The Hidden Cost of AI, Marketing to Bots and Why Retention Wins with Brevo’s Channing Ferrer

The idea of software apocalypse doesn't exist in my mind. Yeah, software is evolving for sure, but software isn't going away. We just need to think about AI as a mechanism to drive more use of software-related products. AI is software in the same sense. We build code, so does AI build code. Those two things are intertwined and we can do a lot more to create efficiencies across our customer base through AI. So I'm really excited about all those little things.

You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. Channing, what's up? Welcome to Right About Now. Thank you for having me, Ryan. Excited to be here. Hey, man. I'm excited to have you. It was kind of like the who's who of brands on my list, the ones I hear a lot, being in marketing. Martech, always on my radar. HubSpot, now Brevo. You've been around the block, my friend, and respect what you've been doing. Yeah, I appreciate it. Appreciate it. Had some fun experiences, I think, between a bunch of these different tech businesses I've been a part of.

We went from very inbound heavy, self-serve heavy business, really pushing into that enterprise space. So that was a fun transition, working with a very international teams. SEMrush is a U.S. headquartered company, but heavily international team. Went over to Brandwatch, which was interesting. LBO-backed business, kind of a turnaround. I wanted to try that. Hadn't been a part of that, and there's pros and cons in that. But it was a fun experience working with some cool people there. Really interesting opportunity, I think, because I had a chance to kind of run the whole business as the president there. And then now here at Brevo, where I've been here for about a year and a half. European headquartered business, but we're really growing globally. Yeah. And CRM is the key acronym there.

And quick story leads into your question here. Our customer advisory board, we had like 10 really good customers together at dinner. And then we sat down for the afternoon the next day, talking through what they want and what their challenges are. And the clear theme was repeat customers. They are really struggling in different senses. One customer, one company, one our customer was a candle company. They manufacture and sell candles. They've got stores all over the place. Think of Yankee Candle. They're very similar to Yankee Candle type business. A lot of their customers are single purchase customers every year. Another one was a restaurant. And once again, 70% of their customers, single purchase customers each. year. They're trying to create this repeatability of these customers that enjoy purchasing their products, but only do it in a very limited way.

And customer acquisition for net new customers, we all know is super expensive. It's hard. It's doable, but it's getting harder and harder and harder through all a variety of different reasons, which we can talk about. How do you get your customers that already know you to come back? And do more. It's probably the lowest cost way to drive revenue as well, because, again, they're already aware of you. But there's so much noise out there. How do you kind of filter through that noise? One of the things that I was chatting with these customers about is how do we get loyal customers to, again, repurchase? Not just customers that do it once a year for the first time, but customers that they know come back, but they're only coming back once a year to purchase a candle or go to the restaurant or whatever.

How do we create that kind of that sense of true loyalty and repurchase desire? One of the things that they're doing is they're using loyalty tools. They're building kind of loyalty program and trying to get these customers to be incentivized through either discounts or mostly it's through discounts, but through other ways. And one of the things we've been talking with some of them about is imagine if your loyal customers become advocates as well. And it's a really simple idea. These loyal customers, maybe they don't have a big follower base. They're not like true influencers, but they have followers. And those followers, again, even if it's 100 people following them, care deeply about what they say, because those are going to be their closest friends or people that trust them probably in some sense.

If you can create this idea of advocacy through those loyal customers and incentivize that advocacy, you're not just incentivizing them to come back, but you're also incentivizing them to go out and acquire new customers for you. And so that's kind of a cool concept that we've been toying with a lot and getting a lot of really good feedback from and our customers are really into. Bye.

You know, we went and bought that first candy bar. You're like, wow, this thing is so good. Let me go tell my friend about, you know, my first Mars bar or whatever your favorite candy bar is. But you kind of think about that experience when you're younger and you're super excited about this new thing that you just got. And you don't have to tell a lot of people, just tell a small number of people. But it really, really goes a long distance. That's the thing. When you look at where we find information today, I went and did a survey. Actually, we did two surveys. I did just a really simple LinkedIn survey. We ran a more formal survey as well. But both results came back the same.

We asked, where are you looking for a product? If you want to buy something, like what do you do to buy it? The top two answers were I go to someone I know and trust and ask them. And then the other one was I go to chat GPT or your favorite LLM and ask it. And there's a level of trust with LLMs as well that exists, which we can debate how long that will exist. But it does exist today. They're asking for support in some sense. And 80% of the respondents were, those were the two things that they did. People are looking for advice. There's so much noise out. There's so much information. You think about the volume of emails we get today, the volume of information we're trying to consume.

In today's day and age with AI, data is king. Data is the thing that drives everything. We need a system and process for how we do things. We want to run our workflows through a system. We want to run our email campaigns and other campaigns through a system. But again, system, I think of also as that system of records. Where does our data live? Because we're going to use our systems, our HubSpot or our Brevo tools to kind of reach out to our customer base. But in order to do that in the most effective way, we've got to have the best data possible. And you want to create that personalized experience through your system, your system of record. As I see it, and as I see a lot of customers today, as we talk with a lot of these customers, they're really looking for that personalized experience and to create that personalized outreach experience, they need to get data ingested into one system for them to use one system of record for them to

And once you pull that data together, that data can come from people visiting your website, that data can come from your current customers, that data can come from third party data sources as well. Pull all that data together into a unified system, then you can create truly personalized experiences. You can categorize that data into a lot of different ways. For example, if we do this age categorization, I might say this group, this older age group is going to engage more deeply with email. This younger age group might engage more deeply with SMS or with WhatsApp, depending on the region that they're in. That's one simple thing we can do. But of course, we can really narrow that down a lot further with a lot more detailed information.

How do you think about resourcing human capital, but other resourcing as well? There's so much that AI can do for us. It's how do you point it in the right direction? We still need humans to do a lot of the day-to-day work, of course, but AI can make us so much more efficient. How do we invest our human capital most efficiently alongside that AI capital? It's a really tricky balance. I see a lot of marketing teams getting a lot of headcount pressure. feeling this pressure to reduce team size because AI can solve everything for you. Can't really solve everything. It can solve a lot for us. We have to really understand how to deploy it and how to use it. And then the other thing with a lot of the AI tools that exist out there is they get very expensive very quickly.

I wonder, I'm like, I can't be the only one. I just say, I'm like, what did I spend on that? The challenge is, it's not only, well, I could have hired or had two people or whatever. I haven't had the exact thought. Then I'm like, well, I found the two right people. Which one was, what's the past, the least of resistance here? Not because I don't want to hire people, but can I find them? Resource utilization is very interesting as a challenge for companies of all sizes. I was talking to another CEO the other day about hiring and what they're doing from a hiring standpoint. We were talking about, do you hire young grads or do you go hire someone much more seasoned and senior to do something that's technical?

Let's just say they don't need maybe an engineering degree, but you want someone technical, either in a marketing capacity or in a some sort of kind of builder, software builder capacity, but not truly engineering. And the balance we found is a couple seasoned people is helpful, but also some junior people is becoming, I think a little more, I might even say trendy because the more junior folks are AI native. Yeah. now. Yes, AI still isn't that old, but they're coming out saying, I know how to not code, but I know how to vibe code and I can step in and I can figure this stuff out. And vibe coding isn't that hard to pick up. It's not like you need to learn another language. It used to be developers learned all these languages.

It would take years to kind of figure it out. I'm coding, you just need to have logical thinking and you need to be able to know what the tool can do for you. So having some junior people that are kind of excited, excitable and creative step in to do that vibe coding and some more senior people to oversee it. It seems to be an interesting balance. So you're kind of blending that human capital with the AI tools to build software, build products. Yeah, that's interesting. How are they with working with AI? How is that generally speaking? It's so hard to generalize right now because it really depends. Some people are just way, way ahead. And then some people are just like, I give, keep it away from me.

Yeah, it's crazy because it's some people age irrelevant. Some people are like, yeah, sure. I'm going to go figure this out and I'll do it. And I think those are the people though, who have been always open to something new. And they're always trying that new thing. And AI isn't that different from any other new thing out there. And they go try it. But then you have people who are super standoffish and like, I don't want to try anything different. I got a couple of buddies in finance. AI is still this kind of distant concept. They don't really do a bunch with other than chat GPT on their phone. And that's about the extent of it. It really varies a lot, I'd say.

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And so that's... how we're going to market. That's how we're building product. That's what we're doing in the next six months on a product roadmap standpoint. That's our strategy. And that strategy has to include the things we're saying no to. So whenever we sit down and I talk with my team about 2027 planning, which is what we're doing right now, what's our strategy for 2027? A big piece of that has to be, these are the things we're clearly gonna say no to. And here's the framework we're gonna use to say no to that. When I think about our product roadmap, it's the same thing. We have to say no. And then it turns into, of course, over time, some very tactical decisions that we need to make

When a customer comes in and asks for something, when we hear an opportunity maybe to make a shift into a new direction, we have to be solid on our strategic choices and stick to them. For example, one thing that we do in our go-to-market strategy is we decide on our tier one and tier two geographies and everything else is a no. Everything outside tier one, tier two, tier one takes higher investment than tier two, but everything else is a no. So when we start hearing about an opportunity to go into some new country that all of a sudden seems like it's hot, it's not part of our strategic choice that we made because that'll create a lot of disruption for the team, a lot of distractions.

Is this statement true or not for you, Channing? Are avatars changing faster because of AI or because your customers are using AI too? Go there a little bit for me. Yeah, definitely. So I'll give you two good examples of where I'm seeing this evolve quickly and drastically as well. The first one is more of that tech forward tech savvy avatar or even ideal customer kind of profile, irregardless of what you're selling, someone who's more tech savvy is going to take a different viewpoint on how they buy that product. Let's just say you're marketing to consumers and you're marketing to a younger consumer who's maybe right just out of college, that age group where they're usually a little bit more tech savvy, I'll say. They're consuming information.

They're looking for things in a very different way than that person who's 65 plus, barely ever even heard of ChatGPT, much less using it. You've got different... Different personality types based on these groupings of age based or otherwise and who they are. And the way you want to market them has got to change. And this is again, this year, 2026 is driven a lot of those differing approaches and differing styles of how you market. So that's one example. And that's just an evolution, I would say. But then the other one, the other avatar that I'd say really is drastically changing is how do you market to non-humans? How do you market to AI agents? I use Muse all the time, really gotten to like it a lot.

Almost is what that feels like. That agent, like my Muse agent, takes on a personality of me in a sense. It knows what my preferences are and so on. But how it goes about looking for things is different than how I might go about looking for something. You know, I love to sit and scroll before I go to bed through my Instagram and click on dumb Instagram ads and spend a couple bucks here and there. Like, that's what I do. Muse doesn't do that. You know, it goes very targeted after the things that I'm looking for and it searches across the web and so on. We need to make sure that there's ways for our products. If we're selling, let's say again, we're selling consumer-based products for agents to find our products more easily.

We have to make sure we've got engagement mechanisms for that. That could be as simple as if I have a product that I want to advertise, yes, I'm going to do kind of typical advertising, but I also want to have kind of integrations with maybe three, certain third-party tools that make it more accessible for the agent to find me. I want to make sure my website is set up so that it's agent-friendly to be able to found more easily. I want to make sure that maybe I even have command line interfaces available, depending how the agents search, but they're going to search through that command line interface structure, which again, a human wouldn't at all do. So it depends a little bit obviously on the product and the go-to-market, but you have to be really thoughtful of how can you allow AI and agents to find you, which is a little different than how humans, of course, find products.

And it customizes it based on that. This is a company after my own heart here because I firmly believe in that. And it relates to what we're talking about a little bit, Channing, I think, which is, again, building for them. But then it's sort of how that gets deployed for the user with the conversation. Where do you guys fall on that? What drove the voice integration on that? What I love about it, it's very interactive. You can just go in there and ask it questions. It'll respond. It's feeding off of our data set that we fed to it. So it's very knowledgeable on Brevo and the industry, and it can talk about a lot of things, pricing included. We don't shy away from anything there.

We say, if you want to ask it pricing, ask it pricing. You can ask whenever you want. We want it to be very candid also, because we don't want to push leads to our sales team or push people to purchase if it's a bad fit, because I actually don't like that. It's an and negative repercussions. We leverage AI from a standpoint of how do we engage with our customers? And these are typically gonna be humans. I try to differentiate sometimes because we are very much more human driven in how we engage, but we do have the ability and we do think a lot about how do we engage with non-human purchasing as well. But most of that happens I think more on the B2C side rather than B2B.

Anyway, I digress. What's on the roadmap for Channing, you personally, and for Brevo the rest of this year and really 2027? The things that are super top of mind for me are how do we create that truly agentic communicative interface in Brevo? Like right now, you still go and click around a bit. And I want to shift more and more towards a conversational interface, just like the way we engage with chat and Claude and so on. I think that's something we're really going to work on that a lot for next year. I do think, again, enhancing the... data connectivity, data integrations is so critical for that personalized experience. We all expect and want a personalized experience. It's from a consumer standpoint, what people I think are growing to get used to.

I'm sure you have to spend a lot of time at least thinking about it. I mean, you're the CEO. What keeps you up at night? What gets you excited? What keeps me up at night is I watch too much of Silo on Apple TV or think back to good old Terminator days. Super negative, pessimistic on where the world is going. That's what keeps me up at night. And there is a percentage chance in my head that shit gets bad at some point in the future due to AI. Right? Hey, you're real. I like it. Our audience will like that, Channing. You're being real. So fucking A, yes. Part of me wants to build a silo in my backyard. So that's what keeps me up at night kind of very broadly.

What gets me excited is like, holy shit, there's this new tool that's really just taken off in the past year or so. And we're just scratching on the surface of what we can do with it, what it can do for us, what it can do for humanity and everything else. I think as I think about software development, the idea of software apocalypse doesn't exist in my mind. Yeah, software is evolving for sure, but software isn't going away. We just need to think about AI as a mechanism to drive more use of software related products. AI is software in the same sense. We build code. So does AI build code. Those two things are intertwined and we can do a lot more to create efficiencies across our customer base through AI.

So I'm really excited about that. all those little things. This gets into imagine a world where I tell my AI driven marketing engine to go out and generate me a certain amount of revenue, I'm going to give it a certain amount of budget, go figure it out. Like that's where we're going in the world. And yes, humans will still need to have some oversight there, but we can do this in a much more efficient way and AI is going help drive that. So I'm excited about what we can do. It's just a matter of how long it takes to get there. It does take time. It's as much as we can build things faster these days, there's still decisioning and processes that we've got to go through to make things happen.

Yeah, I know. We'll see where it goes. Channing, hey, man, I can see why you've been successful. You've got an approachability to you, realness to you that's endearing. Thank you, Ryan. I appreciate that. Hey, man, where can everybody keep up with what you're up to, what the company's up to, all that stuff? I tend to post a lot on LinkedIn, easiest spot to follow me. Variety of topics, marketing, leadership topics, a mix of both. Actually, a lot of stuff that overlaps with what you got going on here, Ryan. So that's probably best spot. And then brevo, B-R-E-V-O.com is our website. So check us out. Go check out the AI agent that gives you a demo. You don't have to talk to a human. Yeah, you can.

We appreciate them. We appreciate Channing. We appreciate you for making us number one. We'll see you next time. Right about now. Here's the truth. Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea. Make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram, at Ryan Alford. And watch or listen to every episode at ryanisright.com. This is Right About Now. Now quit waiting. Go win.