Welcome to my first official newsletter of 2026! Thank you for your patience while I took some time off to focus on an unrelated personal project.
Let’s get into it.
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending an internal SAP Marketing Showcase & Kickoff event—known as Marketopia.
It was an intensive two-day deep dive featuring incredible speakers, ranging from Ada, our CMO for SAP as a whole, to Etosha, my own CMO for Finance and Spend, on day two.
On a personal note, this event was a career highlight for me. I had the honor of helping shape and refine the content for the product marketing breakout sessions. Shaping these sessions on the back end and seeing the overwhelmingly positive feedback from our community was incredibly rewarding.
Marketing as a Growth Intelligence Engine
While the whole event was inspiring, I want to kick off 2026 by recapping a specific global session on AI & marketing that really stuck with me. It was led by external speaker Liat Ben-Zur, CEO of LBZ Advisory.
She challenged us to stop thinking of AI merely as a tool for efficiency, and instead see how marketing can unleash the power of AI to become the enterprise’s Growth Intelligence Engine.
To get there, she laid out a specific sequence—the "Signal to Action" loop:
Sense: Capturing signal continuously via data
Decide: Translating those signals into choices quickly.
Ship: Moving into the market with the necessary governance.
Learn: Closing the loop with business outcomes.
The "Big Shifts" for 2026
Implementing that loop requires more than just new software; it requires a new mindset. Liat outlined the "Big Shifts" we need to make to survive and thrive in this new era:
Speed beats structure: We cannot let bureaucracy slow down the "Sense to Ship" timeline.
Insights beat title: Good ideas can come from anywhere; hierarchy is less important.
Judgment (discernment) beats certainty: In a fast-moving world, waiting for 100% certainty means you are too late. We need to trust our judgment.
From efficiency to effectiveness: We need to move away from simply optimizing repeatable loops and move toward true systems thinking.
3 Common Mistakes to Avoid
However, the path to becoming an intelligence engine isn't automatic. Liat cautioned us against three specific traps businesses fall into:
Starting with the tech, not the business problem: Seeing AI as a way to hype up shareholders (“We’re AI first, blah, blah, blah”) rather than a solution to a specific business problem.
Generating insights without wiring them into action: Creating great data that never actually changes what the business does.
Measuring activity instead of impact: Counting how many people use a tool, rather than measuring what business outcome was achieved because of the tool.
The Bottom Line: What is AI actually coming for?
I want to leave you with this final thought on where we fit in. There is a lot of totally valid fear that AI is coming for our jobs, but fortunately, the reality is more nuanced.
According to Liat, AI is coming for:
Tasks, not judgment.
Repetition, not taste.
Speed, not trust.
The future belongs to those who can use AI to handle the tasks, repetition, and speed, so they can focus their human energy on judgment, taste, and building trust.
This is what I will be continuing to explore in 2026, via this newsletter.
As always, stay curious!
Best,
Skyler Neal
