
Loading summary
Podcast Announcer
The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to CMO Confidential,
Mike Linton
the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five time CMO Mike Linton
Typeface has completely changed the process of large campaign executions. Everyone knows AI can help with images and headlines, but the real impact is making the leap from a creative brief to a live, multi channel large campaign at speed. Typeface just announced its marketing orchestration engine, the first platform built to automate campaign workflows. You can roll out campaigns that used to take months in just a few hours. TypeFace uses Agentic AI to orchestrate the entire process, taking one campaign and instantly orchestrating it into thousands of personalized experiences across ads, email and video. Major brands like Asics and Post holdings are already transforming their marketing with Typeface. See how to move from brief to personalized campaigns in hours, not months at Typeface AI slash cmo. Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them. The Chief Marketing Officer Confidential CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com here today with my guest Mike Caput. Today's topic structuring your company for AI an update from the front lines. Now Mike is the Chief Content Officer for the Marketing AI Institute and host of the Artificial Intelligence Show, a podcast that has been running since 2021. The Marketing AI Institute where he works was founded 10 years ago and hosts the largest AI event for marketing conference in the US right here in Cleveland, Ohio. So Mike, if anybody has one of the very front row seats for the AI revolution, which he has occupied since well before the introduction of ChatGPT, his company recently completed a very large study on AI usage and he's here to share the results. Welcome Mike.
Mike Caput
Hey Mike, thanks for having me. Super excited.
Mike Linton
Yeah, well this, I think this is really a fun topic. And you surveyed more than 2,000 companies on how AI is actually being used. Tell us, why did you even undertake this study and how you went about selecting the companies?
Mike Caput
Yeah, of course. So for the last five Years at Marketing AI Institute we have run this thing called the State of Marketing AI Report. And that's basically year on year research where we've surveyed hundreds and then eventually a couple thousand marketing leaders and business leaders, not just marketing, but mostly marketing for that particular study. And we collected all this benchmark data over the years because for a long time our work was solely for marketing. Marketing AI Institute, pretty self explanatory. But in the last couple years we've actually expanded quite a bit. We have a parent company now called Smarter X that our CEO and founder Paul Raitzer started. So we're one of the brands under SmartRx. So SmartRx is not just for marketers. Marketing is a huge part of what we do, but it's about helping businesses of all stripes, all functions, all departments adopt AI responsibly. Because we started out as marketers, we have deep marketing backgrounds. But we found that everything we were teaching and learning and sharing in marketing was also highly, highly relevant to non marketing functions. So long story short, we did all this.
Mike Linton
You got your talking points in there, Mike. That was as good as anybody's ever.
Mike Caput
Oh my gosh, I'm getting the talking
Mike Linton
points in in the first. I mean that is an A plus.
Mike Caput
Wow, that. Well that makes me feel good about this. So you know, just remember that when I say something done. Yeah. So we have been collecting this marketing data for years on AI adoption, education barriers. And because of the expanded mission of SmartRx we decided this year, okay, we're doing the state of AI for business reports. So we've kind of taken our existing audience, our new audience, some of the adapted the questions from several years, added some new ones and basically said okay, let's interview as many company or survey rather as many companies as possible, some in marketing, some not. We actually only have about a third of its marketing this year in terms of job title, function, etc, but we've got now 2000 plus respondents at different companies across finance, HR, legal operations, etc. C suite, all companies, all industries, a lot of different sizes. Like you know, we're still kind of parsing the data right now. It's still an early, we just finished up, but yeah, really good representation. We basically chose the companies by serving everyone we could in our existing audience. Our database has almost 150,000 people across every possible function. We have thousands of learners in our AI academy, many of whom are not marketers. So it really came from kind of our existing channels and audience and we were just looking for the widest cross section possible.
Mike Linton
So if I parse it out, what I say is, all right, these guys had a really broad field, and they surveyed the whole field.
Mike Caput
Yes, that's exactly it.
Mike Linton
And so what we're getting here is input from what you guys. The broadest field you could reach, which is one of the broader fields most people probably could reach. So give us the headline conclusion of what this field says.
Mike Caput
Yeah, a couple big things to note here. We can unpack whatever we want to unpack. But really, two big things kind of jumped out to me from the preliminary data that we're kind of analyzing at the moment. So, first is, there's quite a bit of. Of disconnect between individuals and organizations when it comes to AI adoption, integration and where everyone's at. So individuals are actually kind of outpacing organizations. So when we ask people, how would you define your personal state of AI adoption? There's a number of options, two of which are really important in terms of later phase stages, which would be integration and transformation. 53% of people said they're in those later stages. Whereas when we talk to organization, when we asked at the organization level, hey, are you understanding piloting or scaling AI? Only 25% of organizations are at the scaling stage at the moment. And on top of all this, and when I say.
Mike Linton
When you say scaling, what does scaling actually mean? I'm rolling it out to everybody, or I'm.
Mike Caput
Yeah, scaling means you've gone beyond initial pilots. You've used AI before in the piloting phase, perhaps done it for a number of things. But scaling is not only is it rolling out to everyone, you are expanding your use of it across every possible facet of the company. Obviously, that encompasses quite a wide array of companies, but that's the most mature stage, we would say, at this.
Mike Linton
And that is. That means I've rolled this out, and it's in the toolbox, and I kind of expect everyone to open that toolbox 100%.
Mike Caput
Yeah. Yeah. So you'd be. The most mature organizations, we would say, would be in that scaling phase. And so, you know, only about a fourth, which is still good. That's better than before, but only about a fourth are at the furthest or as far along as they could be, whereas almost half of individuals are quickly moving in that direction. So, you know, again, it's still. There's a lot of nuance to the data, but individuals are essentially outpacing their organization.
Mike Linton
If only 25% are scaling, what are the other 75% doing?
Mike Caput
They're either doing not enough or they're in the piloting phase. So a big trend is we've seen a lot of people, most actually. So about 46 to 47% of all the people surveyed are in the piloting phase. So they've started using AI for select use cases. They may be using one or more tools, but it is not widespread across the company. And we see this is really common. I don't want to say kind of to our team, I told you so, but I felt like I was pretty confident this would be the data because this is a challenge everyone has.
Mike Linton
And wait. One of the things about pilot is I can have a real pilot or I can have a pilot that gets the board and everybody else off my back. How many? And I don't know if you can answer this from the survey, but when you look at the pilots, are the pilots real? And if the pilot goes bad, do companies actually not scale?
Mike Caput
Yeah. So I think that we probably don't have any conclusive data on what is real or not in terms of this. I think the vast majority of people that answer that they are piloting, I would say they believe they're real. So I'm sure there's some. There's some diversity there, but I think they believe it at least. I would say that when we encounter organizations piloting, the vast majority are doing some real things with it. But in terms of how far and how fast that's moving, sometimes that could be a little overstated.
Mike Linton
And are there any companies are still just hanging back, waiting?
Mike Caput
Yeah, I think you'd be kind of surprised. We were actually surprised. So in years of doing this, pretty recently, I think we've come to the conclusion that a lot of places are a lot further earlier in their journey than I would have anticipated, just because there's so many actual challenges to figure out, especially bigger enterprises. There's a lot of legal, a lot of it, a lot of logistical things to figure out that people are not moving very fast to figure out. So plenty of widespread adoption. The hype is real, like this is happening. But the gap between people doing stuff and not doing stuff, I don't think has ever been bigger.
Mike Linton
Well, and some of the hype about where an AI first company or we are on the cutting edge, you know, you're now saying huge amounts of advertising saying, you know, we're all over it. Yep. Is that a lot of the advertising is out of the actual implementation or is that in line?
Mike Caput
Yeah, I think that there is a tendency to overstate things sometimes I get. I know we're the worst Sometimes, yeah, I think. I think there's some hype going on. Again, there is real technology, real use cases, and real results behind the hype. 110%. But I think a lot of people are talking a big game too at the moment.
Mike Linton
Before we go on, I should have asked this in the beginning. What actually is the Chief Content Officer do at the Marketing AI Institute? Like that's such a big title. Chief Content Officer.
Mike Caput
That is an excellent question. So we kind of think of the business, both Marketing AI Institute and Smartr X as a whole. It's basically an education event and media company. So, you know, we've got online education in person, virtual events, and there's a media engine that powers all of it. We've always been a content shop. We have a content engine that. Where we teach, publish research, publish content weekly through the podcast, newsletters, written content. So basically my job is I own that content engine and make sure that we're publishing across all the right channels, all the right stuff our audience needs to know if they want to accelerate their AI literacy.
Mike Linton
We are taking a short break from this show for a word from our sponsor, Typeface. To orchestrate workflows across channels. Meet ARC agents, your AI teammates handling complexity so you can focus on what matters all within a reimagined workspace where you and AI create as one spaces. Works the way you do. Create anything from documents to videos to entire campaigns at scale. Our agents help you craft campaign storyboards powered by your brand hub, giving you the perfect starting point. Transform one asset into countless variations for every audience and market. Join industry leaders already reimagining their content lifecycle with typeface. Welcome to Marketing's next chapter, where every story finds its voice. Now back to our discussion.
Okay, that was. That was a sidebar that I took us down. I'm going to get us back on the regular show. You know, I want to go back to this say do gap where we just talked about the advertising, where what I say is maybe not what I do. How can you give us some examples of actually say do working in the marketplace? And then how do you even know as a leader if you have a good say do gap? You know, I'm saying I'm telling the board I'm doing AI. I got all these pilots running, but am I really doing AI or am I just saying I'm doing it and not really embedding it into the infrastructure of the company?
Mike Caput
Yeah, I think there can be a big gap there. And what we see sometimes happen is so that for that gap first starts with what you just mentioned, which is what you're telling the board, your boss, all this great stuff we're doing with AI. And it's true. I don't think people are lying about it. They're starting to run those kinds of experiments and pilots. But when you actually sit down and say, okay, well, what's happening each week in and out, there's even wider gaps between what is being said and what is being done. And I think a lot of that happens because the execution is really, really hard. It's one very hard sometimes to put pieces in place to actually monitor AI usage. A big other piece that I'll probably talk about again is number two, AI literacy is very often ignored by companies or underinvested in. So we're shotgunning tools at people and saying, hey, we bought all these licenses, go use this stuff. And your average knowledge worker might not fully understand what AI even is, what it's capable of and where the technology is going. And so you say like, oh, did all this stuff, we bought all this stuff. We have a plan. And then it's kind of cricket sometimes in organizations.
Mike Linton
And how do I measure true adoption and true literacy from a real, like, okay, I really want this to work. How do I actually measure that particular. I'm a big humongous company and I, I don't really. I know my, all my workers can't absorb this all at once as much as I want them to. How do I, I measure all this stuff?
Mike Caput
Yeah. So this is an ongoing challenge, and there's no perfect answer just yet, but I would say we see the most successful companies doing a few things, which is. One sounds very simple, but at a very baseline level. You need to be looking at whatever analytics or metrics are available in the AI tools you've bought. You can see usage. You can typically see who's using what and how often it's being used. That's a part that people really need to pay attention to, because if people are not using the tools, the rest of this doesn't really matter. So if they're not using tools, okay, why is that? Now? It may be that education or literacy problem. And that's kind of one of the things we built our company to do is basically not only provide the education platform that companies don't have and need for AI literacy, but also you have, increasingly, when everything's in one platform, you have ways to actually track over time how much better people are getting with AI, how much, how much educational content they're both consuming and Using. So I think being able to also track that piece of it, the literacy piece, is really would be really smart and wise for companies to start doing.
Mike Linton
And how do if I read all this hype and I will say I think I'm a heavy AI user, use it. I teach college, I use it there, I use it for the show, I use it a lot. But then I always think I'm super behind. How do I know if I am a laggard or not? As a person, individual and then as a company, I mean really. No.
Mike Caput
Yeah.
Mike Linton
So as without hiring you guys because I know you're going to get the talking points in so I'll just get them in for you.
Mike Caput
I love it.
Mike Linton
I want to do a self assessment. How do I do it?
Mike Caput
You know, at the individual level, I think it'd be wise to consider just how often you are even using tools to begin with. Are you a daily, weekly, monthly user? Like if you're not using AI every day for at least something, I would say you might want to consider further use cases for AI. I think seeing what you're using it for is the number of use cases you are leveraging AI for going up or down. Pretty simple question. Or staying the same rather you probably want that number to be going up because that's a plateau you can really hit where you get geeked about a few different use cases, use AI for them, you see some results, but you're not continually expanding and reinventing your workflows. Using the tools now companies is a little bit of a bigger challenge, but I would say there's some kind of obvious boxes to check to understand if you mostly if you are a laggard. Right. So like if you don't have any really formal useful AI policies, that's probably an issue. If you do not have at least an approved tool and even if it's not your ideal tool, something that has already been approved that people can use and are taught how to use, if you don't have that, you're probably lagging behind. If you are finding yourself stuck in that phase where only one department owns this or only a couple are experimenting with it, I don't think you're that far behind, but you might be lagging a bit. That's a huge issue. Like 40 plus percent of people said that silos and like inconsistent deployment. 40%, yeah, it was a huge issue.
Mike Linton
So that is almost half of the companies are, are not expanding this past the silo.
Mike Caput
And to toot the horn of our audience, like that's probably Low because we probably, hopefully, if we've done our job, have a little bit more of a forward thinking or at least further advanced audience than your average company. I could probably guarantee that's at least over 50% at your average firm, if not much higher.
Mike Linton
Hey, so Mike, one of the things a bunch of our guests have said before is you should have more than one tool in play.
Mike Caput
Yeah,
Mike Linton
I'm certain you probably believe that, but how many tools should you have in play? There's like you could have at least five in five of the big guys in right now.
Mike Caput
I always say the right answer is whatever you can get approved. Especially like working with bigger enterprises, all
Mike Linton
you would eat can eat buffet. The right answer is how much can you eat?
Mike Caput
Honestly, I would agree with that. I would say you can never have enough redundancy. But guess what? Even if, if your organization's a little more conservative, you only only get one tool approved. That's better than zero. But I would say you need at least two or three. As I would argue, as you're like daily drivers. Like look at what's happened in the news recently. We just saw Anthropic specifically getting a huge fight that's still ongoing with the US Government. Like you could, you could. They have huge usage problems due to this now where they're trying to buy more compute. You and I were talking before we started recording about all the need for all these data centers and compute and there's outages and usage problems. And like, I don't know about you, but I'm at the point now where if my AI tool of choice goes down in a workday, it's like if the Internet's going down so we're not getting a huge amount done. So I'd say redundancy is important. At least two tools, probably three would be kind of my sweet spot personally.
Mike Linton
Okay, I have to ask if I am trying to catch up, say I'm in the middle of the pack or I'm in that bottom of the set.
Mike Caput
Yeah.
Mike Linton
What are the biggest mistakes companies make when they try and catch up? Because you know, every. No, I haven't talked to anybody. Maybe one or two people that think they are truly on the front end of this. Yeah, you probably talk to a bunch more people, maybe on the close front end, but almost everybody feels it's changing so fast it's hard to keep up. If I want to catch up, I know I'm behind. I acknowledge I'm behind as a company. What is the biggest mistake I can make here? We've talked about what you should do. Right. But you, I'm sure you see a bunch of people step in it when they do this. Tell us.
Mike Caput
Yeah, if I really had to choose, I would say some version of the following mistake which is you. Okay, let's say you've kind of had your, your come to Jesus moment over here and you say, okay, I know I'm behind. AI is super important. We're all in. Great, that's amazing. But it's very tempting for companies to then say, okay, we're going to get all the tools, we're going to get all the latest, we're going to give it to people and then we're going to go and we're going to not only catch up, but get ahead. That's an amazing sentiment. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be on the bleeding edge like that. But if you think you're just going to hand people tools and especially as we're getting into AI agents which we could talk about like, oh, we are
Mike Linton
going to talk about that. Yeah.
Mike Caput
As you hand people these tools that not only they might not understand the full power of, but also are increasingly autonomous, it can lead to a huge amount of problems. You cannot just turn this stuff on and expect your team to get it. We this year in the data, for instance, lack of training and education is still the number one barrier that people say when it comes to adopting AI effectively in their organization. It's not about access to tools. A lot of them don't really have issues anymore justifying getting AI tools in 2026, which is a great thing. We've asked a question around. What is your top barrier to a, to AI adoption? It's been training and education for six straigh years.
Mike Linton
Hey. Hey, Mike. And if, if I don't want to hire a firm like you, if I want to say I have to do my training and education or I'm a, a small company, is there something I should get? Because there's, there's all these tools I can choose from. Is there a standard training anywhere?
Mike Caput
Not really standard training. We often point people, we see a lot of education solutions as super complimentary to what we do. But you know, there's plenty of good training, free training through Coursera, LinkedIn learning. Honestly, I think people don't do enough is if you don't have a budget or you want to get more experience and catch up and find decent training, go ask AI not for training to take have it teach you. I mean that half the time when I need to figure Something out I ask Claude or Chat, GBT or Gemini, hey, teach me this concept. What is this about? How do I start implementing it in a real way in my business or in my work or my life? So that's a really valuable outlet. I would say that that's the issue right now. Kind of one thing we've tried to help solve is like there is no centralized, there's no one stop shop for this stuff. I mean our solution is beginning to become that. But then there's plenty of others like it. But yeah, there's no one single authority where you say you do that. You'll be up to speed. Totally.
Mike Linton
And then let's talk about the advanced edge where I am now have a bunch of AI agents maybe reporting to me.
Mike Caput
Yeah.
Mike Linton
Working for me that I have created. Tell me, what are the do's and don'ts or the hall of fame and the hall of shame in managing agentic agents that you have created?
Mike Caput
Yeah. So it's still very, very early on a lot of this stuff. So we're still even kind of feeling our way around it. But I think big issues you want to be considerate of is one, what does your agent have access to? Because a lot of people don't always very carefully look at what permissions they give agents for different folders, file systems, accounts that grade.
Mike Linton
The mic could put agent for my all my stuff. And I don't actually box it in right. It actually is all over everything I have.
Mike Caput
It can be depending on the tool. Yeah. There's been people that for instance openclaw is a big buzzworthy open source agent at the moment. You'll hear these horror stories of people giving the agent access to their bank accounts, their password, not. Not a good idea to begin with. So no. No surprise that things go wrong. But yes, agents will try to go do things for you by figuring out the steps to do those things. There's a lot of unintended consequences. It may think that the best way to fix your code base is to delete it. Because if you delete the code base there's no problems. Right. I mean it's not going to always be that blatant. But there's all this unintended stuff where agents could go wrong really really quick
Mike Linton
or you come back and your agent has sold your house on Mobot to another agent. Agent.
Mike Caput
Yeah, exactly.
Mike Linton
Right. Any, any tips for doing this right? You have these agents. If you have any examples of how to do this right, you know, say you're right on the edge and, and you Say, all right, we're going to make the next jump. We're gonna. We're gonna do agents. And how, how do you integrate them with people correctly and manage them correctly? Any thoughts on that?
Mike Caput
Yeah, I think that's such a bleeding edge area. I think everyone's still trying to figure that out. But for me, it some combination of, like, fully understanding your actual workflow and also what is the job to actually be done. There's too many people out there who either are saying, well, you know, I'll have people come up to me and say, well, we want to do agents. How do we do agents? Let's go do it. And be like, well, how do you do the work? Today? You're going to still have to train an agent just like a person to go do the work. So if you don't have that documented somewhere or you don't have that as a process or a system already, that's probably the unsexy first step here is, like, before you run, you gotta walk a little bit when it comes to that. So actually documenting and understanding and mapping your work is really going to benefit you when it comes time for agents and will just make any agent work better. So if you're not getting value out of them, maybe give it some clearer instructions about what you want to do. And then when it comes to incorporating people there, I think a lot of people start to see, mistakenly so see agents as a replacement for people. And I understand why you could logically get to that point, but I think really where we're going to go is people working in concert with agents and managing them and perhaps orchestrating them. Still so early on, there's like, very few companies actually doing that, I would argue. But that's going to require a lot more communication and education for your staff, because I don't think there's that many people that are super competent or comfortable when it comes to saying, wait a second, I'm going to have to go work with this AI agent now and, like, talk to it. And, you know, it's. We're getting there, but it's still very early. So I think there's going to be a lot of basic change management that is not being done.
Mike Linton
But if I hear you, I hear you saying the job description matters. And there's already, you know, you already have to watch out for the silos. The silos are just different. And you probably can't motivate the agent by asking it to try harder. You're going to explain how to do it.
Mike Caput
Yeah.
Mike Linton
Have it all hands with your agent. Go. I just want you to try harder. Yeah, yeah.
Mike Caput
As someone who has formed too personal of a relationship sometimes with AI in terms of like, hey, why aren't we doing this? Right? Like, that's probably going to be a thing. People are going to be getting real attached.
Mike Linton
Hey, so before we get towards, we're getting towards the end of the show, but any surprise in the research we haven't talked about yet that you think is aha for our listeners?
Mike Caput
You know, I'll tell you the surprise. To me, it wasn't the biggest surprise, but it is actually worse than I thought. We always ask in one way or another about how are you optimistic or pessimistic about AI's impact on jobs. And the exact wording, the question is a little different. But basically we're trying to say, like, do you think AI is going to create more jobs over time or create lead to job loss? Pessimism has been rising and you know, previous research was just marketers, so it's not exactly apples to apples, but it was the highest it's ever been by a dramatic amount. It's like 3/4 of people roughly think that AI is going to destroy more jobs than it could. Creates 75% in the next few years. So again, long, long term, we might be in a really good spot. But over the next three years, they 3/4 of people think we're losing more jobs than we're going to create. And I think that that sentiment has really, that pessimism has really increased over the last few years as you kind of see how capable these tools are getting and the headlines out there.
Mike Linton
Yes, it's almost increasing in direct proportion to capability.
Mike Caput
Almost. Almost directly, yeah.
Mike Linton
Hey, before we get to our traditional last question, any prediction on any big things that will happen before the end of 2026?
Mike Caput
I think you've got to probably hang your hat on the fact that we're going to have a lot more people using a lot more agents by the end of 2026, regardless of your skill level. I don't know if it'll be literally everywhere, but we're already seeing a huge uptick in adoption of agentic capabilities. Even if you're not building your own something like Claude code runs agents all the time. I think we're and Claude cowork for non technical knowledge workers too. I think we're gonna see a lot more of that by the end of 2026. You're gonna have people saying, oh yeah, like I'm either expected to start Learning about agents or I'm already actively using some.
Mike Linton
Excellent. So that brings us. I wanna make a joke about Spacelease sprockets, but no one would know what that is. So this brings us to our traditional last question. It's two parter. You can take one or both, but you must take at least one funniest story you can tell on the air or practical advice we haven't discussed yet. You could take one or both of those, but you must take at least
Mike Caput
one funniest story or practical advice. You know, I'll probably just go with some practical advice. And my practical advice would be this. This will be pretty tactical, but I think it's probably really wise for people to start thinking about. You could probably do a whole podcast on this to begin with. But found is in how my work has changed over the last three months is it's a lot less about chatting with AI necessarily or dumping things into a chat window. And it's much more about building out documents, often markdown files. Claude would call these skills. There's different names for them depending on which tool you're using. I'm literally building out almost a second brain or a knowledge base that is perpetually referenced by tools like Claude code or other agents. So I think I would really start to be thinking about instead of just jumping into a chat or a GPT or something, which is amazing if you're doing that and you can use AI in whatever way makes the most sense for you, I'd start really thinking about what does my personal second brain look like. And in terms of a build out, in terms of what I'm teaching AI to do, giving it skills that it can execute autonomously, that's the next frontier. And the sooner you start building that infrastructure out, the further ahead you'll be.
Mike Linton
So this is essentially you're creating your own thought partner in quasi image, but not exactly.
Mike Caput
I'm. I'm attempting to. Yeah, and I think it really is not even thought partner but like hey, digital version of Mike that does all the things Mike can do eventually. We're not there yet though.
Mike Linton
All right, well you heard it here. Build your own version of Mike. So Mike, thanks for joining the show and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. If you're enjoying the show, please like share and subscribe. New shows drop every Tuesday and all of Our more than 160 episodes are available on Spotify, Apple and YouTube which include the unit economics of AI. Can LLM companies actually make money? It's a bird, It's a plane. Holy shit, it's AI Parts one and two. Synthetic influencers should brands do it themselves? And marketing at Meta the view from the eye of the storm. Hey all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential. Typeface is changing the way to think about brand marketing at scale. Their marketing orchestration engine is the first of its kind and built specifically for the enterprise. The orchestration engine uses shared brand intelligence designed to turn brand guidelines into personalized voice, visuals and messaging delivered in a way that fits the context of your audience. It's how brands like Asics and Post holdings scale what works without sacrificing quality. Start orchestrating your brand at Typeface, AI CMO.
CMO Confidential w/ Mike Linton
Guest: Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer, Marketing AI Institute
Date: June 2, 2026
In this episode, Mike Linton welcomes Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at the Marketing AI Institute, to discuss how companies are structuring themselves for artificial intelligence (AI) adoption. The conversation centers on findings from the Institute’s recent large-scale survey of over 2,000 companies, offering a pulse-check on where businesses truly stand in their AI journeys—across marketing and beyond. The discussion covers the gap between individual and organizational AI adoption, practical barriers, the rise of AI agents, and what leaders should (and shouldn’t) do to drive responsible, effective AI transformation.
“We’ve got now 2,000-plus respondents at different companies across finance, HR, legal operations, etc. …all companies, all industries, a lot of different sizes. We were just looking for the widest cross section possible.”
— Mike Kaput [04:18]
“Individuals are actually kind of outpacing organizations.”
— Mike Kaput [06:15]
“Scaling means you’ve gone beyond initial pilots… you are expanding your use of it across every possible facet of the company.”
— Mike Kaput [07:15]
“There is a tendency to overstate things sometimes… There is real technology, real use cases, and real results behind the hype, 110%. But I think a lot of people are talking a big game too at the moment.”
— Mike Kaput [10:41]
"It’s not about access to tools. …Lack of training and education is still the number one barrier that people say when it comes to adopting AI effectively in their organization.”
— Mike Kaput [21:39]
“If you don’t have any really formal useful AI policies, that’s probably an issue… 40+ percent of people said that silos and inconsistent deployment [is] a huge issue.”
— Mike Kaput [16:58, 18:27]
“Redundancy is important. At least two tools, probably three would be my sweet spot personally.”
— Mike Kaput [19:19]
“…It’s very tempting… to then say, ‘okay, we’re going to get all the tools… and then we’re going to go and we’re going to not only catch up, but get ahead.’ …But if you think you’re just going to hand people tools…and especially as we’re getting into AI agents…it can lead to a huge amount of problems.”
— Mike Kaput [20:59]
“There’s all this unintended stuff where agents could go wrong really, really quick.”
— Mike Kaput [25:12]
“It’s like 3/4 of people roughly think that AI is going to destroy more jobs than it could create—75% in the next few years.”
— Mike Kaput [28:05]
“We’re going to have a lot more people using a lot more agents by the end of 2026, regardless of your skill level… you’re going to have people saying, ‘oh yeah, I’m either expected to start learning about agents or I’m already actively using some.’”
— Mike Kaput [29:23]
“Instead of just jumping into a chat or a GPT… I’d start really thinking about what does my personal second brain look like… The sooner you start building that infrastructure, the further ahead you’ll be.”
— Mike Kaput [31:39]
On the Say/Do Gap:
“When you actually sit down and say, okay, what’s happening each week in and out, there’s even wider gaps between what is being said and what is being done.”
— Mike Kaput [13:44]
On Training/AI Literacy:
“If people are not using the tools, the rest of this doesn’t really matter.”
— Mike Kaput [15:16]
On Agents and Future of Work:
“For me, it [agent success] is some combination of, like, fully understanding your actual workflow and also what is the job to actually be done. …You’re going to still have to train an agent just like a person to go do the work.”
— Mike Kaput [25:40]
In Mike Linton’s words:
“You heard it here. Build your own version of Mike…” [31:57]
End of Summary