AI councils over chaos, Claude Skills for ops, founders who post win bigger, AI beats humans, three tiers of AI selling.

ZestScout Newsletter: No. 08

Oct 23, 2025

Dear Readers, in today’s edition:

Index

Your “Go Experiment With AI” Memo Is a Waste of Time
AI Search Collapsed the B2B Funnel - Here’s the New Playbook
Claude Skills: Bridging Chatbots to AI Agents
Your Founder’s LinkedIn is a Sales Engine (You’re Just Not Using It)
GPT-4 Beats Professionals in Social Media Engagement
Your B2B Sales Team Is Using AI Wrong

Your “Go Experiment With AI” Memo Is a Waste of Time

Last time, we talked about AI adoption. I don’t want to leave any stone unturned, so here’s the playbook you actually need.

Telling your team to “go experiment” is a recipe for chaos. Snowflake’s marketing team - where 90% are daily AI users - proves there’s a better way. It’s not about magic; it’s about a brutally effective structure.

First, kill the free-for-all.

Your team doesn’t need permission to play. They need a mandate and a system. Unstructured experimentation creates duplicate efforts and zero shared knowledge. It’s a waste of time and money.

It’s Not Nearly Enough to Tell Everyone to “Go Experiment With AI”
The companies winning with AI share one critical trait: a culture of curiosity combined with executive mandate. It’s not enough to tell everyone to “go experiment with AI” - that creates chaos and duplication.
Snowflake’s approach: identify the naturally curious folks who lean in, formalize them into an AI council (30 people at ~20% time allocation across all marketing functions), and have them test, learn, and share quarterly with the broader organization. But if the CEO doesn’t make AI a top strategic priority, employees won’t treat it as one either. You need both top-down leadership and bottom-up innovation.

Steal Snowflake’s AI Council model.

You don’t need 30 people. You need a process.

Identify the Curious. Find the 1-2 people on your team who are already playing with AI. They’re your vanguard.
Formalize Their Role. Give them an official, 10-20% time allocation to test tools and workflows.
Mandate Them to Share. Their job isn’t just to test, but to document and teach the rest of the team what works. A quarterly demo is mandatory.
Get Executive Buy-in. If leadership doesn’t care, nobody else will. This must be a stated priority.

Focus on task automation, not sci-fi.

The fastest wins aren’t from building custom agents. They’re from eliminating grunt work. Snowflake’s team saw 90% time savings on real-world marketing tasks.

Start here:

Content First Drafts: Video scripts, interview prep, social media copy.
Localization: AI delivers massive efficiency for translating content.
Meeting Prep: Summarizing notes and creating action items.

Here’s the hard part. Every tool must answer one question: Is it making us more money or saving us more money? If the answer isn’t obvious, kill it. “Cool” doesn’t pay the bills.

AI Search Collapsed the B2B Funnel. Here’s the New Playbook.

In our last newsletter, we touched on how AI is rewiring B2B buying habits. A new piece in MarTech crystallizes that shift and provides a clear strategy for what to do now.

The traditional buyer journey is officially obsolete. AI search delivers synthesized answers, not a list of links. The goal is no longer driving traffic - it’s becoming the citable authority that AI platforms quote directly.

The old funnel is gone.

AI collapses awareness, consideration, and decision into a single, conversational query. Instead of clicking through ten blue links, a buyer gets a complete summary of solutions, reviews, and comparisons without ever leaving the results page.

The hard truth? This shift will be brutal for brands that don’t adapt.

Gartner predicts that by 2028, 60% of B2B seller work will take place through conversational interfaces powered by generative AI.

Your new job is to feed the machine. Here’s how:

Optimize for conversation, not keywords. Create content that directly answers the nuanced, long-tail questions your customers ask. Think detailed FAQs and how-to guides.
Weaponize E-E-A-T. Your content must scream Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. AI prioritizes verifiable proof, not just well-written fluff.
Structure for machines. Use schema markup and structured data. If an AI can’t easily parse your product features, comparisons, and case studies, your brand is invisible.

The game has changed. Stop chasing clicks and start building an information moat AI has to cite.

Claude Skills: Bridging Chatbots to AI Agents.

Most of us are still wrestling with ChatGPT. We’re fighting for consistency, hoping for a decent output. We aren’t building real AI agents yet.

But what if there’s a bridge between clumsy chats and full automation?

Anthropic’s Claude Skills might be it. This isn’t just another feature. It’s a fundamental shift in how you can automate and scale marketing work without writing a single line of code.

This is your marketing process, codified.

Claude Skills are custom workflows you teach the AI in plain English. They turn your repeated processes into reusable, shareable playbooks that Claude executes on command.

Think bigger than just content generation.

Turn webinar transcripts into a full content package: blog draft, social snippets, and email recap.
Summarize customer research into core messaging pillars.
Generate sales enablement assets that actually match your company’s tone of voice.

Before, this required complex prompting or developer help. Now, any marketer can build it. Rakuten reported that tasks which once took a full day now take about an hour using Claude Skills.

The real problem this solves is consistency at scale.

Anyone can get one great post out of an AI. The challenge is repeating that success across every channel and team member without losing your brand’s intent. Skills fix that gap.

It means your AI assistant can now act like an extension of your marketing operations system instead of a random content generator.

This lets you store and enforce your brand voice, systematize SEO frameworks, and automatically format assets for any platform. You’re no longer just creating, you’re operating.

Build your first Skill in minutes.

The process is brutally simple.

Enable Skill Creator in your Claude settings.
Describe your workflow in plain English.
Answer Claude’s setup questions about inputs, tone, and deliverables.
Activate and test your new repeatable process.

From there, you simply state the goal. Ask it to “Build a campaign landing page,” and Claude can automatically stack multiple skills - brand guidelines, copy frameworks, and SEO optimization - to deliver the final outcome.

Here’s the hard part.

Claude Skills are still new.

Access: You need a Pro, Team, or Enterprise plan.
Quality: Community-built skills vary in accuracy.
Security: The sandboxing is still improving.

These aren’t dealbreakers. They are the early tradeoffs for a system that turns your AI from a creative assistant into a marketing operations engine.

Your Founder’s LinkedIn is a Sales Engine (You’re Just Not Using It)

Most founders treat LinkedIn like a press release feed. It’s a monumental waste. The data is clear: startups whose founders post consistently see 33% more leads and up to 3.7x higher deal sizes.

Your founder’s voice isn’t a vanity project - it’s a pipeline driver. Stop broadcasting and start building relationships.

Lead with perspective, not product. Nobody cares about your features. The less you talk about your product, the more people want to buy it. People buy from people they trust, and trust is built with stories.

“First, [people] listen to you, they feel like they’re deeply connected, they love the ideas you put out, they trust you, and then they have to check out what you do.”

Use three story types:

Customer Priority: Show you understand the market, don’t just sell to it.
Transformational Shift: Help people navigate industry change.
Personal Journey: Build credibility through vulnerability. Share mistakes.

Turn daily interactions into content gold. Your calendar is a content buffet. Every customer call is a potential post.

After each call, ask yourself:

What surprised me? (That’s your contrarian take.)
What bothered me? (That’s your polarizing hook.)
What lesson would save others pain? (That’s your high-resonance post.)

Pack a punch with every post. Your hook is everything. If it doesn’t stop the scroll, you’ve already lost.

And forget brevity. LinkedIn data shows posts between 400-800 words generate nearly 3x more engagement. Go deep. Solve a real problem. Your audience will thank you for it.

GPT-4 Beats Professionals in Social Media Engagement

Think your social media team is top-tier? A new three-part study shows GPT-4 consistently generates more engaging content than both original corporate posts and those rewritten by incentivized professionals. The secret is a new linguistic framework.

Here’s the playbook AI is using.

Introducing the FIIT Model: Researchers analyzed GPT-4’s optimized posts from Fortune 500 companies to derive the FIIT (Fluency-Interactivity-Information-Tone) model. This is the set of linguistic principles behind high-engagement content.
AI Superiority is Consistent: In controlled tests, AI-generated posts outperformed not just the original corporate tweets but also versions rewritten by paid, trained human professionals.
It’s Not Just Bad Human Content: The study confirms this isn’t simply because corporate accounts are poorly managed. Even when professionals were tasked with improving posts, GPT-4’s output still proved more effective at driving engagement.

Your B2B Sales Team Is Using AI Wrong

Everyone is talking about AI in sales. Most are using it for tactical wins - drafting emails, summarizing calls. That’s a failure of imagination.

The real shift isn’t about giving your reps a new tool. It’s about building them a new team of autonomous AI agents that fundamentally re-engineers how you sell.

The gap between vision and reality is a chasm.

A recent BCG survey found that while seven in ten sellers use general-purpose AI, the impact is weak. Why? Because the approach is broken.

More than four out of five sellers cite inaccuracy and poor data integration as major roadblocks. They’re spending time double-checking AI output, which kills the efficiency gains. This is what happens when you treat a strategic weapon like a tactical gadget.

Stop thinking in tools. Start thinking in tiers.

The future of B2B sales operates on three levels of AI integration. Each level hands off more complexity, freeing up humans for high-value work.

Augmented Selling: AI provides the script. It recommends talking points, collateral, and the next-best action.
Assisted Selling: AI becomes a real-time partner. It listens to calls, offers prompts, and drafts follow-ups while the seller focuses on the customer.
Autonomous Selling: AI runs the show. It prioritizes leads, nurtures accounts, and handles standard tasks across every channel, from email to video.

For massive strategic accounts, humans stay in control with AI assistance. But for smaller, transactional sales, autonomous agents can manage outreach at a scale no human team could profitably achieve.

The breakdown of successes and challenges in our survey validated BCG’s 10/20/70 rule: 10% of a company’s efforts should be focused on algorithms, 20% on technology and data, and the remaining 70% on people and processes, which produce most of the value of an AI transformation.

Here is your five-step execution plan.

This isn’t a pilot program. It’s a full-scale transformation.

Define a bold North Star. Move beyond vague efficiency goals. Target concrete KPIs like conversion rates and territory coverage.
Chart a purposeful course. Don’t just buy more tools. Sequence the deployment of high-impact use cases to build momentum and trust.
Build an integrated tech stack. Fragmented data is the enemy. Enforce data quality and make deliberate choices on platforms versus custom builds.
Strengthen AI governance. Establish clear guardrails for what agents can and cannot do. Unify data standards and build feedback loops.
Drive adoption relentlessly. Get top-down buy-in. Redesign roles, align incentives, and upskill your talent. The technology is only 10% of the battle.

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