Agents, Empathy & AI: Jennifer Ortiz on the Human Side of Martech

ICYMI: Jennifer Ortiz Catches Up with 10 Minute Martech on Why Humans Still Make Marketing Work

“Humans are the reason marketing works. Until they find a way to change that, we’re all going to be around for a while.”

In this episode of 10 Minute Martech, Jennifer Ortiz, EVP and CMO at Progress Software, joins host Sara Faatz to talk about why the future of marketing belongs to AI agents and human empathy. From classic challenges, like building content strategies that close deals, to new frontiers in AI-powered personalization, Jennifer shares her vision for using technology to connect more deeply with individual buyers, not just audience segments.

She also dives into intent data integration, search-everything optimization and her dream for instant, AI-driven funnel reporting.

Jennifer’s perspective bridges the hype and the human. She champions AI agents and advanced martech capabilities, but never loses sight of the trust, empathy and direct communication that keep customers engaged. Her advice blends strategy, technology and people-first principles, making this episode a blueprint for marketers navigating rapid change without losing their soul.

Jennifer’s 10 Memorable Moments on 10 Minute Martech

1. Classic, Moderate, New

Jennifer organizes her marketing priorities into three categories:

1. Classic (content strategy)
2. Moderate (intent data integration)
3. New (AI agents)

2. AI Agents for Individual Targeting

The future of personalization is one-to-one. AI agents that treat every buyer individually instead of grouping them for scale.

3. From Linear Journeys to Chaotic Paths

Today’s buyer journey is messy. Technology helps pull together signals from content, intent and engagement to make sense of it.

4. Search Everything, Everywhere Optimization

SEO is no longer just about Google. Jennifer’s playbook includes communities, peer reviews, Reddit and every touchpoint where conversations happen.

5. Truth vs. Perception

Sometimes what’s out there isn’t accurate, it’s one person’s experience. Marketers need to join and shape those conversations.

6. Empathy Is a Martech Advantage

Building trust requires listening, transparency and solving real customer needs. Not just pushing content.

7. Practical AI in Action

Jennifer uses Copilot daily for productivity and Conversica to help prevent leads from falling through the cracks.

8. Lead Gen Engine, Powered by AI

Progress generates massive lead volume. AI tools help nurture, convert and hand off hot leads without loss.

9. The Dream: AI Funnel Reporting

Jennifer wants to ask AI for funnel metrics and get instant, board-ready visuals with no manual mountain climbing needed.

10. Content Craving

She’s hungry for fresh, relevant martech + AI content and urges peers to produce more of it.

Jennifer’s Martech Hot Take

“How we’re going to use AI agents to change the marketing tech landscape, I cannot wait to see how much more effective and targeted that makes us all.”

Jennifer envisions a near future where AI agents radically improve personalization, targeting and operational efficiency, especially in how marketers report, analyze and act on data.

Jennifer’s Recommended Reading List:

• Sixth Sense CMO Community – Her go-to for peer learning, transparency and actionable insights.

Listen Now

• Watch the full episode on YouTube

• Subscribe on Spotify

• Listen on Apple Podcasts

Next Up in the 10 Minute Martech Series!

Sara sits with Scott Brinker, VP of Platform Ecosystem at Hubspot and Editor at chiefmartec, to break down what not to do with AI agents and why the ever-expanding martech landscape is actually a win for marketers.

Want to keep reading in the meantime? …

Full Episode Transcript: Jennifer Oritz

Here’s the full transcript to keep you transfixed. Every insight, every quote, unedited and unforgettable.

Sara Faatz: I’m Sara Faatz and I lead community and awareness at Progress and this is 10-minute Martech.

Jennifer Ortiz: Humans are the reason marketing works and until they find a way to change that, we’re all going to be around for a while the way we do things and the skills we need with AI and I think with the evolution of AI, I see us as marketers going through the same change again, but with more possibilities.

Sara Faatz: That’s Jennifer Ortiz, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Progress. Let’s get started. What is your burning Martech idea, concern or question right now? I mean the world is changing. What are you thinking about? What keeps you up at night?

Jennifer Ortiz: When I think about this question, I categorize it in three different areas and I think classic, moderate and new. I guess I think of everything like the marketing funnel, right? There’s a classic funnel, there’s a new funnel. And I think about classic because I think about it this way because I think there are problems we’ve all have had and still remain and still have today. And when I think about Classic and the Martech, it’s content strategy. So having a content strategy that closed deals is one of the classic problems in Martech and why I say Martech is having the right system, having the right processes and systems to support all of that.

Sara Faatz: Right.

Jennifer Ortiz: On the moderate side again, classic, moderate. On the moderate side, I’d say intent data. Intent data is what’s keeping me up at night. I love intent data. I think it’s helping us do great things. But how to fully integrate it and capitalize on it. We have multiple intent data systems today, some not integrated, some integrated. And I think we have challenges with both. So I’d love to be able to truly use that intent data real time to make decisions and help our sales teams again close deals faster. And then around the new. It’s what everybody else is talking about. It’s AI and marketing. I think what I’m most excited about when it comes to AI is the use of agents in marketing. Marketing is very, it’s contact based, it’s person based, right? It’s us to that person. It’s us trying to close that buying team made up of people. And when I think about how we try move the that person or buying team through the funnel we have to, because of the technology we have. We have to group them together, we have to score people together. We have to assign people together.

Jennifer Ortiz: And I think things can fall through the cracks. I think we can start to Use agents, intent, data, content, systems to be more targeted, be more personalized and look at that individual instead of grouping that individual together for scale in our systems. And that I think is what excites me most about what’s to come.

Sara Faatz: I was just talking to somebody the other day about the journey. Years ago, we would think about our journey as this very linear thing, but journeys are actually probably as chaotic as the humans who enter them because they’re going to engage with content, they’re going to engage even from an intent perspective. They’re going to be in different places at different phases of that journey. And so the technology, you know, that last piece that you just talked about really helps us take all of those other things. The content we know they’re engaging with the intent that we know that they have and really pulling it all together. I think we’re in for a wild ride in the next nine to 12 months.

Jennifer Ortiz: It’s not search engine optimization anymore, it’s search everything, everywhere optimization. That is SEO. And not only is the introduction of AI changing that drastically, but also too communities, right? Communities, user groups, peer review sites, forums like Reddit, using all of these tools at the end user’s disposal and being able to make sure that we’re in the conversation or correcting the conversation. Because sometimes without what’s out there isn’t always the truth. It’s one piece and one person’s perception or experience. I think that’s the piece that has really made what we do as marketers more, more challenging, but also opens up more opportunities.

Sara Faatz: 100%. Yeah. And I mean, I think also what you hit on in all of that is that human centered approach, right? Everybody is searching differently, they’re finding information and their experience is different. So how do you think we can make sure that we have, we maintain empathy, that we maintain that human element in all of the marketing that we’re doing as the technology is becoming more advanced.

Jennifer Ortiz: Humans are the reason marketing works. And until they find a way to change that, we’re all going to be around for a while. The way we do things and the skills we need with AI with Martech, definitely it’s always changing and evolving and I guess as marketers too, right? If you think, I think it was like five, six, seven, eight years ago, I can’t remember when the Martech scene just exploded. We adapted, we became more technical, we understood the technology landscape better, but we became better marketers because of it. And I think with the evolution of AI, I see us as marketers going through the same change again, but with more possibilities. But I would say back to your question. You know, talking to your audiences, talking to your competitors audiences to know what you are, aren’t doing that can help elicit that connection through solving a need. Talking to your customers, talking to your communities, talking to user groups, get out there, talk to your peers, right? That’s going to keep that human connection. And I think us, Sara, as a company, what we’ve done well and it’s still hard to do is making sure we build trust with our customers and that is through open communication.

Jennifer Ortiz: When we know something they need to know, it’s our job to tell them. It’s our job so they understand how to get to us. Whether that be getting to us through technology or getting to a person.

Jennifer Ortiz: We’ve got to have those channels there for our customers and they need to know that they can trust us. And again, building trust is also a human element and I think that’s key, especially for a company like Progress, right. Where you know, we’re trying to build new pipeline but our customers are so critical to us.

Sara Faatz: You know, we’ve touched on AI already but do you have a single practical application of AI that you’re using today?

Jennifer Ortiz: I use Copilot all the time, every day. It helps, you know, everything that when AI came out, first came out is true, right? Makes you more productive, helps you. That’s a practical application. I think, I think we need to roll out more of that in our marketing organization. We’re also using a tool that’s helping us with Top of the Funnel nurtures and lead conversion, the tools integrated with Salesforce. It’s tool called Conversica. We absolutely love it and I think what we love so much about it is we’re not missing leads, we’re not missing people. Progress is a lead gen engine and I’m so proud of that and all of the things we do to be that lead gen engine. But where we generate a lot of leads, people can fall through the cracks, form submits can fall through the cracks. It’s all configuration today. It’s helping us nurture, convert and get in contact with these people who are raising their hand at the top of the funnel and it’s doing a great job and we’re handing those leads, those hot leads that we might have missed right off to sales.

Sara Faatz: So two more quick questions before I let you go. What is your Martech hot take right now?

Jennifer Ortiz: How we’re going to use AI agents to change the marketing tech landscape. I cannot wait to see how much more effective and targeted that makes us all. You know what I really want to see? This is like my marketer’s dream. I have a marketing operations background. I want to see what AI can do with funnel reporting. You know, can I just ask it questions and it just give me the data I need right away? I think, you know, you know this, Sara, we all know this. We just came out of MBR, QBR going into board meetings. It’s a mountain to climb to get those presentations, those charts, right. How and when is AI going to make that on demand? That is going to be amazing. So those are my Martech hot takes right now.

Sara Faatz: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. One of the, you know, when you think about the AI agents too, I think the interesting thing there is how does that impact the way we think about websites today? Right. If AI becomes your UI, you still obviously need a content management system underneath, right. So does that mean if you have zero click searches, is your agent really just the one that’s going and pulling that content from different, you know, different areas? And what does that look like? I’m super excited about what the future looks like. And I wouldn’t have said that from a technology perspective even a year and a half ago. I think we’re really on a in a super interesting, fast changing world right now.

Jennifer Ortiz: I’m craving content on this stuff. Are you? I am finding even our new. We have a new chief AI officer at Progress, Ed Keisling and he sent me some content last week and I was like, thank you. Because I am just craving Martech AI content right now and there’s not as much out there as I thought. A lot of it at this point. If it’s from a year ago, forget it. It’s evolved so much in even the last three months. So I guess if anybody out there is listening, produce that content because I am waiting and I am eating it up right now.

Sara Faatz: Yeah. Anytime I can get my hands on something that helps me understand how should I be engaging or thinking about my customer differently? How should we be leveraging content in a way that’s compelling and engaging in a post generative AI hype world, how can we take content that people would want to consume and find a way to bring it to where they are today as opposed to before we would put it out there and we would run research, SEO and all of those kinds of things. We also use that content for different things. So you would bring somebody to your site and then be like, oh, by the way, there’s a try now button on every single page or there’s a, you know, there was a call to action. Now they can get that content without necessarily seeing that call to action. And so it’s super important that we find ways to bring that part of that experience when they don’t have to necessarily come directly to you, so.

Jennifer Ortiz: And it’s really important too for a company like Progress because, you know, we’re approaching a billion dollars, we’ve got so many products, it’s really hard for us to scale at a marketing scale, what we’re trying to do and the message that we’re trying to send. So all of what you just said, Sara, makes it all possible for companies like Progress to be able to effectively get our message out based on what the challenges that we solve with the help of AI. I think the way we market, the way chat displays this information is just gonna make us more efficient, faster and we’ll get the message out there to the right audience.

Sara Faatz: Yeah, absolutely. One last question. Who do you follow for information or inspiration? You said you were starving for content. Do you have go to’s that you would highly recommend?

Jennifer Ortiz: So I do. And I hate like, I would love to just come up here and not talk about vendors, but I have to. So on Fridays, there is a CMO community and Sixth Sense runs it.

Sara Faatz: Oh, awesome.

Jennifer Ortiz: Oh, it is so fabulous. I can’t even tell you. They have. I guess, I guess you call it Vegas rules, right? What you say in that room doesn’t leave that room, which is really nice. But people are so transparent. They come in with their marketing metric slides, they talk about what’s dead, what’s being built, what’s being rebuilt. I have learned so much from that community of peers. The Sixth Sense meeting on Fridays is where I’m getting most of my content these days. And then they usually send me down a path of finding more interesting content.

Sara Faatz: That’s great. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation today.

Jennifer Ortiz: I did too. Thank you, Sara.

Sara Faatz: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Sara Faatz and this is 10-Minute Martech.