I did not expect the sharpest version of that argument to come from inside an AI company.

Samantha Fein is VP of Marketing for Sanas, the speech AI company whose real-time technology helps people on both ends of a call understand each other. She has spent her career at the front edge of whatever was arriving next.

Few marketers sit closer to the AI wave than she does. Yet the stories she told me on the latest Moneyball CMO Podcast were about smoothies at a mothers' exercise class, a reseller's phone call, and a McDonald's wrapper stuck to a whiteboard she has kept since 1997.

She tells those stories because she believes that is where the advantage has moved.

Last December, Merriam-Webster named "slop" its word of 2025, defining it as low-quality digital content produced, usually in quantity, by AI. Its announcement even listed "workslop," the term Stanford and BetterUp researchers coined in Harvard Business Review for AI output dressed up as finished work that does little to move the task forward. About four in ten desk workers in their survey had received some in the previous month, and each piece took nearly two hours to clean up.

Samantha did not need to read about it. She watched it happen inside her own team.

She meant it, and the team moved. About six weeks later she was back in the Slack channel with a different message.

"Stop the AI slop." The reaction was the one any leader would get."Every single one of my team members was like, didn't you just tell us?"

She had. What she asked for was AI first. What came back was volume, and the team had treated the two as one instruction. Her honesty about where that leaves marketing right now is rare from someone in her seat.

She has no interest in retreat. Her analogy was the streetlight. People once walked through town lighting the lanterns by hand, and nobody is going back to that. The efficiency is permanent. What she grieves is something else, and she said it plainly. "I started my career as a writer. That breaks my heart."

She was talking about structuring content so that AI answer engines pick it up, a long way from sitting down late at night and writing from your soul. Every CMO I know has issued some version of an AI-first mandate. Very few defined what they wanted from it beyond speed. Samantha's six weeks show what that gap looks like in practice.

Every content team now works inside a search engine that increasingly answers the question itself. Ahrefs' latest analysis found that when Google shows an AI Overview, the top-ranking page earns roughly 58% fewer clicks than it otherwise would.

So marketers are rebuilding their content to be picked up and cited by AI systems. Samantha is doing it too, and she has two worries about where it leads.

The second is measurement. More channels, more agents producing content, more formats of the same idea.

"We used to need six, seven touch points and now we need 16."

Then she credited the final click on a 16-touch journey which tells you almost nothing about what moved the buyer. Where I push back is on the conclusion some teams draw from it, that journeys have become too messy to measure at all. A longer journey calls for better maths, with weights derived statistically from what actually happened and each touch tested for incremental impact.

She also named the tension every marketer now has to manage at once."Building a brand for the machines versus building a brand for the person really becomes a clear distinction." Her anchor through all of it never moves: "At the end of the day, all of this matters only if it results in pipeline and revenue."

AI is turning established markets into new ones all at once. Voice, customer support, search, sales tooling. For marketers inside those markets the playbook question gets harder, because the reference points have gone.

Samantha has built a career on arriving before the reference points exist.

"I personally chase the moment right before the category exists, right before the explosion."

Her first rule for that moment runs against almost every board deck I see. "There are no benchmarks... So don't look for one would be my number one piece of advice. You can't compare the funnel or the CAC. It's just not possible."

Forecast off them and you forecast off the wrong people. Her line for the difference belongs on the wall of every AI startup's marketing team."Harvesting curiosity is one thing. True demand is another."

Her answer to all that ambiguity is to expect failure and make it public. Run small experiments, find where the heat is, and lean in there.

Buying attention has never been easier. Any team can switch on paid social and watch installs arrive. Samantha did exactly that as employee number one at a high-end children's fashion marketplace. She ran Meta ads and the downloads came. They did not stick.

So she tried something no media plan would have approved, "I ended up going to a mommy and me exercise class and bringing everybody smoothies and just listened."

What she heard had very little to do with the app. The mothers talked about how motherhood had changed, how they made money, when they planned to go back to work, and how that work now sat alongside the new job of being a mother.

The economics are the part most marketers would get wrong.

She chose the expensive option on purpose. Those mothers taught her who the product was for and where the fit was. Once she knew that, the cost of every later download fell, because in her words, "I know exactly who I'm marketing to now." She grew the business pocket by pocket from there, through to an exit.

None of this makes her anti-performance. She called demand gen, powered by AI, the most powerful function in a marketing organisation today. Her caveat is the point of this whole section. "But it doesn't really matter if there's not a stickiness to it."

AI will keep making reach cheaper. It still cannot tell you why a mother in an exercise class would trust you.

Samantha recalled a really interesting story.

The wrapper traces back to her time in a McDonald's think tank, where the central question was how to make people feel something, and how feeling makes someone buy, return and stay. The ideas ran from putting internet into restaurants so people would linger, to offering employees language lessons or healthcare so they would stay too. She called the joy of a customer industry agnostic, and I agree with her.

What stops this being a soft story is that she runs hard numbers.

When a Speech AI marketer with quarterly share-of-voice targets tells you the numbers come second, it is worth taking seriously.

When Anyone Can Automate The Conversation, Picking Up The Phone Becomes The Brand

When Samantha joined Sanas, one of its partners was a reseller that sold both Sanas and a competitor. She asked her team what would make that reseller choose Sanas over the alternative. Nobody knew.

"How do you not know? Just ask."

So they asked. The first answers were polite: they liked the team, everybody was nice. Then came the one she built an ad campaign on."You always pick up the phone when we call you."

Her reaction was immediate. "Oh, you feel that we can be trusted."

A feeling the reseller had never put into words became a message, and a message can be tested."I can then take some of those feelings and turn them into messaging. That messaging then is measurable."

Most marketers get this backwards. We call feelings unmeasurable and then never ask the question that would let us measure them."We say that we can't measure these things. We actually can."

That one hit close to home - I have long felt that our own customer success and go-to-market teams are the real reason customers prefer us over the alternatives. In a year when AI can draft the email, book the meeting and take the first call, a human who reliably answers is becoming something you can put in an ad.

Samantha's method is simple enough to run this quarter. The steps below are my structuring of what she described.

One caveat, because it matters. This loop tells you whether a message works better than the one it replaces. It will not tell you how much revenue marketing contributed. That takes statistically derived multi-touch attribution, incrementality testing and marketing mix modelling. The loop is for finding what to say.

The story about the CMO role got sharper this year. Forrester's latest analysis of the Fortune 500 found that only 36% of companies now use the chief marketing officer title, down from 49% a year earlier, with titles like chief growth officer and chief commercial officer absorbing the job.

Samantha had traded texts with her own CEO about exactly this two nights before we recorded. She did not pretend the trend is imaginary.

"There might be fewer of us and I see the decline." Her read on why is specific. Part of it is structural. "I think the product role is actually more of the CEO role now. Now product runs the P&L."

The rest comes down to the marketers themselves.

"The CMOs that I admire and the ones that I learn the most from have always been the blend. Strategist, creative, and data all day long."

And the ones struggling?

"CMOs that I see struggling or have confusion are the ones who are in their lane of marketing. I'm going to do brand, demand gen and digital footprint and field events. Yay you."

Staying in the lane felt safe for a decade. Samantha's point is that the lane is now exactly where the role vanishes. What survives is strategy that reaches into product and deal structure, creativity that can define a market or stand apart in a commoditised one, and the judgement to read data before any benchmark exists to read it against.

If you lead marketing, revenue or growth, four things worth carrying out of this conversation:

I started Moneyball CMO to get past the safe version of marketing leadership that looks good on LinkedIn and into the version CMOs discuss with each other. Samantha gave us that second version. She told me that nothing matters as much as getting into the field and listening to how people feel.

Automate everything software now does well. Then take the hours you get back and go find out how your customers feel, in person, before your competitors think to ask.

Watch the full conversation with Samantha Fein here:

Moneyball CMO is a series featuring marketing and growth leaders who challenge conventional B2B wisdom with data, candour, and real experience. Know a leader who should be on the show? Reply to this email.