Before You Build Anything: Use AI to Find the Truth First

AI is changing the marketing talent search and what’s possible in day-to-day workflows. We asked several EM Marketing consultants to walk us through a real project or client engagement where AI changed what they could deliver.

There was too much good material for a single post, so we’re running it as a series grouped by marketing discipline. This first installment covers Strategy, Positioning & Research – what happens before anything gets built, written, or launched. The four consultants below all used AI to get to the real answer faster and with less bias than gut instinct alone.

Solid Competitive Intelligence in Just Two Days

Arjita Shrimali was brought in by a publicly traded healthcare SaaS company that was losing deals to newer, cheaper competitors. Everyone assumed it came down to price, so she ran a split-tool competitive intelligence workflow.

One AI tool aggregated thousands of customer reviews across more than 20 competitors, and a second analyzed and scored that data against her own framework for what counts as a credible signal.

What used to take weeks of interviews and surveys came together in under two days. The client was surprised to find that their messaging focused on product features that customers didn’t understand or care about. Shifting the story to the business benefits that actually drove purchase decisions reoriented the client’s entire positioning strategy.

When Data Proved the Hypothesis Was Wrong

Two years ago, after three back-to-back layoffs in the tech recession, Jolie Shapiro started interviewing revenue leaders in her spare time about what high-pressure roles actually do to a person. Her first question cracked them open. What makes you, you?

She thought she knew the pattern – tying mental health to revenue. She had already built a product and a community on it.

Then she fed 30 hours of transcripts into Claude and asked it to weigh the frequency of every theme. Ninety-six percent of what these leaders talked about was how you showed up before a really tough moment.

She rebuilt the positioning around what was actually there and relaunched. Not long after, she ranked in the top nine percent of applicants for TechStars Boulder, one of the most competitive startup accelerator programs in the country.

Asking the Harder Question about What’s Actually Working

At Sephora, Tommy Lamb helped build a machine learning (ML) driven system that changed the fundamental question behind every promotion the company ran.

Most teams ask what revenue was generated after a promotion. This question gets answered by attribution but can be skewed by customers who were going to buy anyway. Tommy’s team built the infrastructure to ask a harder, more honest question: how would revenue be affected without the promotion?

The result was that promotions proved to drive 85% incremental revenue, well above the 50-55% industry standard. The program finished 300% above its internal goal for the year. It’s a reminder that the question you ask matters as much as the answer you get back.

Mapping What’s Resonating before Building Content

Ravali Dodia works in integrated campaigns and demand generation, and her use case tackles a problem every marketing team knows well – producing content without a clear view of what’s actually landing. Using Claude, she builds visual maps of the customer journey, from awareness through discovery, education, and acquisition, laid against the content that already exists for each stage.

At a glance, it’s possible to see where the real gaps are and which existing assets are pulling their weight, so her team knows exactly where to invest before committing a budget.

Want this kind of thinking on your team?

EM Marketing’s experts know how to put AI to work on everyday marketing problems. Just as importantly, they know where their own judgment still has to lead. If your team needs that kind of thinking, on a project or full engagement basis, let’s talk about which of our consultants is the right fit for what you’re building next.

This is Part 1 of a four-part series. Next up: Demand Generation & Paid Media, where we look at how EM consultants built AI growth engines that saved significant time and improved ROI.