AI-First Marketing Starts with People: Allan Malcolm on AI, Brand Voice and the Future of Martech

ICYMI: Allan Malcom catches up with 10 Minute Martech on AI-forward marketing, brand voice and why humans still belong in the loop.

“There’s a real temptation right now to let AI become your copywriter, and I think that if you’re not really intentional there, you’re gonna get a bunch of LLM garbage.”

In this episode of 10 Minute Martech, Allan Malcom, CMO of Voxel AI, joins host Sara Faatz to discuss what it really means to build an AI-forward marketing organization without losing the human element that makes great marketing work.

From designing AI-ready marketing systems and protecting brand voice to developing future-ready marketers and embracing experimentation, Allan shares why the organizations seeing the greatest success with AI aren’t replacing people. They’re empowering them to do their best work.

Allan’s Big Idea: AI Should Amplify Human Expertise, Not Replace It

For Allan, the conversation around AI has become too focused on tools and not focused enough on strategy.

While organizations are eager to adopt AI across marketing, simply introducing new technology isn’t enough. Success starts with intentional design by building the right data foundation, creating thoughtful workflows and enabling AI to reflect the company’s voice, values and expertise.

Rather than replacing marketers, AI should become another member of the team, helping automate repetitive tasks while allowing people to focus on strategy, creativity and building stronger customer relationships. The marketers who thrive won’t be the ones using the most AI, they’ll be the ones who know how to combine AI with uniquely human insight.

Allan’s 10 Memorable Moments on 10 Minute Martech

1. AI Starts with Strategy, Not Software

Successful AI adoption begins with string data, connected systems and clearly defined objectives. Not simply adding another AI tool to the martech stack.

2. Good Inputs Create Good Outputs

AI can only deliver meaningful results when it’s trained on quality data, thoughtful processes and a well-defined brand voice.

3. AI Is Another Member of the Team

Rather than replacing marketers, AI should augment teams by helping them work faster, make better decisions and focus on higher-value work.

4. Don’t Let AI Become Your Copywriter

Without careful guidance, AI-generated content quickly becomes generic. Organizations should invest time teaching AI their voice, tone and positioning before relying on it for customer-facing content.

5. Humans Belong in the Loop from the Beginning

The best AI workflows aren’t built around reviewing AI output after the fact. Human expertise should shape the prices from the very start.

6. Generalists Will Thrive

Future marketers will still develop areas of expertise, but they’ll also need to understand how brand, content, demand generation, technology and data work together across the business.

7. Experimentation Is Becoming a Core Marketing Skill

AI is evolving too quickly for fixed playbooks. Teams that continuously test, learn and adapt will outperform those waiting for certainty.

8. Competitive Intelligence Is an Immediate AI Win

AI can rapidly analyze competitors, identify positioning, uncover messaging strategies and provide valuable market insights with far less manual effort.

9. Communication Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage

As AI becomes increasingly conversational, companies need marketers who can clearly communicate.

10. Simplicity Will Define the Next Era of Martech

Instead of continually expanding technology stacks, organizations will increasingly prioritize integrated, purpose-built solutions that solve real business problems.

Allan’s Martech Hot Take

“Traditional martech is being wildly disrupted right now … that universe of having a super broad, complex martech stack is over. I think simplicity is gonna win. Integration is key.”

Allan believes the industry is entering a new phase where bigger martech stacks won’t necessarily create better outcomes. As AI reshapes how marketers work, organizations will increasingly benefit from simpler, more connected ecosystems that prioritize integration, flexibility and business value over collecting the latest tools.

Allan’s Inspiration List

Rather than pointing to a list of influencers or thought leaders, Allan encourages marketers to focus on developing the skills that will matter most as AI continues to reshape the profession.

His advice is simple:

• Become a systems thinker
  Learn to zoom out, understand the bigger picture and recognize how marketing, technology and data work together.

• Develop critical thinking skills
  The ability to evaluate information, solve problems and understand the “why” behind decisions will become increasingly valuable.

• Practice clear communication
  As large language models become more conversational, marketers who can communicate effectively will produce better outcomes.

• Stay curious and keep experimenting
  AI is evolving too quickly for anyone to claim mastery. The marketers who succeed will be the ones willing to test new ideas, learn from failure and continuously improve.

Listen to the 10 Minute Martech Episode

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Next Up in the 10 Minute Martech ICYMI Series

Greg Joseph, VP of Inventory Development at StackAdapt, joins host Sara Faatz, to explore how AI is transforming connected television, making hyper-personalization possible at a scale that was previously out of reach.

From real-time creative generation and intentional prompting to why human oversight still matters, Greg shares practical insights into how marketers can embrace AI while delivering more relevant, authentic customer experiences.

Want to Keep Reading?

Here’s the full transcript so you can explore every insight from Allan’s conversation with Sara.

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

Allan: There’s a real temptation right now to let AI become your copywriter, and I think that if you’re not really intentional there, you’re gonna get a bunch of LLM garbage. So it just takes time to really get your internal models working with your voice. First, even weeks of outputs are probably not something you would wanna put in front of your customer.

Sara: That’s Alan Malcolm, CMO of Voxel AI. Let’s get started. Well, it’s been said that AI is sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but it’s actually happening for a real reason. Um, a lot of organizations right now I know are wanting to be AI forward. You seem to have truly been able to manage that from a, a marketing function perspective. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to you to have an AI forward marketing team and some of the things that you guys are working on and doing?

Allan: Having an AI forward marketing team involves really intentional thought upfront, not just in terms of what you want to achieve with it, but how you want to architect it. Good inputs equal good outputs, bad inputs equal bad outputs. So it starts with, you know, is your existing go-to-market stack optimized to even consider agentic workflows?

Is your data in a situation where you can capitalize on that and make meaningful moments that matter for your customers? If you don’t have that, uh, you need to start there first. Beyond that It goes far beyond just trivial prompting and asking your favorite LLM for the right outcome. Uh, it really becomes about here are the intentional capabilities we want to augment with an AI, and here’s the skills we need to train the models on our voice, our tone, our emotion to make sure that that really represents us just as it would another person on the team.

And I think that’s the f- the last thing I would just emphasize. AI does not replace your team. It’s another person on the team.

Sara: Yeah. That’s a great, a great point. Obviously, that’s a, a huge topic of conversation right now, and probably will continue to be throughout the year. But along those lines, how do you train, you know, you say AI forward, how do you train your marketing folks, your team, to, um, on those skills?

Uh, what, what paths did you guys take? Um, and, and it’s probably a little different since Voxal is an AI-forward company itself, but would love to share some of those learnings with the, uh, with our audience.

Allan: Yeah. So I think first of all, we try to bring in people that are more generalist than traditional specialists.

I think the future of our profession in marketing is we all have to have generalist mindsets. You might have your areas of expertise. That could be demand gen, that could be brand, it could be content, but you have to be aware of the other [00:03:00] functions and how they interoperate. Uh, so that’s, that’s the first point.

If you have-- I, I think the future of just being a specialist in marketing is probably not the future of our profession. So start there. I think it, from there, it starts with experimentation. Let’s be really frank. Our world has been disrupted massively in the last six months. Uh, so it’s not like there’s people running around that are, so to speak, complete experts in this field.

There are some, but for the most part, this, this is a, a, a period of experimentation. So you have to create this culture and philosophy that we’ll experiment, we’ll evaluate, we’ll fail fast, and then based on those learnings, we’ll continue to improve. So it’s, it’s a real evolutionary time in, in the profession.

Sara: Yeah. Are there any experiments, you know, we, we have a, we do Fail Fridays here where we talk about experiments that didn’t work, and those are, uh, good for both a laugh but also a lot of learning. Um, and then we also celebrate the, the experiments that are working. Do you have examples of either of those, either AI fails or, or AI, uh- AI wins that you could share or happy to share with us?

Allan: Yeah. I’ll talk about an AI fail. I think, um- Yeah.

Sara: Awesome …

Allan: I, I think there’s a real temptation right now to let AI become your copywriter, and I think that if you’re not really intentional there, you’re gonna get a bunch of LLM garbage. Uh, it’ll, it won’t sound like a person. It’ll be very robotic. Uh, it won’t emote with your audience, which I think is incredibly important.

So it just takes time to really get your internal models working with your voice. Um, so like the first outputs, the first even weeks of outputs are probably not something you would wanna put in front of your customer. That’s a fail. I think where AI is incredibly strong, I’ll give two examples where it’s really strong out of the gates.

Um, competitive intelligence, uh, you can build a competitive agent very quickly that can get you [00:05:00] very far down the road of understanding your competitor’s positioning, their ICP, how they’re, uh, targeting. You can learn a lot, and AI really fits that void well. And then I think also just on that whole topic of ICP, it can really help you uncover nuggets either in your existing ICP or- Yeah

adjacent markets or industries that you didn’t really consider as part of your ICP.

Sara: Yeah.

Allan: I think those are really strong, quick win areas for AI.

Sara: Yeah. I think that’s [00:05:30] great. Yeah, the, uh, the, the content is an interesting one to me qu- quite honestly. I had a, a philosophical conversation with a colleague, uh, recently just, just about that and, you know, the, the question was, “Hey, can’t really AI just…”

You know, and it, it’s a conversation that’s not new, but can, can it just replace all of the content that we’re creating? And, and at the end of the day, one of the examples I gave is that, you know, I saw a, uh, an email nurture chain that had been created initially by AI, and then a human entered the loop, but the human actually didn’t have the context that they needed, and so it actually They didn’t have the context for the prompting and then didn’t have the context when they were creating the content, so it actually became a lot less relevant.

Um, and so I think that you still, you cannot today replace subject matter expertise, and I’m not talking about functional expertise, but, but your, y- your, your functional area or your, the area that your organization focuses on. You can’t replace that thought leadership now with, and unique thought, um, with AI.

And so it’s really interesting. There are ways you can leverage it, absolutely, for content ideation and structure and all sorts of other things. But you still have to be, at least in my opinion, you h- still have to have that point of view, right? You have to be able to say as an organization, you know, “We-- we’re putting a stake in the ground, in the ground on this topic,” or, “We believe X for these reasons.”

And, and AI only knows what’s already out there.

Allan: Yeah. I think actually what you described, that scenario you described, I think that the process was wrongly architected. I think it starts with a human in the loop. You don’t bring in a human after the fact. I think, you know, when you’re really building the right skill sets for the LLMs to pick up, they can be highly productive.

But the skill sets are not agent gen- uh, generated. They’re generated by people. Um, but I also think this is the opportunity for the profession. We’re always been clamoring for years about our strategic seat at the [00:07:30] table. This is where the marketer can come in and really influence strategy, really be, you know, have their fingerprint, if you, if you will, on the business.

Because you’re gonna be that thought leader that’s gonna, you know, train models on your tone, train models on your positioning, really understand that connection with the customer.

Sara: Yep.

Allan: A robot’s not gonna do that, right? Exactly.

Sara: Yep.

Allan: So it’s super important that you embrace that, uh- Yeah … and you, and you have humans [00:08:00] in the loop, but I think right from the beginning of the process or workflow you’re designing.

Sara: Yeah. I love that. Yeah, definitely, absolutely agree. You’ve talked a little bit already about the skill set that you think that, that modern marketers should have, uh, talking about the idea and concept that we should be more generalists, right? Maybe full s- full stack marketers if we’re gonna take from, from the engineering, um, world.

What, if I’m a n- if I’m new to the industry, if I am a recent college graduate, there are obviously a lot of conversations right now about that and what opportunities are for them. Where would you recommend they start, and, and what would you say is going to help them stand out from other applicants in a, in the martech space or marketing space in general?

Allan: sure. Um, so this is gonna sound nerdy and technical, but I think you really need to understand system-level design, uh, and system-level thinking. Uh, if you can’t zoom out and see the big picture and understand what you’re trying to solve, you know, at the 5,000-foot view, uh, you’re gonna fail. I also [00:09:00] think the ability to critical think, uh, is incredibly important for people entering the profession.

Uh, I get asked this. I mentor a lot of people, both, you know, mid-career and early career. Uh, understanding basic mathematics and critical thinking is your core skill, um, because if you don’t understand how simple logic statements get architected, you’re gonna have a hard time working alongside an agent.

Sara: Right. I’ve joked on, on this show and, and in, in person with friends, I was an English major, a communication major, and a [00:09:30] philosophy minor, and I I used to joke that that just meant unemployable, but I really, the, the, the skill set, I had no idea way back then that, that that skill set would translate so well to the, to the, the world today.

I mean, I think it was, you know, Karpathy who had said the, the next programming language is, is English.

Allan: It’s funny, one of the leading LLM providers in their standard training will tell you to speak to it like it’s a person.

Sara: Yes.

Allan: Right?

Sara: Yeah.

Allan: And so if you’re not an effective communicator, you’re not gonna get effective output.

Sara: Right. 100% agree with that. Yeah, we’ve actually been talking quite a bit about prompting and how, and teaching prompting skills in a way that, that, you know, it’s probably no different than when You know, Google first came out and you had to learn to search differently, but then that kind of came, got down to you could just do keywords and find keyword searches.

But now you really, if you’re curious and have a spirit of exploration and experimentation, you will play with those words and find, find the right way to get the answers that you need.

Allan: You know, it’s funny, one of my [00:10:30] previous employers, uh, we set up a whole internal initiative around speak like a person.

Sara: Yes.

Allan: Oh, I love that. And it’s super important. It’s becoming really, really more relevant.

Sara: Yes. Yeah. That’s great. Well, um, I could talk to you all day, um, but we, the, we are a 10-minute show, so I think we can wrap up with, um, what is your martech hot take today?

Allan: My biggest hot take, and it’s probably controversial, traditional martech is being wildly disrupted right now.

Um, I can’t say I know what the future looks like, but it’s becoming the, the, all the various, and you’ve probably seen the slides that have like, you know, the 200 martech logos on it, that universe of having a super broad, complex martech stack is over. I think simplicity is gonna win. Uh, integration is key, and I think really understanding what your needs are versus that next new shiny ball are gonna be super important going forward.

Sara: That’s great. I love it. Well, Alan, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation today.

Allan: Thanks so much, Sara.

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

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