MarTech Interview with Peter Guagenti, President and Chief Marketing Officer at Tabnine

Peter Guagenti, President and Chief Marketing Officer at Tabnine discusses the evolution of marketing and how digital transformation and new age martech has created new fundamentals for marketers:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Peter, tell us about yourself and more about your new role at Tabnine, what are you most looking forward to?

I recently joined Tabnine as President and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to lead go-to-market strategy and growth for the company. I have spent the last 12 years in software start-ups, in roles spanning strategy, product development, sales, marketing, and operations. Most recently I was CMO at Cockroach Labs, a leader in data infrastructure for high-value applications.

I have been passionate about AI for the last 8 years or so, including investing in and advising a number of early start-ups in the space, but the category has struggled to gain traction in the past as businesses didn’t fully appreciate what was possible at the time nor what has been coming. All of that changed when people got their hands on ChatGPT. Now everyone sees how transformative AI can be and are rushing to integrate AI-based tools into their day-to-day lives.

Tabnine is a shining example of how AI will change day-to-day work for the better. In this case, focused on accelerating and simplifying software development. The company already had a massive user base – over one million monthly active users today – and adoption amongst enterprise engineering teams is now taking off. I’m excited to not just contribute to building another successful technology business but to make a meaningful impact on developers’ and engineering managers’ lives through AI.

AI is taking the center stage across most business functions including marketing, what are the biggest trends you’d like to comment on as well as biggest safety concerns you feel modern marketers should be looking at when it comes to AI.

If you lived through the last 20 years of digital transformation as many of us have, you likely think that the transformation and pace of change was massive, but what we are about to experience with AI today will make all of that pale in comparison. Every aspect of how we live and work will be transformed through AI, and this is not just platitudes. If you just consider the quality and pace of decision making possible through the advanced algorithms we already use — think about how well Uber and Lyft know where to place cars to maximize ridership, or how well the Netflix algorithm is at exposing you to content you will love — now imagine the transformation each of those delivered in their respective business categories to every aspect of your life. AI systems are now democratized to the point where any business can start to tap that power, not just the biggest, most well funded technology companies. Expect the world 20 years from today to look as different to us as what people in the ’90s would think of our world now.

Like every significant, large-scale innovation — and AI is right up there in the top 10 innovations over the last 100 years — how we apply it will affect how beneficial or detrimental it is. One complicating factor here is that AI itself is being developed and controlled by the largest tech companies, who already wield what many have said is too much power over our current society. So, if the profit motive and the potential for monopolization runs the risk of running roughshod over us, then we have to combat that by demanding more from the companies we do business with.

More specifically, I believe that we should be more concerned about privacy, security, and the protection of our proprietary data and copyrighted works. AI is currently trained on truly every piece of data that Big Tech can get their hands on, and are relying on their might to protect them from the repercussions. Artists are having their styles copied, writers are being plagiarized, and photographers’ images are being taken. In our world, code that is out in the open but explicitly restricts copying, duplication, and distribution is showing up in the AI coding assistants from the tech giants. We believe this is wrong, and we should hold Big Tech to a higher standard.

Your data and behaviors should be private and controlled by you, not exploited for greater profits without your buy-in. Copyright and license restrictions should be upheld, as it has been for generations. Companies should not sacrifice our security for the sake of speed to market.

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How would you summarize the state of B2B martech and marketing as of today and what thoughts do you have for the near future of this space – what trends will shape this market?

Algorithms and AI have had a place in the most advanced marketing teams for some time. We have always chased delivering the right message at the right time to the right person. We now have tools that leverage models and AI to do each of those things and they get better every day.

For example, I am on my third generation of commercial software that leverages models to identify my ideal customer and to score my leads (a product called MadKudu), and each of those generations has added more capability without increasing my costs. There is no need for marketers to “guess” anymore where data exists, and we no longer need to rely on manual testing to inform our choices. That’s been revolutionary compared to how we did things even 10 years ago.

I believe that transformation will continue with the rise of generative AI. I do not believe it will ever replace the creativity required to build and shape a brand, or to create meaningful engagement with your audience, but mundane tasks like reshaping messaging for a specific audience or placement or channel will likely go away very quickly. If you have a well defined brand identity and style and are able to combine that with AI-based graphic generation, you will soon be able to create a plethora of new, personalized experiences without having to manually produce each from scratch.

In my opinion, AI will not replace us as marketers, but will instead allow us to move faster, to be more effective, and to spend time on the creative tasks where we add more value instead of on dull repetitive tasks.

When it comes to B2B tech and the overall SaaS ecosystem, how do you feel marketers and sales teams in this segment can create better end-to-end journeys and experiences for end users? What are the biggest lags you see in an already-crowded digital market such as this?

Despite all of this talk about AI, automation, and data, in my opinion, the biggest issue with creating better end-to-end journeys and experiences in B2B tech is a lack of humanity and empathy. We transformed as marketers from creative, instinct-driven people 20 years ago to being analytical, data-driven people. In trying to optimize and improve our outcomes, we threw away the one thing that guaranteed our success – creating a meaningful connection with a prospect or customer.

As marketers, we need to get back to what made our discipline so successful for over 100 years; understanding the people we are trying to connect with and what matters to them, crafting positioning and experiences that resonate with them as people, and communicating with them in a style and a form that respects them and the way they choose to interact. Every purchase is an emotional purchase – whether we’re talking about drinks or databases, cars or clouds. People will always choose to do business with brands that connect and resonate with them.

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