Modern marketers face a paradox. The CEO demands growth with less spending. Yet most marketing teams are stuck with fragmented tech stacks, siloed data, and hours of manual work: building media plans, responding to RFPs, inspecting dashboards, and manually optimizing campaigns.
The tools exist to transform engineering productivity. What’s the equivalent for marketing?
Claude Code was born from a simple founder insight: developers don’t hate hard problems. They hate busywork. The breakthrough wasn’t chasing higher intelligence, but building an agent that could reliably take on the repetitive, low-leverage tasks that drain engineering energy: boilerplate, refactoring, test scaffolding, and endless edge-case debugging. By deeply understanding the codebase and operating directly in developers’ workflows, Claude Code became a true teammate rather than a clever autocomplete. The outcome is not fewer engineers, but better ones – freed to focus on architecture, product judgment, and creative problem-solving, where human taste and experience matter most.
Marketing is on the same path. Today’s marketers are buried in repetitive execution: pulling reports, responding to RFPs, launching similar campaigns across channels, tweaking bids, and monitoring dashboards. Agentic AI can remove this busywork and shift marketers from doing the work to orchestrating outcomes, just as Claude Code did for engineering.
Today, marketing systems sit in silos, and workflows are a mess. The unlock is a suite of agents that integrate seamlessly with existing tech stacks and actually do the work. What used to require an entire platform can now be accomplished by a few well-orchestrated agents. Marketers move from doing the work to conducting the symphony.
The last generation of marketing technology was built around systems of record, insight, and engagement, not systems of action. Google Analytics captured traffic, Tableau made performance visible, and Marketo orchestrated campaigns and lead flows. Together, they helped marketing teams understand what happened, but stopped short of doing the work. As data volumes exploded and channels multiplied, insight became abundant while action remained manual, fragmented, and slow.
The debate right now is whether those systems survive the shift to agents. Most marketing AI today stops at recommendations. Another dashboard. Another insight. That’s half the picture. The other half is what enterprises actually need: systems that finish the work.
The next generation is emerging as systems of action. These products won’t just surface dashboards or recommendations; they will close the loop by executing decisions end-to-end. Powered by agents that understand context, goals, and constraints, they turn insight directly into action – launching campaigns, reallocating spend, personalizing experiences, and continuously learning from outcomes. The wedge is no longer about better reporting. It’s about removing human bottlenecks from execution while keeping humans focused on strategy, judgment, and creative direction.
The shift isn’t an incremental improvement to existing tools. It’s a fundamentally different relationship between humans and software. Tools wait for commands. Agents pursue goals.
A CMO says, “Increase trial-to-paid conversion by 10% this quarter.” The agent figures out what to do next. This sounds like science fiction until you break down what “figuring out” actually means in practice.
AI agents don’t replace marketers. They absorb execution, accelerate learning, and enforce consistency. Three things change:
The marketer of the future thinks in systems, writes goals instead of tasks, reviews decisions instead of drafts, and leads agents the way a creative director leads a team – with vision, taste, and judgment.
Building for marketers requires deep domain expertise. This is where founder-market fit matters most. Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya have spent 26 years building category-defining data and AI companies together. Their track record is impressive:
They’ve built and shipped marketing software for over two decades. At Krux, they saw customers struggle with the very complexity they’d enabled: thousands of segments gumming up the works. That pain became Kana’s founding insight: let agents handle the complexity, while marketers curate and orchestrate.
Tom and Vivek built Krux to a billion-dollar exit on just $48 million in total capital. In a world where founders think raising hundreds of millions is winning, their philosophy stands out: “Scarcity breeds creativity. Scarcity breeds intensity.”
They could have raised $50 or even $100 million in this seed round for Kana. They chose $15 million because they know exactly what they need to accomplish. At Krux, that discipline meant wealth creation across the entire cap table. They’re building Kana the same way.
At Mayfield, we’re a people-first firm. Everything starts with people. I’ve wanted to be in business with Tom and Vivek because people build companies, people build products. When those people are going after the right market opportunity, it’s a marriage made in heaven.
Kana fits squarely into our thesis around Collaborative Intelligence as a Service. AI is a 100x force that collaborates with humans to make them superhumans. What’s happening in coding will now happen in marketing. Tom and Vivek are the pioneers bringing that thinking to the marketing space and augmenting and elevating marketers.
Watch my conversation with Tom and Vivek on building category-defining companies, lessons from 26 years of partnership, and why marketing is AI’s next frontier.
