There’s a conversation happening in every marketing leadership meeting right now, and it goes something like this: “We’ve run six AI pilots this year. What do we have to show for it?” Usually, the honest answer is: activity. Lots of activity. Not much value. Gartner’s Nicole Greene recently made this point in a piece for…
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When the CEO of HubSpot talks about what’s holding companies back with AI, marketing operations leaders should pay attention. In a recent LinkedIn post, Yamini Rangan shared that nearly every customer conversation she has about AI eventually circles back to one thing: data. Her argument is simple and, in our experience, completely correct. Messy data…
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HubSpot’s May 2026 release is one of the densest in recent memory — AI everywhere, campaign attribution fixes, native data cleanup, and a long list of admin and governance improvements. But as anyone who runs marketing operations knows, “new features” and “value realized” are two very different things. At RightWave, we’ve spent two decades helping…
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For years, Marketing Operations support meant one thing: campaign execution. Build the emails. Create the landing pages. Clean the lists. Fix the forms. Keep Marketo, HubSpot, or Salesforce running without breaking anything. That work still matters — more than ever, actually. But the role of MOps has grown way beyond getting campaigns out the door.…
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HubSpot just made one of the boldest declarations we’ve seen from a major CRM vendor: not only should AI agents be able to run on HubSpot, they should be able to run HubSpot. In a recent blog post, Chief Product and Technology Officer Duncan Lennox laid out a vision of an open ecosystem where every…
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Every marketing team has the same question right now: how do we use AI? It’s the wrong question. The teams getting real value from AI in email marketing aren’t running more tools or writing better prompts. They’re the ones whose campaign operations, data hygiene, lifecycle logic, and segmentation discipline were already strong. AI just made…
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AI is changing marketing operations faster than most teams expected. Campaign briefs can be drafted in minutes. Email copy can be produced almost instantly. Lead scoring logic can be documented neatly. Reporting narratives can be summarized without someone spending hours in spreadsheets. On the surface, this looks like a massive productivity win. And in many…
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AI agents are no longer a future-facing experiment. They are already answering customer questions, routing requests, handling support interactions, triggering workflows, and influencing how people experience a brand. And that is exactly why they are becoming risky. A recent article in MarTech highlighted a worrying trend: many enterprises that deployed AI customer agents have had…
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A B2B client was paying roughly $60,000 a year for a dedicated lead routing platform. The tool worked. The logic was sound. Territories were mapped, rules were tested, and leads were landing where they should. That was exactly the problem. When a system becomes that stable, you have to ask a harder question: do you…
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AI has quickly moved from “interesting experiment” to serious budget line item for marketing leaders. A recent MarTech article, citing Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey, highlights a clear disconnect: CMOs are now allocating an average of 15.3% of their marketing budgets to AI initiatives, but only 30% say their organizations have mature or fully developed…
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