Sage Zaree is an executive with over 2 decades of marketing experience. He began to develop new marketing strategies using AI in the 2021 and has fully adopted AI in most of his workflows and has become an expert leveraging data in marketing augmentation using AI.
What first drew you to the intersection of AI and marketing?
Honestly, it was the data overload. Four year ago, I noticed a growing disconnect, we were collecting mountains of customer data: web behavior, engagement metrics, purchase history, etc but we weren’t acting on it fast or smart enough. That’s where AI started to catch my attention. It wasn’t just about automation, it was about augmentation.
So for me, AI wasn’t just a shiny new tool. It was the missing layer between rich data and real time marketing.
How has your perspective on marketing evolved since integrating AI into your work?
Integrating AI into my marketing work fundamentally changed how I view the role of a marketer.
Early in my career, marketing was largely about creative instincts, A/B testing, and driving strategies. It was effective, but reactive. Once AI entered the picture, it flipped that mindset from reactive to predictive and from broad targeting to specific relevance.
AI doesn’t just automate tasks, it amplifies our ability to see patterns, anticipate behavior, and craft experiences that are both scalable and deeply personal.
What’s a common misconception people have about AI in marketing?
One of the biggest misconceptions in most sectors is that AI is some kind of “plug and play” button that you can just add AI into your workflow and suddenly your marketing becomes smarter, faster, and more profitable overnight.
The truth is, AI is only as effective as the data, strategy, and human oversight behind it. It’s not a replacement for marketers; it’s a force multiplier for good marketers. If your message is off, your data is messy, or you don’t have a clear customer journey, AI will not fix that. If misused AI typically scales problems not solutions.
Which AI tools or platforms do you currently rely on the most, and why?
For content generation, I am old school, everything is manual, SEO is a big part of my objectives and hand written, 1st person perspectives are critical.
When it comes to predictive analytics and customer segmentation, I lean heavily on platforms like HubSpot with AI integrations or Salesforce Einstein. They give us the ability to segment audiences based on intent, not just demographics.
For ad performance optimization, tools like Meta Advantage+ and Google Performance Max have been getting more intelligent. They still can go off on a tangent and over spend as these tools work for their respective platforms and not people
For visual content, Midjourney and Runway are starting to play a larger role, especially for creating campaign visuals or storyboarding ideas without needing a full design team every time.
Ultimately, I don’t rely a single tool but leverage a series of interworking tools that are put into a single flow, then use people when we cannot automate to fill in the gaps and make a judgement call.
How do you evaluate whether AI is actually improving campaign performance?
It all comes down to clarity of measurement. AI can be impressive on paper, but if it’s not driving meaningful results, it’s just noise. So the first step is always defining what success looks like, for example, increased conversion rates, lower acquisition costs, improved engagement, or more qualified leads.
I look at performance on two levels: efficiency metrics and KPIs.
In short, are we able to get faster results by leveraging an AI system vs taking a manual approach. Secondly, and more importantly are we able to get better outcomes with all identified KPIs.
I also compare AI led campaigns against control groups or A/B tests to isolate the impact. If the AI is truly learning and optimizing, I expect to see incremental gains over time.
Where does AI end and human creativity begin in a successful marketing strategy?
AI can give you infinite variations, but it can’t give people vision.
In a successful marketing strategy, AI handles the data analysis, trend detection, performance optimization, even drafting copy or generating images. It’s incredibly powerful at pattern recognition and scale. But the emotional core, the brand voice, the big idea still belongs to humans.
So in my mind, AI doesn’t replace creativity; it clears space for it. It takes the repetitive work off our plate so we can spend more time on strategy, insight, and innovation.
What skills should marketing professionals focus on to stay relevant in the age of AI?
The number 1 skill would be prompt engineering, you need to understand how to interact with AI. I have seen so many with shiny object syndrome regarding tools, flows, automations, etc. Just start with ChatGPT and learn how to write where it provides consistent outputs. Knowing how to write effective prompts, evaluate outputs, and guide generative tools is quickly becoming a core marketing skill.
