The Autonomous Marketer World Tour kicked off where it should: in our hometown of Chicago.
The goal of these events is simple — bring together marketers, business owners, and partners to talk about what's actually changing in marketing right now and what the shift to autonomous marketing looks like in practice.
Getting ready to meet autonomous marketers in our event space in Chicago.
The entire event was built around proof, not promises—customer stories with real numbers, a live demo starting from zero, and an unfiltered Q&A about where autonomous marketing is headed. Here's what we covered and what you can expect if you join us at a future stop.
The autonomous marketing shift is already happening
Valerie Craig, who leads Brand Experiences at ActiveCampaign, opened by framing where we are in marketing technology. We've been through this pattern before: on-prem to SaaS, desktop to cloud, broadcast to digital to mobile-first. Each time, early movers pulled ahead. Right now, we're in another one of those shifts—from AI tools to autonomous AI.
Valerie introduced a five-level framework for the autonomous marketing journey, from using AI as a basic assistant (level one) to full team multiplication where agents do meaningful work across functions (level five).
The five levels of autonomous marketing.
The critical point: humans are essential at every level. Strategy, brand, creativity, relationships—those don't get automated. The tedious work does.
The data tells a story:
- 87% of marketers using autonomous marketing say they have significantly more time to be strategic
- 13+ hours/week is what marketers spend on tedious tasks that autonomous marketing can reclaim
- 2–3x productivity gains among early adopters—while maintaining or improving quality
Three marketers, three very different businesses, same result
The core of our presentation focused on three real-world examples. What made them compelling is how different the businesses are—and how consistent the outcomes were.
Amanda Pressner Kreuser, Masthead Media
Amanda Pressner Kreuser is the sole biz dev person at Masthead, a content marketing agency. She was spending 20 hours a week manually sourcing contacts on LinkedIn, writing outreach, and following up, realizing she needed to streamline her workflow. To do so, she built five custom GPTs to handle the repetitive work: a referral scout, an email library, a scheduling assistant, a follow-up bot, and an activity tracker.
An important difference: It took upfront effort for Amanda to set up her workflow, and she's still hands-on with much of the process, but the payoff is real.
Result: doubled her pipeline without adding headcount.
Adam Cain, ElectricityRates.com
Adam Cain of ElectricityRates.com has an approach that shows where autonomous marketing is heading. He's a solo marketer managing 40+ energy suppliers whose rates change daily and hundreds of thousands of customers with varying contract timelines.
Autonomous marketing evolving in real-time: Instead of building multiple tools and stitching them together, he described the problem to Gemini, designed a single "switch readiness score," and connected it to ActiveCampaign—which now triggers personalized campaigns automatically based on each customer's data.
Result: 200% increase in conversions.
Amanda's workflow is powerful but hands-on. Adam built one thing and let the platform do the rest. That progression, from assembling your own toolkit to defining a goal and letting AI handle the execution, is autonomous marketing evolving in real time.
Both approaches give you hours back. The difference is how much of the work stays on your plate.
What happens when you stop sending the same email to everyone
Luis Fernando Castillon joined Parrish Law Firm in 2014 and inherited a basic Mailchimp account sending the same generic email to every contact, car accident, dog bite, workers' comp, it didn't matter. Open rates hovered around 11–17%. And whenever his boss casually asked, "How's marketing performing?" it sent Luis into a scramble, pulling data into spreadsheets, building charts, assembling a presentation.
Reporting alone ate 10+ hours a month.
After switching to ActiveCampaign and putting Active Intelligence to work, the results speak for themselves:
- Open rates jumped to 35–40% (a 100% increase)
- Grew from hundreds of contacts to 5,000+
- Runs multiple campaigns simultaneously—no added headcount
- Reporting that took hours now takes seconds
At the event, we shared a live clipof how he uses Active Intelligence to pull instant performance reports, complete with visualizations he can hand directly to leadership. The work that used to consume his month now happens in a single prompt.
Come attend an upcoming stop to see just how he does it!
Active Intelligence in action: from zero to full setup, live
Customer stories are one thing—but we wanted to show what Active Intelligence can actually do, live, with a real business. Dathan Brown, Senior Manager of Sales Enablement at ActiveCampaign, took the stage and started from scratch.
Come see a live demo of Active Intelligence in real time with real customer examples.
Mario, the owner and managing broker of Four Daughters Realty, was in the audience. Dathan pulled up Mario's website, imported it into ActiveCampaign's AI Brand Kit (which automatically grabbed logos, colors, and brand context), and walked through the "imagine, activate, validate" loop—the core rhythm of autonomous marketing:
- Imagine: Typed a single prompt and generated a full welcome series with trigger logic, wait steps, and sample emails tailored to Four Daughters Realty's services.
- Activate: Built two personalized email campaigns (one for first-time buyers, one for people new to Chicagoland) with subject lines, preheaders, and body copy—all pulled from Mario's actual website and brand context.
- Validate: Used Active Intelligence to diagnose an intentionally terrible email campaign—14% bounce rate, unclear CTAs, and list quality issues. AI flagged the problems and offered specific next steps.
What used to take days with professional support happened in minutes. The output wasn't perfect on the first try, but the starting point was dramatically better, and the marketer's job shifted from building everything by hand to reviewing, refining, and directing.
Creativity is the new competitive advantage
The event closed with a fireside chat between Valerie and Gary Spagnoli, founder of Analytics Mates and a Kellogg MBA candidate who recently toured OpenAI, NVIDIA, and several leading VC firms.
Gary's take was shaped by a consistent theme he heard across those visits: technology is no longer the competitive moat it used to be. It's easier than ever to build. What differentiates you now is your data, your brand, and your taste.
He shared a line from the president of IDEO that stuck with the room: we're entering "the age of deviance". Creativity matters more now because AI gives everyone the same default answer. If everyone follows best practices, everything flattens.
Gary on creativity and standing out:
If everybody’s best in class and following best practice, we have to look for the wrinkles… on the side, the edges.
His practical advice for marketers getting started:
- Research first. Use AI to analyze what's working and what's not before you build anything new.
- Use multiple tools. Let them challenge each other—differing outputs sharpen your strategy.
- Try reverse prompting. Ask AI to ask you questions before you start, so you clarify your goals upfront.
- Prototype immediately. The friction to execute is lower than ever, don't overthink it.
When asked what ActiveCampaign does better than standalone AI tools, Gary was direct: Active Intelligence understands your previous campaigns and your brand history. That context is the difference between generic output and something you can actually use.
Come see it for yourself
The Chicago stop ran about two hours: a strategic presentation with real customer stories, a live demo with a real business, and an unfiltered Q&A. You leave with frameworks you can use, prompts you can steal, and a clear picture of what autonomous marketing looks like in action.
The Autonomous Marketer World Tour is heading to more cities. See you there!
