TL;DR
Use AI to validate ideas fast: Treat AI as a prototyping partner to iterate copy, visuals, and concepts before you invest.
Organize the team into tastemakers and ops: Quality bar setters plus builders and automators working together are hard to beat.
Publish from human anchors, then repurpose: Create from podcasts and demo days, then use AI to translate into channels.
Make education the product: Monthly live demos drive hundreds of attendees and 50% plus engagement with only email and organic.
Align revenue with a simple attribution loop: Ask at form fill, capture call snippets, and survey post purchase to learn how buyers really found you.
AI turns ideas into validated bets, not just more content
Sylvia’s team uses AI where it speeds learning: brainstorming, drafting, and quick visual prototypes to test whether an idea deserves real production. Without AI, cycles would be slower and fewer ideas would make it to testing.
They started with a four-hour internal hackathon to build a custom GPT for repurposing existing content. That prototype proved the value and led to adopting Copy.ai for shared knowledge, workflows, and automation triggers across the team.
Key mindset: context engineering beats generic prompts. Provide high-quality examples and clear instructions to avoid “average of the internet” output.
Build blended teams: tastemakers and ops
Marketing roles are blurring. Sylvia sees two complementary archetypes:
Tastemakers who know what good looks like and protect quality
Ops builders who connect systems, automate workflows, and scale distribution
In their first AI workshop, tastemakers curated “what good looks like” examples while ops designed formats, instructions, and handoffs. Together they shipped a working prototype in one session.
If rebuilding from zero, she would hire one great tastemaker storyteller and one curious ops self-starter, then rotate “jobs to be done” rather than lock into narrow functions. Squads form around outcomes like SEO or thought leadership, not fixed titles.
Publish from anchors and let AI do the translation
Kandji’s content flywheel is anchors and distribution:
Anchors are human-led sources such as their podcast and demo day events run by solutions engineers who have lived the customer problems.
Distribution is where AI shines, repurposing anchors into social, newsletter, web, and longer editorial pieces.
Demo days happen monthly, starting with full-product overviews and expanding into deep dives by feature and problem area. Clips sometimes become short social videos, but most assets from demos are longer form for late-stage buyers.
Attendance is driven by email and organic only. Results: hundreds of attendees and 50% plus engagement measured by questions and chat. The lesson is to optimize the event’s value first, not just the invite subject line.
Gamify creativity to raise the quality bar
To keep the edge with AI, Sylvia gamifies exploration. The team runs a “shark tank pitch day” where cross-functional judges play buyer personas, every pitch must include a transformational AI use, and the best ideas get cash prizes and momentum. It is a safe space to bring bold ideas, and the human spark stays central.
Hackathons created both bonding and belief. After seeing an engineering team ship a working build in two days, the org leaned further into focused sprints to unlock speed without sacrificing quality.
Meet buyers with honesty and education
Buyer behavior has shifted toward more upfront education and a desire to see the real product. Live demos and clear, visual explanations help cut through skepticism created by over-hyped launches.
Kandji created a media arm, The Sequence, on a separate domain to publish thought leadership, demo write-ups, short video, and monthly research surveys. A side benefit: LLMs quickly began referencing The Sequence as an external source, improving answer-engine visibility.
They survey their readership with Typeform monthly, often getting 100–200 responses, and one recent study passed 1,000 responses. Publishing community insights back to readers strengthens the loop.
Align on pipeline by learning, not litigating credit
Sales and marketing have been aligned from day one, but separate pipeline targets can still create friction. Sylvia advocates a shared number and a curiosity-led view of attribution.
Their practical loop:
Open text “how did you hear about us?” at form fill to capture the freshest recall.
First-call capture of the same question, with a plan to auto-extract call snippets into Slack so marketing hears buyers verbatim.
Post-purchase survey to understand the end-to-end journey.
The goal is a better story of influence, not a courtroom on credit.
Keep the stack lean and the ops tight
Kandji is primarily sales-led with experiments in PLG. They run HubSpot for CRM and marketing automation to keep data in one place, plus Notion for project management, Typeform for constant audience research, and Figma across brand and product design.
Copy.ai entered the stack after an internal prototype proved value, an operator-to-operator sales conversation showed real workflows, and the team had hands-on experience through an Exit Five community course.
In rapid fire:
Strong opinion: most teams are using AI to spin the same playbooks faster instead of changing the playbook.
AI’s role: augment people, with humans in the loop for taste and spark.
What AI will replace: content repurposing at scale. What it will not: product marketing that challenges and synthesizes.
If forced to keep only three tools: Notion, Figma, Typeform. Most used AI tool: ChatGPT for breadth and ubiquity.
Final word
Prototype with AI to learn faster. Publish from credible human anchors so the work stays real. Run lean ops that turn great ideas into consistent programs. Align with sales on learning how buyers found you, not on arguing who gets credit. That is how Kandji ships value with clarity and speed.
About the CMO
Sylvia LePoidevin is the Chief Marketing Officer at Kandji, the Apple device management and security platform for secure, productive global work. She joined as employee number four and the first marketing hire, later becoming CMO and helping scale Kandji’s growth engine around human anchors, community research, and pragmatic AI. Earlier, she led marketing at FloQast, DataFox (acquired by Oracle), and SADA. She also helps lead the Pavilion Miami chapter, supporting the next wave of growth operators.
About the series
This is from Breakout Sessions, where marketing leaders unpack how AI is changing GTM and the way buyers buy.
