Finite By Clarity: B2B Marketing Podcast for Tech, Software & SaaS

A billboard in New York reads “Business software that doesn’t suck.” It’s bold and memorable, and according to Adam Frank, it’s exactly the kind of message that makes a sceptical buyer more sceptical, not less.

For years, B2B marketers have been told to lead with why and sell benefits, not features. Adam has found the opposite with some of technology’s most sceptical buyers.

In this episode of the Finite Podcast, Jodi Norris sits down with Adam to unpack how to win over buyers who’ve heard every claim before. They discuss when features are the smarter conversation with senior buyers, why “saves you time and money” no longer lands, and how Adam runs almost all of Rootly’s demand gen through AI agents, starting each morning by reviewing their proposed changes in GitHub.

Adam Frank is VP of Marketing at Rootly, the AI-native on-call and incident management platform trusted by Nvidia, Replit, Canva, and DoorDash. With more than 20 years in B2B SaaS across product, marketing, and growth, he has been a developer, built products for developers, and marketed to them, giving him an unusually complete view of the sceptical buyer.

If your messaging is built on claims anyone could make, this conversation is a must-listen.

Inside you’ll find…

• Why talking about features works with senior, experienced buyers, and when it backfires
• How Rootly runs paid media and retargeting through a team of AI agents, with a human approving every change
• Why your website should tell LLMs when not to mention you, and how poor-fit users spread scepticism to the buyers you actually want

For years, a marketing team's value was measured by their headcount and their budget. That equation is breaking down. As AI moves from writing assistant to agentic orchestrator, the companies pulling ahead are driving more revenue with fewer people.

In this episode of the Finite by Clarity podcast, Jodi Norris sits down with Colin Piper to unpack what it takes to build a marketing team in the AI era. As BuildOps' first CMO, Colin inherited a team of fewer than ten and chose to grow it deliberately, to around 20 people in a 500-person company.

But Colin hasn't always worked with lean teams. Through ten years at Autodesk Colin rose from early-stage product marketer during the company's move to the cloud to leading a 100-plus person marketing organisation across its construction technology vertical.

This perspective makes for an excellent view of trade-offs and advantages of lean teams in an era of AI.

Inside you'll find…

• Efficiency over headcount: why revenue per head is becoming the new badge of honour for marketing leaders
• The orchestrator hire: why Colin looks for boundary-spanners over specialists, and the full-stack marketer that may come next
• Where lean stops: field marketing, ABM, and the human work AI can't automate

Meagen Eisenberg has deployed over 300 active AI agents to drive 31% year-on-year growth in pipeline per marketing dollar spent. Wow.

In this episode of the Finite Podcast, Jodi Norris sits down with Meagen, CMO at Samsara, to unpack what happens when a marketing organisation puts autonomy, not automation, at the centre of its workflow.

Beyond the headline number, Samsara is running 113 active agents in production workflows, with a further 37 in development, and 200 more handling personal productivity, including a website assistant whose quarterly pipeline has quadrupled.

Meagen explains why agentic marketing is a genuine philosophical shift rather than a new channel, why hiring criteria have changed accordingly, and how human judgement and review cycles remain essential even as agents take on more of the workflow.

Meagen Eisenberg is a four-time CMO and board advisor who has led marketing through IPOs and acquisitions at MongoDB, Navan (formerly TripActions), Lacework and now Samsara, and advises companies including Together AI and Gretel.ai. Across 25 exits since 2011, she has built a reputation for steering marketing organisations through structural, technology-driven change.

Inside you'll find…

• Why agentic marketing demands a different hiring and management philosophy to any previous shift in the discipline
• The metrics Samsara uses to prove agentic marketing's return, and the results behind them
• How human taste and judgement remain the essential checkpoint in an increasingly autonomous workflow

"How to not get electrocuted" is the advice Nikola Tesla once gave newspapers , back when electricity first reached London and New York and headlines warned it would kill you in the street. A century on, AI is no different.

In this episode of Finite by Clarity, Jodi Norris sits down with Paul Roehrig, chief strategy and marketing officer at Ascendion.

Together they challenge the fear-led narrative dominating so much AI messaging, both the version aimed at customers and the quieter version playing out inside marketing teams themselves.

Paul offers a sharper way to think about the anxiety. He also pushes back on the idea that AI is somehow limitless. Every disruptive technology, from electricity to the railways, eventually reaches an endpoint society decides on. AI will too.

Paul Roehrig is the founder and strategic leader who guided Ascendion's breakthrough as a powerhouse in AI-powered software engineering.

An award-winning, best-selling author of Monster, What To Do When Machines Do Everything and Code Halos, he previously led strategy and growth for Cognizant Digital Business & Technology, founded the Center for the Future of Work, and was a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Inside you'll find…

• Why the fear around AI echoes the exact headlines that greeted electricity a century ago
• Paul's argument that AI is a mirror of us, and why blaming it misses the point
• Why every disruptive technology finds a natural ceiling, and what that means for the tension between economic value and public safety

Elizabeth Maxson has started noticing the tells. Beyond em dashes and "quotation marks," the certain phrases repeated a little too often. Leaders she's long admired, publishing content that no longer sounds like them.

On this episode of Finite by Clarity, she makes the case that this matters more than most CMOs think, not because AI-assisted content is wrong, but because publishing without judgement, experience or voice quietly erodes trust.

Elizabeth is Chief Marketing Officer of Contentful, a digital experience platform trusted by more than 4,800 customers. Before Contentful, she was CMO at Tableau, a Salesforce company, and led Strategic Technology Partnerships marketing at Salesforce, launching relationships with AWS, Google Cloud, Alibaba and Apple.

In this episode, Jodi Norris sits down with Elizabeth to unpack how the buyer journey has changed shape, and why the instinct to produce more content is usually the wrong one.

Elizabeth explains how cutting webinar output and being more selective on topics increased registrations and conversions, and how keeping personalisation deliberately simple, segmenting by audience type rather than complex micro-targeting, delivered a 195% increase in click-through rate.

Inside you'll find…

• Why the small, repeated tells of AI-generated content are quietly costing leaders their audience's trust
• Why "less is more" content strategies are outperforming high-frequency production
• How simple, broad-strokes personalisation is consistently outperforming complex micro-targeting

What if the biggest risk in marketing isn't failing, it's being too afraid to?

In this episode of the FINITE Podcast, Jodi Norris sits down with Amanda Cole, CMO at Bloomreach, to unpack why building a culture that tolerates, and even expects, failure has never mattered more. As AI reshapes how marketing teams operate, Amanda argues the old playbook no longer applies. Instead, the marketers who thrive will be the ones comfortable saying "that didn't work" and moving on fast.

The conversation explores what happens when decision-making shifts from humans to AI agents, why scale changes the stakes of every mistake, and why Amanda believes the real risk isn't moving too fast, but forgetting to bring your whole organisation along with you.

Amanda Cole has spent over 20 years building B2B marketing functions from the ground up, starting in direct mail and rising to CMO at Bloomreach, where she leads global marketing, technology partnerships and pipeline generation. Known for her candour and appetite for risk, she's built a reputation for pairing bold experimentation with hard-won lessons on leadership and change.

Inside you'll find…

• Why Amanda believes 80% of marketing doesn't work as intended, and why that's exactly the point
• How AI agents change the scale and speed of failure, and what "human in the loop" really means in practice
• The sunk cost trap every marketing leader falls into, and the discipline it takes to walk back before the finish line

As B2B technology companies scale, size often comes at the cost of agility. Processes calcify, buying cycles stretch, and marketing teams end up running up and down the stairs faster instead of building the elevator.

In this episode of the FINITE Podcast, Jodi Norris sits down with Carol Carpenter, CMO at Cohesity, to unpack what it really takes to market at enterprise scale without slowing down.

Fresh from Cohesity’s merger with Veritas, Carol shares the realities of integrating two large marketing organisations, building trust across cultures, and holding on to startup-style velocity inside a 5,800‑person business.

She explains how her team uses AI to redesign workflows – from translation and brand governance tools, to AI‑powered SDR outreach that doubles lead‑to‑meeting conversion. Along the way, she draws a firm line between what can be automated and what cannot: creativity, taste and strategic judgement.

Carol has been in technology marketing for most of her career, starting as a product manager at Apple. She enjoys scaling and transforming companies and has done that in leadership roles at VMware, Google, Apple, Trend Micro and now as CMO of Cohesity. Carol gives back through mentorship programs such as the HBS Women Entrepreneurship program and Monte Jade, an AAPI professional organisation.

Inside you’ll find…

• How to merge marketing cultures without losing speed, trust or clarity
• Where AI genuinely shortens a six‑month enterprise buying journey – and where humans must stay in the loop
• A practical framework for lifting teams out of execution and into more strategic, high‑leverage work

We’ve got big news!

Over the past six years we’ve convened inspiring conversations with some of the most exciting names and brands in B2B tech. From interviews and meetups to full-day conferences, the Finite brand has grown into a trusted space for thoughtful conversations in B2B tech.… and we couldn’t be prouder!

You may be aware that throughout this journey we’ve been quietly backed by Clarity. Clarity is a senior-led global growth consultancy for technology brands that have outgrown agencies and fragmented partners.

Now, as we continue to grow and evolve, we want to make it more clear just how large a role Clarity plays in Finite’s story. And so we are now…

Finite by Clarity.

With a refreshed brand that reflects our growing ambitions, we’re able to bring higher quality content, exclusive podcast guests, and more insights to inspire your marketing strategy and career.

The newsletter and podcast will continue as normal, and you can find the new home of Finite on Clarity’s website, where you can still access our library of content.

We hope you’re as excited as we are for the new opportunities and horizons at Finite by Clarity.

Connect with our host, Jodi on LinkedIn - she loves at chat!

And check out the new home of Finite by Clarity for our library of episodes.

For high‑growth B2B tech brands, the next funding round or IPO is no longer just a financial milestone – it is a communications stress test. Investors are bringing AI‑driven tools, sharper scrutiny and higher expectations into every decision. The companies that win are those that can match strong numbers with a compelling, consistent story.

In this episode of the FINITE Podcast, Jodi Norris sits down with Liam McLaughlin, Managing Partner at Clarity Europe, to unpack how CMOs and marketing leaders can actively prepare for their next raise or listing through comms and marketing. They explore where tech investment is flowing today, why AI is fueling a renewed funding boom, and what it really takes to move from “interesting startup” to “serious international player” in the eyes of investors.

Liam breaks investor attraction down into three pillars: authenticity, narrative and AI visibility. He shares practical examples from an EV charging infrastructure client on the road to IPO, and a fintech brand using AI visibility programmes to show up consistently across search, executives, media and analysts – and, crucially, inside LLMs.

Liam has almost 20 years of integrated communications experience, working with global technology brands including Oracle, NetApp and EMC, as well as consumer names such as Canva, Clearscore and eBay. As Managing Partner of Clarity Europe, he has led communications strategies for brands navigating major funding rounds and public offerings across the UK and Europe.

Inside you’ll find…

• How to build an authentic, investor‑ready brand story that goes beyond “AI‑washing”
• A practical framework for aligning spokespeople, channels and proof points over a multi‑year funding journey
• Why AI visibility is now a core stakeholder in investor relations – and how to measure and optimise it

Many B2B technology brands are falling into the same trap: slapping the "AI-powered" label onto their solutions and hoping it acts as a differentiator. But when everyone claims the same capability, it becomes a baseline expectation rather than a competitive advantage. If your marketing feels like a constant uphill battle, the problem might not be your channels or tactics - it could be your foundational positioning.

In this episode of the Finite Podcast, Jodi Norris sits down with Matt Hodkinson to explore why positioning is the single most critical lever for sustainable commercial growth. They unpack the dangers of generic category labels, why simply caring more or having years of experience isn't enough to stand out, and how to build a commercial promise that deeply resonates with enterprise buyers. Matt explains why poor positioning is like a bad diet - no amount of marketing heavy lifting can outwork it.

Matt Hodkinson is the Co-Founder and CEO at Tylt, a specialist consultancy that helps technology firms and consultancies achieve category leadership. With a background in technology consulting and over a decade running a successful inbound marketing agency, Matt brings a unique, dual perspective to the structural challenges of go-to-market strategy. He now focuses entirely on helping businesses hone their differentiation and messaging to escape the sea of sameness.

Inside you’ll find…

• Why treating AI as a differentiator is a critical mistake in today's homogeneous tech market.
• The difference between surface-level messaging and deep, structural category leadership.
• How to balance the need for search discoverability with the necessity of a polarising, standout brand identity.

After a trillion‑dollar sell‑off in software stocks and the so‑called “SaaSpocalypse”, it is not just founders who are nervous - CMOs and marketing leaders are questioning the future of their products and positioning.

In this episode of the FINITE Podcast we sit down with Antony Cousins, VP Product at Meltwater, to interrogate the death‑of‑SaaS narrative head‑on. They unpack how investor decks, agentic AI and vibe‑coded tools like Claude Cowork have fuelled the story that AI will replace subscriptions.

Ant brings a rare perspective, combining a career in Ministry of Defence tech roles with frontline communications work in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Arab Spring, leadership in AI startups and now product leadership at Meltwater. He has spent the last decade at the intersection of AI, media intelligence and reputation.

If you are a B2B marketing leader wondering how AI will affect your revenue, this conversation will help you separate existential risk from lazy narrative – and design for growth, not just survival.

Inside you’ll find…

• Why “SaaS is dead” is an oversimplified narrative – and where AI agents and vibe‑coded tools genuinely threaten software.
• How data moats, long‑term memory and UX become the defensible edge in an AI‑native SaaS ecosystem.
• What CMOs and agencies should change now: commercial models, junior hiring and how they collaborate with software providers.

B2B technology is shifting at an unprecedented pace. As traditional sectors grapple with supply chain pressures, shifting workforces, and the demand for personalisation, new frontiers like hardware-as-a-service and physical AI are moving from peripheral concepts to essential infrastructure. For marketers, the challenge is clear: how do you build a category and drive adoption for a disruptive technology that fundamentally changes how the world works?

In this episode of the FINITE Podcast, Jodi Norris sits down with Caitlin Allen to unpack the mechanics of category creation and how marketers can spot market signals, tipping points, and growth opportunities within emerging tech. They explore the nuances of marketing robotics, how to structure a team to create FOMO (fear of missing out) while helping buyers overcome their fear of messing up, and the structural forces reshaping B2B go-to-market motions.

Caitlin Allen is a seasoned marketing leader who has spent two decades building markets for transformative technologies before they are part of a P&L. She has helped scale category-defining companies across venture capital, deep tech, and consumer platforms—including serving on the executive teams that led Lyft through its IPO and Happy Returns to its acquisition by PayPal, as well as advising ambitious startups as a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. She is currently the SVP of Market and Chair at Simbe, where she is pioneering Physical AI and bringing "Store Intelligence" to the $28T physical retail economy.

Caitlin shares her refined methodology for taking complex, multi-threaded sales cycles to market. She discusses how she conquered narrative homogeny in the robotics space, the five questions every buyer needs to answer during a paradigm shift, and how she integrates an intricate network of AI agents into her team’s daily operations - from persona-specific bots and Reddit monitors to leadership coaching agents.

If you want to understand how to position disruptive technology and orchestrate a category-defining marketing strategy, this conversation is a must-listen.

The traditional CMO career path is disappearing. Senior marketers are now expected to be strategists and builders - able to vibe code landing pages, wire up automations, understand agents, and ship prototypes alongside leading teams and shaping narrative. So what does a successful marketing leader actually look like in 2026?

In this episode of the Finite Podcast, Jodi Norris sits down with Kat Wendelstadt to unpack how AI, economic pressure, and changing expectations are reshaping marketing leadership.

They explore why director and CMO roles are getting rarer, why salaries in some areas are dropping, and how AI is simultaneously shrinking team sizes and raising the bar for individual marketers.

Kat Wendelstadt is a seasoned go-to-market leader and startup advisor with a track record of scaling companies from early stage to billion-dollar valuations. A former GTM lead at Microsoft and three-time CMO, she has co-founded and advised ventures backed by investors including Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and the venture firm Founders Fund. She now leads marketing at Electric Twin, where she focuses on bringing its AI-driven synthetic audience technology to market.

Kat shares how she’s rebuilt her own skill set to stay ahead — from going deep on one AI platform, to building plugins and automations herself, to rethinking how and when to hire humans versus agents. She talks candidly about cognitive load, burnout risk, and why “having options” should be the north star of every marketer’s career.

If you want to stay employable (and in demand) as a modern marketing leader, this conversation is a must-listen.

In this episode of the FINITE Podcast, Jodi sits down with the brilliant Dario Debarbieri, CMO at HCL Software. With a career at the intersection of marketing and AI, Dario offers a candid look at the Intelligence Economy and what it means for the modern B2B marketer.

We explore a world where artificial intelligence interacts with audiences in real-time, reading the sentiment of minute digital movements to deliver personalized content in exactly the right context. Dario explains why the traditional 4 Ps of strategy may now matter less than your data quality, and why marketers must evolve from artists into engineers to survive.

Key topics covered in this episode include:

• The Intelligence Economy: Why data is the new oil and how to use the right tools to extract and refine it.
• Marketers as Engineers: How the role of the marketer is shifting toward technical precision and data science.
• Context is King: Moving beyond simple demographics to understand the situational context of your buyer.
• The Ethics of AI: Navigating the fine line between helpful personalization and creepy intrusion (e.g., following a customer to their Alexa at bedtime).

Listen to the full episode to hear how hyper-personalization is setting companies apart and how you can prepare for a future where AI is the norm.

How do you turn organic excitement for your product into a structured engine that drives millions in pipeline and 71% higher account spend?

In this episode of the FINITE Podcast, Jodi sits down with Kris Rudeegraap, CEO and Founder of Sendoso, to peel back the curtain on their sophisticated community ecosystem. Kris breaks down how Sendoso manages four distinct community tiers - from power users to alumni - and the specific tech stack they use to automate "job-change" tracking for a 60% response rate.

What’s inside this episode:

• The ROI of Community: How Sendoso attributes $7M in pipeline to personal advisory groups and why certified community members spend 71% more.
• Automating Advocacy: How to use tools like UserGems to track when community members switch jobs and turn them into "warm" entry points at new companies.
• Peer-to-Peer over Product Pitching: Why facilitating conversations between customers is more effective than any top-down marketing content.
• Surprise & Delight: Using "life moment" gifting (babies, weddings, promotions) to bridge the gap between B2B transactions and human relationships.

We’re all starting to hear about it, but what is synthetic data? Simply put, synthetic data is "fake" data that is mathematically manufactured to mirror the patterns and behaviours of real-world datasets.

For B2B marketers, this means using AI to create a digital "twin" of your customer base. Instead of waiting weeks for a survey to come back, you use a model trained on your existing customer calls, ads, and behavioural data to predict how an audience will react.

However, it isn't a silver bullet. Marketers need to be aware of significant concerns: the "rubbish in, rubbish out" risk (if your training data is biased, your AI will be too) and the danger of oversimplification, where nuance gets lost in statistical significance.

In this episode, Kate O’Keeffe, CEO and Co-Founder at Heatseeker, joins Jodi to explain how to navigate these challenges and put synthetic data to work. Kate walks us through how to maximise the effectiveness of your data to minimise risk in your decision-making. We explore the fascinating process of chatting with an agent that embodies your ideal target persona - learning their thoughts, feelings, and opinions on your brand as if they were in the room with you.

This conversation gets to the heart of how synthetic data can do truly immense things for large organisations, providing a unified perspective that aligns boards and teams. Kate and Jodi don’t shy away from the controversial bits, covering data quality, the "honesty" of AI personas, and how to handle rapid consumer shifts.

How do you move from simply using AI to truly integrating it into your workforce? In this episode, Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, CMO of Sitecore, introduces her philosophy of Designed Intelligence - the intentional choreography between human creativity and AI capability.

Michelle breaks down why the future of marketing isn't about chasing cost efficiencies, but about scaling empathy and connection. She shares how Sitecore is evolving its org charts into agile squads, the shift from personalised to "permissioned" marketing, and why curiosity is the most important skill for the modern marketer. Discover how to treat AI as a teammate rather than a tool to build deeper trust with your audience.

Inside this episode:

• The Human-AI-Human Model: Why humans must lead the strategy, AI must accelerate the output, and humans must provide the final review.
• Organisational Evolution: Moving from channel silos to agile squads supported by "AI teammates."
• Permissioned vs. Personalised: How to maintain brand authenticity and trust in an era of industrial-scale synthetic media.
• The Future of the CMO: Shifting from a campaign engine to a real-time experience engine.

We often think of influencers as people with huge follower counts, but true influence happens at the micro-level, right where your customers and brand evangelists live. This is the realm of Personality-Led Growth, and it's where B2B marketing is headed, but we there's a lot of improvement needed beforehand.

On this episode of FINITE, we're joined by Andy Lambert, the entrepreneur who scaled ContentCal to 30,000 users before selling the business to Adobe.

Andy has a rare perspective, having seen influencer marketing from both the scrappy startup trenches and the massive enterprise scale:

• Andy shares the costly mistake of misaligned paid media and how ContentCal pivoted to building genuine advocacy through Community-Led Growth and activating micro-evangelists. He explains how this approach doubled pipeline velocity and average sales price.
• Now leading product at Adobe Express, Andy reveals how he tackles B2B influencer marketing at scale, moving past simple reach to buying creativity and deep integration. He breaks down their strategic partnerships with macro-influencers like Steven Bartlett to drive unaided brand awareness and embed the product directly into a creator's workflow.

If you're looking for practical advice on how to structure, manage, and measure your B2B influencer initiatives—shifting your focus from merely buying an audience to cultivating genuine advocacy and authority—this episode is a must-listen.

This week, we get meta, discussing the strategy and execution behind high-impact B2B podcasts. Jodi speaks with Anne Feuss, Co-founder of PodPeople, an agency that produces top-ranking shows for clients like Google and HBO.

Anne offers actionable insights on how B2B brands can stand out in a noisy market. We cover key topics, including:

• Finding the right host and hook to make technical content compelling.
• The essential move from audio-only to video-first podcasting.
• Tying content efforts to commercial impact and pipeline growth.

Learn the current trends B2B audiences demand and how to evolve your content strategy from basic to best-in-class.

Humanisation in B2B marketing almost feels like a buzzword.

But the sentiment behind it is growing increasingly important in a sea of B2B sameness fuelled by AI.

In this episode, learn what breaks through the slop, and what B2B customers now want to see from brands: Not just photos of your team on your 'About Us' page, but human soul, artistry, and love.

Hear from Deema Tamimi, VP Marketing at The Brief, who recently undertook a rebranding project that was fuelled with humanity.