The AI Marketing Assistant That Wasn’t, a story by Xan Mannekens

I was a fractional CMO at a rising star of a company in the marketing technology SaaS space. Our team was always on the lookout for the next big innovation. Our platform helped marketers streamline their campaigns, but we knew AI was the game-changer everyone was waiting for.

During a creative brainstorming session, we thought we understood what we should do. We decided to create “AudienceGenius” – an AI-powered feature that promised to predict consumer behavior and automate hyper-personalized content creation across channels.

Excited by the potential, a small group of us—myself, a product manager, and our lead data scientist—decided to flesh out the concept. We designed dashboard mockups, drafted compelling landing pages, and wrote persuasive email copy. The plan was to use these materials to pitch the idea to our CEO and secure resources for development.

All our work was carefully stored in a shared folder labeled “AudienceGenius Concept – DRAFT.” We thought we’d been meticulous in marking everything as preliminary. How wrong we were.

It was an ordinary Thursday when all hell broke loose. At 10:05 AM, my phone began buzzing incessantly with notifications. Slack messages, emails, texts – all going berserk. With growing horror, I opened my inbox to find our “AudienceGenius announcement” email had been sent to our entire customer base.

The email enthusiastically proclaimed, “Revolutionize Your Marketing with AudienceGenius AI – Now Live in CampaignCraft!” It included links to our concept landing pages and promised to “boost engagement rates by 500% starting today.”

My heart sank. This feature was nothing more than an idea on a whiteboard. It didn’t exist. How on earth did this happen?

As we scrambled to unravel the mystery, the alarming truth came to light:

1. Our newly hired growth marketer, eager to make a splash, had stumbled upon the AudienceGenius folder.
2. Misinterpreting the situation and overlooking the “DRAFT” label, they assumed it was a scheduled release they needed to execute.
3. Using our own marketing automation platform, they loaded the draft content and hit “Send” to all users.

The fallout was immediate and intense:

• Our customer support channels were swamped with marketers demanding access to the non-existent AudienceGenius features.
• Social media exploded, initially with excitement, then with confusion as people realized AudienceGenius wasn’t actually available.
• Our CEO, completely blindsided, called an emergency all-hands meeting demanding answers.
• Competitors swiftly capitalized on the chaos, painting us as unreliable and overhyping our AI capabilities.

In a panic-driven decision, our CEO declared we had to deliver AudienceGenius – and fast. Our development and data science teams, caught entirely off-guard, were given an impossible four-week deadline to turn this concept into reality.

What followed was a nightmare of even more epic proportions. Developers and data scientists worked around the clock, fueled by energy drinks and sheer panic. The result was a half-baked “AudienceGenius” that was more random than intelligent. It made wildly inaccurate audience predictions and generated nonsensical content that would make even the most avant-garde marketers cringe.

The long-term consequences were severe:

• We lost 8% of our customers within three months, many citing the AudienceGenius debacle as a breach of trust.
• The ongoing pressure to improve the rushed feature drained resources from our core product development, setting us back months on our actual roadmap.
• Team morale hit an all-time low, leading to some resignations, including some of our most talented developers.

In the aftermath, we were forced to completely overhaul our internal communications and marketing protocols. We implemented a stringent multi-step review process for any customer-facing materials and improved our data access controls and labeling systems.

If there was a silver lining, it was that this catastrophe taught us invaluable lessons about the dangers of overhyping AI capabilities, the importance of clear communication channels, and the risks of rushing products to market without proper testing and ethical considerations.

Today, in martech circles, “Pulling an AudienceGenius” has become shorthand for promising AI-driven marketing miracles without the tech to back it up. It serves as a stark reminder of the need for integrity and realism in an industry often driven by the next shiny object.

The excitement about new AI features in SaaS is great, but it needs to go hand in hand with rigorous processes, clear communication, and ethical considerations. Because sometimes, the most expensive campaign you’ll ever run is the one for a product that doesn’t exist—especially when it promises to automate the nuanced art of understanding and engaging audiences.