artificial intelligence - Martech Therapy

I didn’t plan to build a Martech product business, but here we are

What began as an experiment turned into real, deployed Martech. AI made micro viable, but not automatic. Generalist experience, security awareness, and relentless QA mattered more than tools. It’s disciplined systems work, just faster.

What started as a side exercise, mostly curiosity-driven, has quietly turned into a real line of business. Today, roughly twenty percent of my revenue comes from building small, focused Martech tools. Not prototypes. Not demos. Actual, deployed, and maintained software.

That alone would have surprised me a year ago, even when Chiefmartec's Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma shared their Hypertail 'micro SaaS' vision in their State of Martech 2025 report.

When CDP work runs into reality

About nine months ago, a client approached me for something familiar: help selecting and setting up a Customer Data Platform. This is still

When AI replaces processes, not people

A conversation with Paul Meinshausen and Duarte Garrido about the mental models teams struggle with when adaptive systems replace rule-based workflows. Most marketers aren't ready for this shift yet.

I set up this conversation with Paul Meinshausen from Aampe and Duarte Garrido from DOJO AI because I've been watching the same pattern repeat across different companies. Teams bring in AI tools, get excited about automation, then hit a wall when they realize the technology isn't just doing their work faster. It's doing it differently. That difference requires a mental model most marketers don't have yet.

Watch the full episode here ☝

Paul's background is in cognitive science and decision-making under uncertainty. Duarte came up through big brand marketing before building tools for challenger brands with smaller teams. Both of them

Aampe and DOJO AI show why AI-native marketing starts with people, not tools

AI-native marketing won’t fix marketing’s problems, but it might fix how teams work. From Aampe’s change management approach to DOJO AI’s human-in-the-loop philosophy, the real transformation starts inside the organization, not the model.

As I stated on LinkedIn last week, it was a wild week of news. Lee Hammond mapped the chaos in a post on LinkedIn after his visit to CDP World, while David Raab imagined the redesign after challenging ChatGPT. And somewhere between the two, I found myself in a demo with Aampe, realizing just how hard it is to think differently.

Towards the end, I stopped Aampe’s Amaan Kulatunga and admitted, almost out loud:

I’m still trying to fit this into campaign logic.

I was still thinking like a marketer from 2015. And that, I suspect, is what

From ad servers to AI: a reality check with Infolinks Media CEO Bob Regular

Three decades of adtech evolution and why the next big leap won’t come from a single prompt.

Before “programmatic” was a word, Bob Regular was already in the trenches of digital advertising. Today, as CEO of Infolinks Media, he’s seen enough hype cycles to know that progress takes patience and a sense of humor.

We talked about the rise and fall of the dot-com bubble, the long road from cookies to context, and the strange reality that AI may make media buying both smarter and more commoditized. Bob also shared a sharp view on regulation, calling out how well-intentioned privacy laws ended up suffocating smaller publishers while barely protecting users.

If you’ve ever wondered how

Shopping like a human & the quiet rise of Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce is reshaping how people discover and buy online. From Bloomreach’s Clarity module to OpenAI’s new ChatGPT apps, a more human form of shopping is quietly emerging, one built on dialogue, not dashboards.

I spent yesterday morning at the Bloomreach Partner Enablement Day event in Amsterdam, where Adam Hackett spoke about conversational commerce and the company’s new Clarity module. It wasn’t a pitch, more a quiet look at how online shopping is beginning to resemble an actual exchange, less filtering, more asking. The kind of conversation that once happened with a store assistant, now expressed through an interface.

Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer sharing Clarity at the Bloomreach Partner Enablement Day.

Bloomreach’s framing felt grounded, it really did. They’re not trying to turn shopping into a chatbot novelty, we are no longer

Can an AI marketing OS really think like a CMO?

Inside my demo with Dojo AI, from Lucky Saint campaigns to zebra striping trends

I sat down with Duarte Garrido and Luke Costly-White to see what DOJO AI calls an “all-in-one AI Marketing Operating System”. Big claims, but then again, these are undoubtedly “big claim” days we are living in, so I wanted to see what that actually looks like in practice.

Luke’s story already makes this demo interesting. Luke began as a DOJO power user, then became an angel investor, and now works at the very company he backed (for those who read my piece on reference calls with angel investors: this one isn’t on the sidelines anymore).

The demo itself

Posts tagged with artificial intelligence

When CDP work runs into reality