Show Notes
Samsara is one of the most advanced examples of AI adoption inside the marketing team of a large public company. Holly Chen, VP of Growth Marketing, shares the marketing team’s approach.
A big part of their success came from a deliberate three-phase rollout that moved the marketing organization from a leadership mandate to company-wide enablement and, ultimately, sustained momentum. The whole approach runs on a bottoms-up philosophy: the people closest to the pain points are the ones building the solutions, rather than AI development being centralized within a small team.
Holly also shares how AI has changed the way her team hires, why she looks for a specific kind of AI fluency in candidates, and why she believes every marketer needs to become a Marketing Engineer.
We discuss:
The three-stage rollout: mandate, enablement, and sustained momentum Why bottoms-up AI adoption outlasts top-down mandates How a 230-person team built 90 AI agents (and how they keep them running) Samsara’s AI governing body The hackathons and monthly AI Power Hour that keep teams building Why Holly values judgment over taste in the age of AI The biggest hiring mistake marketers make in the AI era
Connect with Holly
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly
Samsara: https://www.samsara.com
Connect with Profound Website: https://tryprofound.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/ X: https://x.com/tryprofound
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/
Resources Mentioned
Gong: https://www.gong.io Playwright: https://playwright.dev Gumloop: https://www.gumloop.com/ Holly’s Substack: https://hollychen.substack.com
The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.
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