Neil Tewari: Marketing Can't Be the Company's AI Bottleneck

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

We've been doing these roadshow events, the Progress Smart Tech Next Roadshow.

And one of the things Scott Brinker talks about all the time is context.

He said, you know, if there's one word for 2026, it's context, whether it's context engineering or some of the other things that you said.

If somebody is listening to this who's saying, OK, yeah, makes sense.

Infrastructure, plumbing all sounds good.

Where do I start? What would you tell them?

Yeah, of course.

Of course, I have a strong bias to setting that foundation right with conversion.

And there's a big part of what we do as a product is how can we enable things to get deep and actually understand the context at a robust scale? I think that this is a very interesting time where I think CMOs and VPs of marketing, it's almost a requirement now to be very in the weeds of how your actual tech stack operates end to end.

I think for a long time, it wasn't actually a big part of the job.

I think everybody just chose Salesforce.

Everybody chose Marketo.

Everyone chose Sixth Sense.

And they all kind of got to work.

And there was team members of the team that could use those tools to the fullest extent.

And there wasn't like that much else to be kind of thought about when it came to actually executing.

Now, it's like when I say plumbing and I say infrastructure, it means actually really robustly understanding, OK, like, why do we not have this context inside our market? Oh, it's on a Salesforce custom object.

And that's related to these objects this way.

That's not stuff I believe that CMOs or EBSO marketing and very fairly were using their time on before.

But now actually can be the difference between marketing well and marketing poorly compared to your competitors.

I think there's two things really is like you've really got into the weeds of that infrastructure and the plumbing to understand where are the faults, where are the gaps? And then second, as I think there also now needs to be a questioning of some of these legacy tooling is like, should we even be using these things that have been the standard for so long?

I had been talking for a while about data not being clean, but I think you actually have gotten even more precise.

It's not necessarily even that data is not clean.

It's that you have to have a high level understanding or maybe a deep understanding of what you're working with to begin with.

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

We've been doing these roadshow events, the Progress Smart Tech Next Roadshow.

And one of the things Scott Brinker talks about all the time is context.

He said, you know, if there's one word for 2026, it's context, whether it's context engineering or some of the other things that you said.

If somebody is listening to this who's saying, OK, yeah, makes sense.

Infrastructure, plumbing all sounds good.

Where do I start? What would you tell them?

Yeah, of course.

Of course, I have a strong bias to setting that foundation right with conversion.

And there's a big part of what we do as a product is how can we enable things to get deep and actually understand the context at a robust scale? I think that this is a very interesting time where I think CMOs and VPs of marketing, it's almost a requirement now to be very in the weeds of how your actual tech stack operates end to end.

I think for a long time, it wasn't actually a big part of the job.

I think everybody just chose Salesforce.

Everybody chose Marketo.

Everyone chose Sixth Sense.

And they all kind of got to work.

And there was team members of the team that could use those tools to the fullest extent.

And there wasn't like that much else to be kind of thought about when it came to actually executing.

Now, it's like when I say plumbing and I say infrastructure, it means actually really robustly understanding, OK, like, why do we not have this context inside our market? Oh, it's on a Salesforce custom object.

And that's related to these objects this way.

That's not stuff I believe that CMOs or EBSO marketing and very fairly were using their time on before.

But now actually can be the difference between marketing well and marketing poorly compared to your competitors.

I think there's two things really is like you've really got into the weeds of that infrastructure and the plumbing to understand where are the faults, where are the gaps? And then second, as I think there also now needs to be a questioning of some of these legacy tooling is like, should we even be using these things that have been the standard for so long?

I had been talking for a while about data not being clean, but I think you actually have gotten even more precise.

It's not necessarily even that data is not clean.

It's that you have to have a high level understanding or maybe a deep understanding of what you're working with to begin with.