VP Of Marketing Says AI Has Killed Every Moat Except Brand

I've spent the last decade in B2B marketing. I started as a BDR, went into digital marketing, moved up into broader demand gen, spent some time at Refine Labs, and have been leading marketing at Loxo for the past few years.

We're a lean team. I have people across demand gen, content, product marketing, and ops, and everyone does the work — no one manages from a distance, and I think that makes us better.

We run the full GTM ecosystem, including paid social, organic social, organic search, AEO, events, partnerships, and BDR alignment. We host a podcast, we're active on LinkedIn, etc. We've invested heavily in SEO over the past year and a half, and we're starting to see it pay off in ways that traditional attribution would completely miss.

The recruiting software space is competitive, and our ICP is specific: We serve recruiting agencies and staffing firms, a different buyer than most HR tech companies chase. That specificity works in our favor when our marketing is dialed in, because we can deliberately target who we talk to and what matters to them.

Does AI Move The Business Forward?

My path to AI wasn't a specific "aha" moment. I came at it skeptically, in the same way I come at most things. My default question is always, "does this move the business forward or does it just create the appearance of progress?" AI had to pass that test like everything else.

Where I landed was that AI changes the inputs available to us, but the fundamentals of what drives business growth haven't changed. You still need to demonstrate an understanding of how buyers behave, be skilled at building trust in your market, and able to connect your marketing activity to real business outcomes.

AI isn't solving these problems, but it makes them much more obvious, enabling us to access more data and move faster than ever before.

How AI Can Improve Content Quality And Volume

The biggest concrete change we've made with AI, like most companies, is how we approach content research and ideation.

We used to rely heavily on what our team observed, including conversations with sales, what we read, patterns we noticed in the market, customer interviews, etc. That process was slow and, honestly, dependent on whoever had the most bandwidth to pay attention.

We've started using AI to significantly compress the research phase, synthesizing what is discussed in our market, identifying gaps in how competitors appear, stress-testing whether a content angle is differentiated or just adds to the noise, and aggregating prospect/customer calls en masse to pick out themes.

We have it structure the content, providing an 80% complete draft. At that point, a human jumps in and makes it...human. We especially lean into that wherever a POV is required.

As a result, work that used to take days or weeks now takes hours. And we can be more deliberate about what we produce. We're not doing more, if anything, we're more selective. But we think more sharply about each piece, and we no longer rush the front end of the process to meet a publishing cadence.

Maintaining quality has become an even more important bar for us. When you create AI slop, it results in lower trust. And content that is clearly "AI-generated" is skipped over more quickly.

Overall, I'd say our output quality and volume have both gone up.

Why Marketing Leaders Shouldn't Outsource Everything To AI

Sam Shares

Anything relationship-driven remains human. This includes how we appear at events, communicate with customers, and build trust with our ICP over time. We do not hand this off.

We rely on AI for all research-oriented tasks. It synthesizes market trends and competitive positioning, and helps us understand how buyers discuss their problems. It quickly provides an informed starting point.

It's particularly good at sifting through complex, multi-variable datasets. We now complete analyses that used to take weeks in minutes.

I also built a tool to uncover how to strengthen our overall GTM funnel relative to industry benchmarks, allowing me to quickly spot areas for focus and improvement.

Anything relationship-driven remains human. This includes how we appear at events, communicate with customers, and build trust with our ICP over time. We do not hand this off.

I think of AI as a good sparring partner for getting something from zero to 80%, but judgment must still come from a human, and I haven't seen anything that makes me want to outsource that.

Why AI Has Made Brand The Most Important Moat

Anyone can copy a product in a month. But it’s really hard to copy the knowledge and insights gained from someone who has spent years in the space, gaining experience only obtainable through first-principles thinking and execution.

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Sam KuehnleOpens new window

VP of Marketing at Loxo

Invest your marketing budget in your brand. The barrier to entry for building software is gone now, thanks to Claude Code, Lovable, Codex, and the rest. It’s never been easier to build and ship a working product.

Consequently, maintaining a true 10x product is harder than ever before. By the time you build a genuinely 10x better product, someone else has already copied it and built a 7x alternative that costs half as much. Then, someone else copies that and builds a 5x version that’s easier to use. Then another. And another.

I see this playing out everywhere. The product moat is collapsing in real time. This collapse leads to a race to the bottom on pricing. When product and feature differentiation become marginal, price is almost always the next lever, creating brand risks that CMOs aren't seeing in their focus on optimization.

Winning Traits From Companies With Longevity

But I've noticed one thing about companies winning in this environment. They’re shifting the focus of their 10x factor from their product to the underlying knowledge infrastructure it’s built on:

• Playbooks
• Proprietary research
• Frameworks for executing and getting results
• The community of users and their UGC content

In short, the type of expertise that code cannot replicate or a competitor cannot copy in a weekend.

When someone uses their platform, the product is good, but customers pay and stay for the underlying knowledge and expertise that come with it. The guidance from employees and the user community. And more impactfully, the “Oh yeah, we’ve seen that scenario play out before—here’s why that’s happening and here’s what does/doesn’t work to get through it.”

That is the stuff that makes moving platforms worth it now.

Anyone can copy a product in a month. But it’s really hard to copy the knowledge and insights gained from someone who has spent years in the space, gaining experience only obtainable through first-principles thinking and execution.

Let the market copy your dashboards and features. Let them put on your clothes and dance around, trying to tell the market that they’re the same as you, just a little more affordable. Because when push comes to shove and they start to get hard questions like “Why am I not getting the results your platform claimed I’d get?”, they’ll be standing there at a loss for words. They never learned the fundamentals or gained the underlying knowledge of what the platform solves for and how to execute the proper strategy from it.

Sam Shares

Review AI’s outputs. Apply your own thinking and judgment. The more, and more obviously, AI is used, the worse your engagement results will likely be.

Why Marketing Leaders Need A First-principles Approach With AI

Here's my advice.

• Don't feel like you have to keep up with every new "Claude skill" or "AI playbook" people share on LinkedIn and other places. But do take a first-principles approach and see where you could intuitively use AI to help your company.
• Review AI's outputs. Apply your own thinking and judgment. The more, and more obviously, AI is used, the worse your engagement results will likely be
• It’s far easier to get started than you think. You don’t need to be a coding expert to get a pilot off the ground. Build and ship something to validate, then come back around later, and you can clean it up.

Follow Along

You can follow Sam Kuehnle's work on LinkedIn. Read his personal meditations on his personal website. And check out his GTM funnel auditor, Affect.

More expert interviews to come on The CMO Club!