Is your data ready for AI?
At last year’s B2B Forum, Carly Schrager (Head of North America Engagements, Bluprintx) shared what companies must do before they can trust AI to make the right decisions with company data.
Watch part of Carly’s B2B Forum 2024 presentation, or read the transcript below.
And make sure to catch Carly’s B2B Forum session this November:
The Content Machine: Scaling Personalization Without the Chaos
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Change is coming…
And I’m trying really hard to say AI as few times as possible in this presentation.
I know it’s annoying, I’ve already heard it a thousand times today.
But “that thing” is coming down the road and elements of it are already seen today.
But regardless of what’s causing the change, the moment that I had of sitting there and getting the call from Eloqua while I was watching the demo and realizing, “oh, things are about to change.”
Marketing as we know it is going to be different, that time is happening again now. And so the really important thing that we need to do is kind of get our house in order ahead of that change.
So what does this change look like? There’s a few things here.
We talked to a lot of companies about what’s working really well and where are [their] pain points.
And a really common pain point that we hear is around content. Content creation, content management.
And the challenge with that, if you put on your consumer hat as we all can, we have really high expectations about how brands are going to communicate to us [and] how personalized that experience is.
I mean, most of you probably feel the same way I do.
If you get communication from a brand and it’s not personalized, it’s discarded. I have no time or patience for that, right?
And then when we put our marketer hat on, we know that it’s also not that easy to create super personalized custom target for every person that you’re interacting with.
And so the struggle is really—you can see the stats on the screen—but 81% of marketers feel the pressure to create and deliver content more quickly.
85% say they don’t have a single place to manage that work.
And so when we find companies in this situation, we talk to them about something called the “content supply chain.”
Has anybody here heard of content supply chain?
Okay, you probably didn’t go to Adobe Summit because it was all over Adobe Summit, just like AI is all over this conference.
So, content supply chain is basically a process of integrating your tech stack and creating automation.
I didn’t say AI, I just said automation where—so in this flow that you see on the screen—you’ve got a campaign manager who creates a campaign, sets it up in a work management tool.
(Work management is something like a Monday.com, maybe Asana, Workfront.)
They put in all of the relevant information as far as your target audience and how we want to target them, what the information is, what the call to action should be, scheduling, things like that.
The work management tool then taps into the rest of your ecosystem.
And so if you’ve got your marketing automation platform, if you’ve got a digital asset management tool, if you have an AI tool, it’s actually leveraging all of those tools to create hyper-personalized, targeted content.
And that way it’s not a human being copying and pasting images and text to create all these variations for each of your recipients.
It’s the technology doing it.
It actually pushes that back into work management so that a human lays their eyes on it and says, “yes, this looks good,” or, “this needs to be edited.” And then pushes it to be sent out.
Then the system gathers the results, pushes it back into the work management tool so the campaign manager can review the results and also to your BI tool so that other stakeholders can see the results of that.
So what it does is, it takes your marketers from being copy and paste people to thinking out of the box and how do we move the needle on the effectiveness of these campaigns?
I’m pretty sure your marketers aren’t going to complain about taking away their copy and paste work and letting them focus on the more exciting parts of marketing.
So there are more forms of AI. Of course there’s generative AI, as we talked about over lunch.
Automation AI we’ve talked a bit about.
There’s also perceptive, predictive, and prescriptive.
And for those that feel like they’re not using any AI, there’s a few examples here of where you actually might be using AI and maybe not considering it to be AI.
So if you’re using Octopost to automate your social media posts, that is automation AI.
If anybody has Salesforce Einstein configured, that’s predictive AI.
So I think, when we hear AI, we think we’re taking on this huge project and, “oh, my company isn’t budgeting for that.” Or, “they’re not ready to make that move.”
You can make the move in little pieces and you’ll notice that it starts to creep in and you’re starting to build up your company’s learning of how to best integrate AI into your business.
All of this is really exciting, but why am I here talking to you about your tech stack when I just told you really cool things that AI does?
And the reason is because it’s super important now to get your house in order before you take this next step, because those exciting cool things that I just showed you aren’t really going to work if you don’t go through the steps that I’m about to talk to you about.
So 40% of their organizations are finding that their data isn’t clean or standardized enough to support advanced AI initiatives.
If you need to read the other stats, read them…
But that one right there should be enough to make you realize that this is an important step that you need to take.
Published August 29, 2025
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