with information and make sure that they have the tools to actually build context and respond. And to go back to your previous question about data, the data enrichment capabilities and the tools that we have now that we did not have for unstructured data are tremendous. And so really rethinking your strategy and applying that new set of tools, I absolutely think we have an opportunity to leapfrog where we’ve been from a data management capability.
Sarah Faatz: Yeah, that’s great. And where do you think the human does play in that though. I mean, because you still have to have somebody who can organize, coordinate all of that, whether you’re talking about the database or you’re talking about content as your data. You have to have that oversight. You may leverage AI for it in a different way, but you still have to have that oversight. Do you see that as a new role or is that an expanded role for somebody who’s doing that kind of work already?
Amanda Cole: I do think it’s potentially an expanded role, an expanded set of capabilities. We hear this conversation a lot about it’s essentially the managers or the leaders of these teams who have a broader set of capabilities and a more strategic mindset. But then you don’t need the team members underneath as much. And so we’re really going to have to do a rethinking of where do we bring in entry-level career professionals? How do we actually train people moving forward? If you need to be a subject matter expert in order to be effective at training AI, how do we create those subject matter experts?
Amanda Cole: I mean, this is what everybody’s talking about and none of us have an answer for. But I also think we’re all living in a reality where we haven’t actually seen this take out major portions of people yet. We haven’t seen it reshape jobs. While a lot of us are pontificating on the impact, we’re not seeing it happen in reality yet. And I think that’s why it’s difficult for us to envision new roles because we can’t exist without the old ones yet.
Sarah Faatz: Right. Well, and brilliant point. But to that end, are you seeing AI being used today in ways that you think other people could learn from or something like that? That’s a really smart way for us to do X, Y, or Z. Are you seeing things in practice? We might not have the answers to everything or how it’s going to change the world, but are you seeing real world examples today?
Amanda Cole: Yeah, I am a board member for a nonprofit called the Mock Alliance and it is an organization that’s bringing together technology partners, brands, and system integrators to develop technology that’s already integrated. And one of the use cases we have, for example, is how to do fraud detection for brands. How do we actually use agents to go out, find where there’s duplicative sites or products, surface that, and then actually initiate a takedown process? That’s a fully agentic capability that some of the partners at Mock Alliance developed. As the CMO at Bloomreach, and we work with all these e-commerce brands, another thing that we’re doing with one of our customers is a conversational shopping assistant on their website. Today, you land on bands, you’re maybe looking for a shoe, the way that you find that shoe is you use filters. Instead, you can actually have a conversation and say, I have an event or I’m looking for, I’m going skateboarding. Clearly, I’m not this target persona. But you have a conversation and you actually get an expert shopping assistant to help you find a product that you’re looking for. That’s conversational and agentic.
Amanda Cole: And I think we see that in the ChatGPT world. And in marketing, we’re seeing marketing is very structured. Workflows and automations, I mean, we all use the same set of workflows and templates. And then we add our creative license with the content and the visuals. AI is actually able to automate a tremendous amount of those workflows and segmentation and even content creation. And so we’re doing that both for our customers and in our team in the marketing side.
Sarah Faatz: That’s great. Where are you going right now for your inspiration or information?
Amanda Cole: Well, I do love the Marketing AI Institute. That’s great. And there’s another influencer named Allie who’s incredible. She runs a content series and then also posts a ton on social media. On the B2B side, Liza Adams is great. But I do think there’s so much information that it really is about being open and curious. And I’d say the other thing that I really learned a lot from has been demoing tools. Our team has demoed over 100 tools in the last few months. And I’ve done at least 30 myself. And there’s been a tremendous amount of learning of positioning, like what are people actually saying and able to do? And then also the new terminology and vernacular and what I should be thinking about and expecting from either my current technology partners or those I evaluate in the future.
Sarah Faatz: Great. And what is your Martech hot take right now? I mean, we’ve talked a lot about AI, so it might be in there, but do you have one? Do you have a Martech hot take?
Amanda Cole: Yeah, I guess the hot take is rethink everything. I do think this is a throw the baby out with the bathwater moment, and I would challenge yourself to set a really strong vision and say, just give yourself the opportunity to say, what if? What if AI really could do the things that people are saying that it can? How would I rethink systems, retrain people, and do things differently in this future?
Sarah Faatz: Great. Well, Amanda, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. I appreciate your time.
Amanda Cole: Thanks for having me.
Continue reading...