
Loading summary
Podcast Host/Announcer
If you love podcasts, and obviously you do, you need to check out Castro. It's a podcast player designed for people who subscribe to a lot of shows but don't have time to listen to everything. Castro helps you cut through the noise, manage your shows, and simply enjoy listening. It's the podcast player built for podcast enthusiasts. So download Castro and start listening today. That's Castro. C A S T R O Enjoy listening the Agile Brand.
Foreign Language Speaker/Intro Voice
Foreign.
Podcast Host/Announcer
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, E commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show. Is artificial intelligence just another shiny toy for marketers, or is it the key.
Greg Kilstrom
To unlocking true agility and sustainable growth in today's turbulent landscape?
Podcast Host/Announcer
Agility requires not only rapid adaptation to.
Greg Kilstrom
Change, but also the ability to anticipate future trends and proactively adjust strategies. This means leveraging data and technology like AI in ways that empower marketers to make smarter decisions faster. Today we're going to talk about how.
Podcast Host/Announcer
AI driven consumer intelligence can help marketers.
Greg Kilstrom
Navigate the current era of socioeconomic uncertainty and drive meaningful roi. Many are looking for solutions to evolving challenges. From inflation's impact on consumer behavior and evolving data privacy laws to demonstrating actual ROI and connecting with target audiences, AI presents a powerful opportunity to meet these needs head on.
Podcast Host/Announcer
To help me discuss this topic, I'd.
Greg Kilstrom
Like to welcome Brian Gernert, CEO at Resonate. Brian, welcome to the show.
Brian Gernert
Craig. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to this. Before we dive in, we're going to talk about a few things here. But before we dive in, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Resonate?
Brian Gernert
Sure. So, as I mentioned, my name is Brian Garnert. I'm the co founder and CEO of Resonate, 30 plus years in technology. So seen a lot of change over those 30 years. One things I would just say is that I think we're in the most interesting time in technology that I've been involved. I think the acceleration of what's possible is almost mind blowing at this point. So my background is building technology companies. The last one was a cybersecurity company. Before that was an early Internet company. So the kind of constant themes in my background is Internet big data and data science. And that's definitely areas that we leverage at Resonate.
Foreign Language Speaker/Intro Voice
Yeah, love it.
Greg Kilstrom
Well, yeah, let's, let's dive in here. First thing I want to talk about is thriving versus you know, simply surviving with, with AI. And you know we hear a lot about AI disrupting lots of things, but you know, specifically marketing in this case. Beyond the buzzwords though, what are some tangible ways that you see successful marketers using AI not just to survive and cut cost and all of that good stuff, but to actually thrive in this environment?
Brian Gernert
Well, I think there's been at least a decent amount of embracing things like creative content for social posts and for other kind of content related opportunities for marketers to leverage. I think the bigger opportunity. And I think this is where it's interesting to me that the market isn't more focused here. It's driving better business results, increasing revenue and not just efficiencies. It's really about being more effective in marketing and driving business results that creates value. And so you know, things like predicting consumer behavior or hyper personalization during your customer journey, even if you're not aware, haven't seen that customer before, that consumer before and the ability to really shorten insight from weeks to days and that'll be minutes and eventually probably won't require us as human beings to actually evaluate the insights but use as an artifact of why things worked. So there's a lot of incremental and kind of not just incremental but evolutionary capabilities that I think marketers can leverage to produce better business results.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, and I think there's to that point sustainable growth is also key as well. Right. I see a lot of, you know, somebody uses this thing over here and someone else uses something else completely different over there. You know, so there's a lot of, I mean everybody's, not everybody, but a lot of people are excited about it and they're using it. But are marketers focused on the wrong use cases? I guess to ask.
Brian Gernert
I wouldn't say they're focused on the wrong use cases. I think Again, I think it's about a lot of marketers are kind of dipping their toe into the water. In the things that are easy are the things I mentioned before, like leveraging LLMs and generative AI for content creation. And you know, those are pretty straightforward. Again, I think, you know, my perspective is that if you, if you build a marketing capability set that drives better business results, efficiencies will come with it versus focusing on efficiencies first. And I do think that's, I don't see a lot of that right now, but I do think that's the opportunity. I think the other thing, as marketers, I think you're really in a difficult place in that every company has kind of slapped AI in front of what they do. And I think that creates a real challenge for a market to understand what is real, what isn't real, and what's innovative versus kind of just a little bit better.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, I've seen a few, at least headlines and a few articles on some of the companies that are investing in AI aren't going to realize returns for quite a while and, or, you know, some of the returns haven't been realized as, as much as hype, you know, a couple years ago or even a year ago might have led some to believe. So, you know, this does a couple things. I mean, some, it leads some marketers to be hesitant to jump on the bandwagon or are we even past bandwagon? I don't know. I feel like we've been talking about this for so long, but, you know, there's still a bandwagon, I guess. But, you know, what advice would you have for those that are still kind of skeptical about the potential?
Brian Gernert
I think, as I mentioned, I think there's a lot of confusion. My belief is that you focus on a specific problem and kind of leverage AI for a specific result that you want to improve and make sure that that's a measurable, tangible result. So it's something that you can communicate to the CEO, to the board, across kind of the company of here was the problem we focus on, here's the result that we achieved, and here's the business impact. And I think if you stay focused in those areas and not try to just kind of, it's not really about adopting AI. It's about focusing where you want to improve performance and then what AI is available to do that and then measure the result and if it doesn't work, don't do it.
Greg Kilstrom
Right.
Brian Gernert
At the end of the day, it's about kind of improving speed and accuracy and increasing revenue.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, because, I mean, AI isn't the goal or AI isn't the strategy. It's the other things that you mentioned. Right. It's a, it's a tool to achieve those things, certainly. And in many cases it could be a great tool to achieve them, but it's not the end in itself.
Brian Gernert
Right, Absolutely.
Foreign Language Speaker/Intro Voice
Yeah.
Greg Kilstrom
So, you know, another thing here is, you know, there's a lot of, whether it's consumer hesitation to spend or, you know, shifts in consumer behavior because of economic uncertainty changes, the unknown, and we seem to be continually facing these types of things. How can AI help here? There's predictive analytics, but there's also a lot of volatility. So can AI driven predictive analytics help marketers better understand things when things are so volatile?
Brian Gernert
I think we walked into a perfect resonate use case. So I'm not trying to, I don't want to make this a commercial, but the big kind of takeaway from what we've built is the ability to predict the future one consumer at a time and identify those shifts. And it's very different than how maybe a traditional data company would collect data on someone through public records in other ways. That's, that's data that's old and candidly doesn't account for the shifts you're talking about. So using AI to be able to predict shifts in individual consumers and then how to engage that consumer and what's important. Our company was really founded on driving values, motivations and beliefs and connecting with people based on those things. And that's very much in line with economic uncertainty, for instance, or rising prices or stability of jobs and those things. So AI and leveraging in the right way allows you to identify not just trends, because analytics is great, but unless you can take that and drive action, it's just interesting information. And so the ability to connect with consumers based on the predictive nature of AI is really what kind of separates what's been possible historically.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, well, and that's that feedback, Luke, because to your point, otherwise we're really just looking at pretty dashboards or PowerPoints with potentially meaningful insights, but nothing to do with them. Right. So it's that connecting the dots. Right. Can you share maybe an example of how Resonate has helped a client navigate some of these types of challenges?
Brian Gernert
Yeah, absolutely. And one thing you just mentioned, as you were talking about kind of looking at the dashboards, you know, I talk about reading the news internally to the company, like we can all read the news. The question is what are we going to do and how do we impact the next result. But a good example of kind of how we've used our capability set with the customers is really a good one, I think, especially in this uncertain kind of economic situation we're in, which is an elective procedure that not covered by medical insurance, which are things that get really impacted when the economy's not. People aren't sure right about their savings and their spending. So leveraging what we could identify these shifts, we could see the people that were pulling back on making any type of financial decision around elective procedures. More importantly, the people that we identified that were still likely to choose the elective procedure, we identified that safety was their number one concern. It wasn't cost, it wasn't a number of other factors that could have had an impact. It was really about safety. So working with the agency, we shifted creative to be more safety of the procedure and the results and then identify the people who are still in market. And we saw a 200% increase in performance from an ROI perspective. And it was at the same time that their competitors were pulling back from marketing campaigns believing that they didn't know how to identify who was still potentially someone that was going to, going to go forth with his elective procedure. So a real good example of really identifying how things are changing, what the impact is and what you can do to drive a better result.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And I mean 200% of anything. That's a, that's a good, that's a good result there. That's great.
Conference Announcer
Want to learn more and join the discussion about marketing and AI? Attend a premier conference dedicated to marketing and AI. That's Meacon, the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference. From October 14 through 16 in Cleveland, Ohio. Meacon brings together the brightest minds and leading voices in AI. Don't miss this opportunity to connect with a dynamic community of experts, visionaries and enthusiasts. The Agile brand is proud to be the lead media sponsor of this important event. Register today@MarketingAIInstitute.com that's MarketingAI Institute.com and use the code AGILE150 for $150 off your registration fee. I can't wait to see you there.
Greg Kilstrom
So anytime we're talking about AI, we're also talking about data. And certainly in addition to economic uncertainty, we've also got data privacy as a concern, and rightfully so for consumers, but then also for marketers with evolving regulatory landscape that we're facing, particularly global companies as well with multiple even if they're similar, there's still different regulations depending on where you're marketing. Again, AI takes a ton of data to do things well in many cases. But how can AI be implemented in a way that also complies and really is built with data privacy in mind?
Brian Gernert
So a few things. One, choose a solution that leverages pseudo anonymized data. So in other words, this is where personal identifiable information has been replaced with artificial identifiers. So you're really not identifying the actual individual, but identifiers that can't be traced back to that person. And this helps to kind of protect privacy from a non PII data perspective. And in addition, work with a company that is focused on training models that takes into account things like gdpr, ccpa. We for instance, have a specific data set that is required for financial services that doesn't take any financial services. Potential conflict in, even though that would be compliant with CCPA for instance. But work with a company that's aware of those regulations and then ask them how are they actually driving a result taking those things into account with their model training and their data sets. And then in addition, where possible, look for where there's transparent consent. So leverage opt in data sources as much as possible. So at least at a PII level, if there's pii, make sure that it's, that it's opt in.
Podcast Host/Announcer
Yeah, and, and I guess just to.
Greg Kilstrom
To dive in a little deeper on that because I think there's a lot of companies that will say that they're, you know, compliant with, you know, all of these things. Like what are you mentioned A few things there. And, and maybe that's the answer. But you know, what should marketers be looking for that, you know, just to say, you know, to say we're compliant broadly is, you know, is, is not specific enough. So like, what are some of the things like let's just use CCPA or you know, in the US specifically, like what should they be looking for to make sure that they can really feel confident?
Brian Gernert
Well, the first thing is instead of just taking what I just said and say, oh, that sounds great, ask, okay, tell me how you actually do that. Give me the, the kind of process that you, you, you leverage to do that. How is your, how do you work with CCPA from an opt out perspective? You know, what is that an automated process? How does that get implemented? How do you know you're not opting people back in that have opted out? I mean, there's a number of questions to ask around each of these. Some of them are specific to the actual regulation but you really should go beyond just hearing the words of yes, we're CCPA compliant, ask about some specifics and they're pretty easy. This is where generative AI could be really helpful. Ask what are the questions to ask about CCPA and is your AI vendor or data provider CCPA compliant? What questions should I ask? But those are a number of things. The opt out is a good example.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, these things are also evolving and there's going to be other ones popping up and stuff like that. So to your point, to know the questions, to ask those questions may even evolve over, you know, a matter of months as well of, you know, the, the best things to ask. So no, that's, that's a great idea. Looking ahead and you know, talking about AI and marketing, what are, you know, what, what are some, some of the things that, that you're excited about as far as developments on the horizon?
Brian Gernert
I'm really excited about the ability to have autonomous optimization that creates better results today. And listen, I think we as human beings are going to want to have checkpoints where we, we validate what we believe is the optimization that makes sense. I think over time what we'll discover is those optimizations are really good and that we'll trust them more and more. But I do think, for instance, for us as we are building our solutions around auto optimization, for instance, we are putting checkpoints in for people to actually take a look and for instance, look at the underlying data to understand so they can feel comfortable. So it's really interesting you're actually slowing down optimization in this conversation. But it's to make sure that people are comfortable that the right decisions are being made. You know, I think multimodal kind of AI integrating text image, voice for deeper personalizations. I think those things are going to be really interesting and exciting. I think we're going to, you know, the world is going to be customized to us as individuals and it's going to be not just, you know, static creative, but engaging creative. So I think there's, there's a lot of really interesting things around that. I think agility and intelligence across the Martech stack from an AI perspective is going to, is going to accelerate results.
Foreign Language Speaker/Intro Voice
Yeah, yeah.
Brian Gernert
So I, there's a number of exciting things I think is going to happen on the near term horizon. When I say near term, some of it's going to be over the next six months, some is going to be having a 12, 18, 24 months, but there's a lot of changes and positive change from a standpoint of increasing Results.
Foreign Language Speaker/Intro Voice
Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Kilstrom
And so how should marketing leaders be, you know, knowing that there's, you know, change? I mean there's always been constant change. You know, that's change is the constant. Right. But it does feel like, you know, in, in this area things are accelerating, you know, quite a bit. And you know, now, you know, with agentic AI, with, you know, there's all kinds of things on current and on the horizon. How should marketing leaders prepare for this or you know, be, be prepared to think about their teams and, and things like that as well in the months ahead?
Brian Gernert
Yeah, I think that I have this conversation across our company. So everybody in our company, we have a corporate chat GPT. Everyone has their own version of ChatGPT. They, we have chat CBTS that people share and work. You know, whether it's our product marketing, we, we have Rachel, our, our, our, our infrastructure we call Ray Resonate AI and Rachel's rai. But literally it's the ability to dynamically create any content on demand for a salesperson, for a customer support person that leverages our internal information. So I think the reason I bring that up is I think it's really important to work with your team to embrace AI as a tool, as something that can improve their jobs and, and candidly their careers. I think the opportunity isn't one that says we need less people, but I do think it's one that says we need people that are really smart on how to leverage the tools and capabilities that are available to them. And those things are changing really fast. So first is build or support a team that is AI forward. And then I go back to what I said earlier, which is it's not just about saying you use AI, it's about what problems are we solving, what business results are we getting and how are we leveraging it for the right things. So I think that mindset will help you build a really strong AI oriented marketing team that drives better results that are measurable and attributable to the efforts across the marketing team.
Foreign Language Speaker/Intro Voice
Yeah. Love it.
Greg Kilstrom
Well, Brian, thanks so much for joining today and sharing your insights. One last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Brian Gernert
I think I mentioned its speed of change is amazing right now. So there's really two primary areas that I focus on which is being in front of customers, being in the market, listening to what their challenges are, where they're getting great results, where they're struggling. In addition, I read a ton on a Constant basis, always looking for what's changing, what's possible, who's doing something interesting from an AI perspective. So keeping close to the market is really important. It helps you react fast. And lastly, we across the company have really adopted four themes and this is for me, but this is really for the company too to make sure that we are focused on the growth of the business and supporting our customers in driving better results. And they're pretty simple. One is nimble by nature. So one of the things that we really focus on when we're hiring is intellectual curiosity and that really helps with kind of being nimble and kind of thinking about what's changing. Second, no surprise being the company we are is tech and AI forward. Third is we have an unrelenting focus on innovation. We are looking for what can we do next to support our clients and create great results. And last was I think probably the hardest, which is constant self disruption. Our goal is to disrupt ourselves before we get disrupted. And I know that the bigger you are, I think the harder that is. And we've been in business for 17 years, so we're not a tiny company, we're also not a massive company. But we choose to disrupt ourselves before we get disrupted. So that constant disruption is kind of a mantra that as we approach how we're doing things, that is a focus.
Foreign Language Speaker/Intro Voice
Nice.
Greg Kilstrom
Nice. I love it. Well, again I'd like to thank Brian Gernert, CEO at Resonate for joining the show.
Podcast Host/Announcer
You can learn more about Brian and.
Greg Kilstrom
Resonate by following the links in the show notes.
Podcast Host/Announcer
Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production company. Co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
Tech Systems Sponsor Voice
Before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500 are already aware of. Finding the best technology, business and talent solutions is not easy. With business demands and competitive pressures mounting you need to be able to design, deploy, and optimize your technology to provide leading customer experiences while driving business growth. Those of you that have been listening to this show for a while know that this podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, a global provider of technology, business and talent solutions for more than 80% of the Fortune 500. Tech Systems accelerates business transformation for their customers. Whether you're looking to maximize your technology ROI, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, TechSystems enables enterprises to capitalize on change. Learn more at techsystems.com that's T E K systems.com now let's get back to the show.
Date: September 19, 2025
Guest: Bryan Gernert, CEO & Co-Founder, Resonate
Host: Greg Kihlström
In this episode, Greg Kihlström speaks with Bryan Gernert, CEO and co-founder of Resonate, about how AI-driven consumer intelligence can do more than just streamline marketing workflows—it can unlock true agility, anticipate changing trends, and generate sustainable business growth, even amid economic and regulatory uncertainty. Bryan shares firsthand insights into where marketers are seeing tangible value from AI, how to separate real innovation from hype, and practical advice for building data privacy–compliant AI solutions that drive meaningful ROI.
[02:31 – 05:01]
[05:01 – 07:55]
[08:19 – 12:24]
[13:24 – 16:59]
[17:28 – 19:11]
[19:12 – 21:19]
[21:20 – 23:17]