TL;DR: Before you touch a single AI tool, write down how your team actually works. Then find the thing that wastes the most time and build something small to fix it. Do it in the open, with your team watching. That’s where it gets good.
If you read my last post, you know where I landed when it comes to how to “do more AI” as a marketing leader: fundamentals first, people are the moat, AI is the lever. Get your system coherent before you touch a tool.
Then what?
I recently sat in on a webinar where Zapier walked 70 of their own marketers through exactly this. A working session where three people on the marketing team showed what they’d actually built, live, in front of their colleagues. A persona research app. A slide deck skill. A suite of internal games built entirely with AI tools.
What struck me wasn’t the technology. It was the mindset. One of the presenters said something I keep coming back to: “Think about how you actually do this job yourself and what are the individual bite-size steps involved. You’re basically teaching the AI the job you want it to do.”
That’s the GSD model in plain language. And it’s where I want to start.
Start with the pain, not the possibility
Before you build anything, you need to know where your team is actually losing time. Not theoretically. Not what you observe from your own seat. What they tell you.
In my experience, the answers are usually the same across teams. People waste enormous time just trying to find information: where’s the latest ICP? What’s the most current messaging? What does the pipeline look like for this product line? The data often exists. People either don’t trust it or don’t know how to read it.
Then there’s the ideation phase. This is where I see the most waste that nobody talks about. Campaign briefs get written in isolation. The campaigns team comes up with a concept and then loops in paid media, organic, and product marketing once the idea is already half-baked. Designers are brought in late. Channel teams find out they’re executing a strategy they had no input on. And then everyone wonders why the launch feels disjointed.
The question underneath all of this is: Why are we building this campaign at all? What’s the insight that drove us here? Is this customer-centric, or is it us-centric?
The insight is the thing. And most teams have no documented ritual for finding it before they start building.
Codify how you work before you automate it
This is where the GSD model becomes real.
Insight. Ideate. Create. Launch. Yours might be different, or similar. For a lot of marketing teams, nobody has ever written their GSD model down, agreed on it, and made it the way work actually moves across individuals and approval gates.
Before you build any AI workflow, write this down. Literally.
- Who needs to be in the room at the ideation stage? (Hint: more people than you think, and earlier than you think.)
- What does a good insight actually look like before a brief gets written?
- How does the campaigns team hand off to the channel teams?
- When do product marketing and design come in?
- Who from sales should be at the table? RevOps?
Every org works a little differently. So figure out how your business collaborates and document it. Once you have it documented and co-created with your team, you have something to build on.
The Zapier slide deck example is a good one here. The marketer who built it didn’t start with the tool. She started with her own workflow: what does building a good deck actually involve? What are the hard parts? What are the annoying parts? What’s the part that everyone does slightly differently? She mapped those steps and then built a skill that reflected them. Now every marketer on her team can produce a deck at the same standard, without her having to be involved every time. This is a shared standard that scales.
What if the AI became the accountability mechanism?
Not a checklist on some internal intranet no one uses. Something your team actually can’t skip.
I’ve been calling it a GSD app and the concept is simple even if the build isn’t. Take this as something I’m working on “out loud.”
Before a brief gets written, the app asks: what’s the insight driving this? Not what’s the campaign. The why. What happened in the business or market that makes this worth doing? Is it customer-driven or business-driven? Which segment, which product line, which audience? If you can’t answer that clearly, you don’t move to the next step.
Then — and this is the part that gets skipped most often — it checks the quorum. Because the GSD model has been codified with roles and responsibilities already mapped, the app doesn’t just ask who you’ve looped in. It already knows who should be involved based on the campaign type, and it surfaces that list for you. You confirm who’s in and who’s intentionally out. Designers stop getting looped in at the end. Channel teams stop finding out they’re executing something they had no input on.
From there, the app helps you pressure-test the idea before you build it — surfacing your ICP, your current positioning, recent voice of customer, recent/past campaigns — so the brief is grounded in something real before anyone spends time on it.
The spirit of it: every question the app asks is a question I’d ask. The app is the CMO, codified. It doesn’t replace judgment — it makes sure the fundamentals are in place before judgment is even needed.
Go together
The last thing I’d say: don’t do this alone, and don’t assign it to one person. Everyone needs to see their own potential in being creative in this new way, in a safe, collective environment, starting with — you! — their lead.
So get your team in a room or on a call. Show them something that works. Try following the GSD App example in the open, make mistakes, ask questions out loud. The team will want to help and take part. Some folks won’t say anything — afraid to sound stupid. But, you’re the lead, take the first step and build with them, out loud, be vulnerable. I guarantee you it will be fun.
In that meeting, you can ask them questions along the way — where do you lose the most time? What would you fix if you had the skills to fix it? You’re building the GSD App (or something else), but by showing the build in the open, you’re passing on confidence for them to take forward and build solo or as smaller groups.
Anne-Marie Goulet is the founder of Swim Club, a strategic practice for founders and marketing leaders who are done with the theatre. She spent 15 years inside Salesforce, Shopify, and WordPress Enterprise leading global marketing teams. Say hi at anne-marie@joinswimclub.com.
