Episode Summary
Trine Tirsgaard, Group Chief Marketing Officer at Twoday, explains how customer understanding, data, experimentation, and continuous learning can create greater strategic value with AI. She explores how marketing leaders can combine technology with customer intelligence to improve decision-making, strengthen teams, and create more meaningful business value. Trine also shares why curiosity and practical experimentation are becoming essential leadership capabilities for navigating rapid technological change.
Highlights
Introduction
YouTube Short
Episode Q&A Videos
4:09 | Customer Value Elevates Marketing Into Strategic Business Leadership
“Today it's about a qualification game, and it's to be super curious about your customers every day through and through, and how can we get in contact with them and have conversations, not just in the technical room.”
3:10 | Strategic Thinking Builds Stronger Value Through Customer Partnership
“Strategic thinking today is something completely different. We need to think differently about how to deliver projects or value today because we are not just selling a project off the shelf and expecting the customer to take it and plug it into their machine room. The journey and the surrounding and the climate on the customer side is equally as complex as our own.”
4:37 | Data and AI Strengthen Customer-Centered Marketing
“You have to get your data straight. You have to plug it into the right channels. You have to do the combination. You have to make the concepts right so they can continuously generate the outputs that you want to refine your campaigns, to refine your offers, to refine your packaging of the value you want to give to your customers.”
3:34 | Human Creativity Turns Customer Data Into Greater Value
“Let's not create a system for a shelf where we can collect all the data that collects the dust. That's why I'm so pushy that people lean into the technology, stay hungry, and stay curious, because I think what matters most in the future is the power of humans. It's the way we put our intellect to work.”
3:59 | Practical Experimentation Builds Better Prompts and AI Outcomes
“I wouldn't advise starting to chase the perfect prompt because I know output is as good as input, and the models are getting better. My advice is to try a model. Just use speech-to-text and ask it what the prompt would be, and try it out. It works, actually.”
4:11 | Continuous Learning Builds Stronger AI-Ready Marketing Teams
“It's a matter of finding that balance where you know enough to step on the next wave that's coming because it's starting so fast, combined with the mindset of staying curious. You have to balance that curiosity in your team, and you have to motivate them to keep going and to learn every day.”
0:59 | Curiosity and Tactical Action Create Stronger Customer Success
“With understanding how to work APIs or more complex data sets, if you can operate that, it’s an eye-opener. Stay curious and be tactical. We were supposed to be very strategic about everything, but I would say the small tactical actions matter today because that's the definition of failing to actually succeed with a customer.”
Key Takeaways
Customer Value Drives Strategy
Build AI initiatives around customer needs, business outcomes, and measurable value, not the technology itself.
Human Judgment Strengthens AI
Combine strong data and AI capabilities with creativity, customer understanding, and strategic thinking.
Continuous Learning Builds Advantage
Create teams that experiment regularly, strengthen their technical skills, and stay consistently close to customers.
About Trine
Trine Tirsgaard
Trine Tirsgaard is Group Chief Marketing Officer at Twoday and has spent her career leading marketing and growth within the consulting industry. She is passionate about helping organizations create customer value by combining deep customer understanding with emerging technologies such as AI. Trine believes curiosity, continuous learning, and empowered teams are the foundations of sustainable growth, and she advocates for a modern CMO role that increasingly serves as the voice of the customer across the business.
From the Guest
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Full Episode Article
Title: "Stop Chasing AI Tools and Start Building Better Thinking"
This article is based on an interview with Trine Tirsgaard, Group Chief Marketing Officer at Twoday
Introduction
AI gives marketing leaders access to extraordinary new capabilities, but access to technology is not the same as creating business value. For Trine Tirsgaard, Group Chief Marketing Officer at Twoday, the opportunity begins with a discipline that predates generative AI: understanding customers deeply enough to know what creates value for them.
After nearly 30 years in marketing and sales, Trine sees marketing becoming increasingly strategic. The shift gives CMOs an opportunity to move beyond promotion and become a commercial engine for growth. Her perspective also challenges leaders to rethink where AI fits. The technology is an enabler. Customer intelligence, human judgment, experimentation, and strategic thinking determine what organizations actually accomplish with it.
Make Customer Value the Foundation of AI Strategy
The starting point for better AI strategy is not choosing another model or platform. It is understanding the problem the customer needs solved. Trine explains, “Today, when I look at a customer, I don’t see the person per se. I see the project and the struggle they are in.” That changes marketing from promoting what a company sells to understanding why the customer should care. When organizations focus on that struggle, AI can help accelerate research, personalization, analysis, and execution without losing sight of the commercial outcome.
This focus also changes how value is measured. Trine says, “If we cannot explain the value of our offer to our customers, we are out of business.” For C-suite leaders, that creates a clear test for AI investments. The relevant question is not simply whether AI makes a process faster. Leaders need to understand whether that efficiency improves customer value, revenue opportunities, decision-making, or another measurable business outcome. Marketing earns greater strategic influence when it can connect technology, customer intelligence, and execution directly to commercial growth.
Build the Data Foundation That Makes AI More Valuable
AI becomes significantly more useful when it can operate with meaningful business and customer information. Trine puts the requirement simply. “You have to get your data straight.” She also emphasizes that organizations must “plug it into the right channels” and combine the information in ways that continuously improve campaigns, offers, and the value delivered to customers. The opportunity is therefore larger than deploying an AI application. Leaders need an operating foundation that lets customer intelligence inform decisions repeatedly instead of remaining trapped in disconnected systems.
That foundation becomes more valuable when technology and human judgment work together. Trine says, “What matters most in the future is the power of humans. It’s the way we put our intellect to work.” AI can process information, summarize material, accelerate production, and surface patterns, but marketers still need to understand customers, relationships, context, and commercial priorities. That combination creates differentiation because the same widely available technology can produce very different business outcomes depending on the intelligence and judgment organizations bring to it.
Turn Continuous Learning Into a Leadership Capability
The speed of AI development means marketing organizations cannot treat learning as an occasional training exercise. Trine believes teams need enough exposure to technology to remain capable of taking advantage of each new wave. “It’s a matter of finding that balance where you know enough to step on the next wave that’s coming,” she explains. That does not require chasing every tool. It requires building a repeatable culture of experimentation where people continually strengthen their understanding and share what they learn with colleagues.
Leadership becomes essential to sustaining that behavior. “You have to balance that curiosity in your team, and you have to motivate them to keep going and to learn every day,” Trine says. CMOs therefore need to rethink both team capabilities and working habits. Data skills, technical fluency, strategic thinking, and customer understanding increasingly need to coexist. The goal is not to turn every marketer into a technical specialist. It is to create teams that can use technology confidently while keeping their decisions connected to customers and commercial outcomes.
Conclusion
The most valuable AI strategy may ultimately be a better learning strategy. Technology will continue changing, and the models available to one organization will often be available to its competitors. Sustainable advantage comes from how effectively leaders combine those capabilities with proprietary customer understanding, human creativity, stronger data, and better strategic judgment.
Trine Tirsgaard’s final guidance makes that approach practical. “Stay curious and be tactical.” Small experiments help executives and their teams understand what technology can actually accomplish before scaling it across the organization. For B2B leaders, the opportunity is to create a continuous cycle of customer learning, experimentation, improvement, and measurable value. AI can accelerate that cycle, but leadership determines where it goes.
ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.
Steven MacDonald
Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.
Steven MacDonald
Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.
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