Liza Adams

Hello go-to-market leaders, strategists, and innovators! 👋 Thank you for dropping by to learn practical AI applications and gain strategic insights to help you grow your business and elevate your team’s strategic value.

Quick Take

A marketing team I worked with recently grew from 20 to 63 AI teammates in just 90 days. They’re instantly available and endlessly patient. And while they don’t have a human’s fire in the belly or an ethical compass, they help us lead better especially on the days we can’t be our best selves.

Some might view building AI teams as simply ‘doing more with less’ in an era of constrained resources. But this misses the point. This approach isn’t just about tactical efficiency. It’s about transforming marketing into a true growth engine by scaling strategic thinking across the organization.

This edition is about what comes after your digital twin. It’s about building a real AI team around you, specialized teammates that scale your judgment, pressure-test your thinking, and help others collaborate with you even when you’re not in the room.

You’ll learn:

• Why a single twin can only take you so far

• How real marketing leaders are structuring their AI “inner circles”

• Examples of teammates by function, from product marketing to leadership

• Starter Kits and demo videos so you can build your next smartest collaborator today

For those who prefer to consume information through audio, I’ve used Google’s NotebookLM to transform this newsletter into a short podcast episode, featuring a natural conversation between two AI hosts. You can listen to the 10-min AI podcast here while driving, walking the dog, or doing chores. Once you hit play, give it just a few seconds then it will start.

Disclaimer: This podcast was generated by AI based on this written newsletter and reviewed by me to ensure ethical and responsible AI use. It’s designed to provide an efficient, more inclusive way to consume information.

From One Team to a Full Team

From One Twin to a Full Team

Digital twins helped us validate what AI could do for us. But the real impact happens when we build with AI to support teammates, accelerate workstreams, and help others collaborate with us in ways that weren’t possible before.

(If you missed it, I introduced the concept of the digital twin in Digital Twins: Your First AI Teammates – How to Build AI Simulators That Transform Work. You’ll also find a demo video of how to build and use one.)

Along the way, you may expand beyond a single twin. You can create executive simulators to prep for board meetings, customer simulators to pressure-test messaging, and peer simulators to model team collaboration. (Digital twins can take many forms, not just copies of ourselves.)

But even with a few simulators, one twin, or even a small set, can only do so much.

The future belongs to those who build the right AI teammates around them.

Mary Kay Evans, CMO of Alida, has seen firsthand how marketing teams move from experimenting with AI to building real competitive advantages.

“Our biggest gains with AI came when we stopped experimenting with isolated tools and started building real AI teammates. Working with Liza Adams helped spark this shift. We are seeing real progress in how we capture insights, plan launches, and adapt messaging faster than ever.”

The Marketing AI Ecosystem: Humans Still Lead

Adding AI teammates doesn’t mean losing control. It means gaining strategic leverage.

While many leaders face pressure to “do more with less,” the true value of AI teammates goes far beyond cost efficiency. These partnerships elevate marketing from a service function to a strategic driver of business growth.

When your expertise is amplified through specialized AI teammates, you maintain consistent brand voice across all touchpoints while freeing yourself to focus on the high-level strategic decisions that truly move the business forward.

Here’s what the future might look like using a marketing leader with AI teammates, as an example. In fact, some marketers are already building and operating in this manner.

At the center: you. Around you:

• Strategy copilots that see opportunities before they’re obvious.

• Content builders that translate insights into action faster than human-only teams.

• Workflow partners that handle the grind, so you stay creative and strategic.

The best future teams won’t be human or AI. They’ll be human–AI partnerships built intentionally from the start.

Real Example: Megan’s Expanding Team

Meet Megan Ratcliff, Director of Growth Marketing and Integrated Campaigns at Dice.

She started like many do: with a strong digital twin trained on her knowledge. But as her work scaled, she added specialized AI teammates to help as shown in the diagram below.

Megan described the responsibilities of each of her AI teammates in this post. She worked faster and led better as a result of building AI teammates.

More strategic launches, tailored messaging, and more time to coach her human team.

Megan is part of the 45-member human-AI powerhouse team with 25 humans and 20 AI teammates that Carol-Lyn Jardine (SVP of Marketing) leads. I shared the case study and playbook for this team in a previous newsletter: “A Leader’s Human-AI Org Transformation Playbook.”

But that was in January 2025. By April, the team had 27 human and 63 AI teammates. They anticipate 100+ AI teammates this summer.

Remember last year when Moderna made headlines about their employees having “created over 750 unique, tailored versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, also known as GPTs, that are designed to facilitate specific tasks or processes across the business.”

The company said that AI could accelerate the delivery of much-needed new products and allow Moderna to move quickly as it aims to roll out 15 new products in the next five years.

What these AI teammates offer isn’t just speed. It’s consistency, availability, and fresh thinking. They amplify our best work and support us when we can’t bring our A-game.

It approach of building human-AI teams is no longer the future. It is today, deployed by more and more companies, from Moderna to Dice!

Starter Kits to Inspire Your Own AI Team

You don’t need to guess what your next teammate could look like.

I’ve created Starter Kits for 11 key marketing functions, each with 3 examples of potential AI teammates.

Here’s a quick preview:

Each starter kit includes:

• The AI teammate’s job description

• What it needs to be trained

• Sample conversations (input → output)

Here’s a screenshot of the interactive starter kit for marketing leadership just so you see what a kit looks like.

Click on the following links to see the individual interactive starter kits by marketing role.

• Product Marketing: Battlecard Builder, Messaging Architect, Win/Loss Analyzer

• Content Marketing: Content Topic Generator, Content Multiplier, SEO Strategist

• Brand & Comms: Brand Voice Guardian, Crisis Response Advisor, Media Relations Strategist

• Digital and Web: Conversion Path Optimizer, Analytics Interpreter, SEO Tactician

• Demand Generation: Campaign Strategy Strategist, Lead Qualification Engine, A/B Test Designer

• Customer Marketing: Customer Lifecycle Strategist, Customer Insights Generator, Customer Advocacy Cultivator

• Marketing Ops: Campaign Orchestration Strategist, Marketing Technology Architect, Analytics Strategist

• Ecosystem Marketing: Partner Marketing Strategist, Marketplace Growth Strategist, Ecosystem Intelligence Analyst

• Field Marketing: Event Strategy Architect, Regional Market Strategist, Sales Alignment Orchestrator

• Event Marketing: Event Strategy Architect, Content Experience Designer, Attendee Journey Orchestrator

• Marketing Leadership: Document Review Advisor, Strategic Decision Architect, Team Comms Advisor, Thought Leadership Assistant

⭐️ Melinda Monaco ⭐️, Senior Director of Revenue Marketing and Operations at Folloze, embraced digital twins to rethink how strategic frameworks and customer engagement scale across teams.

“Creating my digital twin, inspired by Liza Adams’ masterclass, showed me how AI can scale strategic thinking, frameworks, and customer value. Now I am building my next set of AI teammates to accelerate campaign planning, optimize account engagement, and deliver measurable revenue impact faster than we could before.”

Check out her post on how she uses her ABX Strategist!

Want to See It in Action? (Demo Available)

Nothing beats seeing how this works in real life.

Here are some ways you can build AI teammates:

• ChatGPT Custom GPTs

• Gemini Gems

• Claude Projects

• Custom CopilotGPTs/Copilot Studio

• Glean Apps

• Specialized AI Apps

I built a special version of ChatGPT (called a custom GPT or custom Generative Pre-trained Transformer) that’s trained to find new angles on common topics. Think of it as your personal content brainstorming partner that knows your industry and audience. I named it Persona- & Buyer Stage-Specific Content Creator.

Here’s how it works.

Train it with your knowledge about:

• Customer personas and journeys

• Positioning and messaging

• Industry trends and beliefs

• Brand guidelines

Then ask it to find unique stories that:

• Challenge common beliefs not backed by data

• Reveal overlooked but important areas

• Connect unexpected dots across industries

• Offer fresh perspectives on trending topics

• Offer counter-narratives that receive less coverage

Collaborating with AI in this way not only gives us new ideas, it also jumpstarts our thinking quickly.

The short video below shows the custom GPT in action and a behind-the-scenes peek at its instructions.

Closing Thought

You don’t need a massive AI team tomorrow. You need one smart teammate today.

If you have a team of 20 and each one starts building one AI teammate today, you’ll have a team of 40 tomorrow!

Gina Hortatsos, SVP of Marketing at HackerOne, believes AI is reshaping what great work looks like, pushing teams to innovate faster and build stronger customer connections.

“AI is helping marketing teams work smarter, build stronger customer connections, and accelerate innovation. The teams that thrive will be the ones who use AI to reimagine what great work looks like, not just make old processes faster.”

In a few years, the most effective leaders won’t be the ones who just use AI tools. They’ll be the ones surrounded by AI teammates. These AIs are trained to extend their thinking, support their team, and help them lead well, even during a tough day.

Don’t wait for that future to arrive. Build it, one teammate at a time.

The Practical AI in Go-to-Market newsletter is designed to share practical learnings and insights in using AI responsibly. Subscribe today and let’s learn together on this AI journey!

For those who prefer more interactive learning, explore our applied AI workshops, designed to inspire teams with real-life use cases tailored to specific go-to-market functions.

Also check out this team transformation case study and step-by playbook of how we helped transform a lean GTM team into a human-AI powerhouse with human and AI teammates.

Or, if audio-visual content is your style, here are virtual and in-person speaking events where I’ve covered a variety of AI topics. I’ve also keynoted at many organization and corporate-wide events. Whether through the newsletter, multimedia content, or in-person events, I hope to connect with you soon.