Suzy Everist on marketing to AI agents

I also find that it's harder because I spend a lot of time like arguing with AI. It's not like I create a prompt and then I'm like, "Great, let me use that and go with it." I find an like an unfortunately high number of hours spent like going back and forth. And that's been been surprising and like a little frustrating, to be honest. So, yeah, I'm always curious to hear like how people don't do that so that I can spend

Hi everyone. And welcome to another episode of our new podcast. And we have Suzy with us. We met with Suzy in an event. As far as I remember correctly, it was like a B2B marketers event. And I think we had like a really nice vibe. Then we met couple of more times, and she was kind enough to join me in in this podcast episode. Hi Suzy, how are you?

Hey, doing well. Thanks for inviting me. And yes, we did meet because we were on the same team during a trivia game. Oh, true. True. That was And I don't I don't think we won, but I think we had the most spirit and energy. You know, you know what? There was a part regarding translating emojis, like finding slogans with emojis or something like that. And I think we were the best one in that section.

And that was the only section that was important. So, I I would say Yeah. say we were the actual winners of that thing. yeah, true. Cool. Thank you for joining. And for the ones who don't know you, would love to hear a bit of like who you are, what you do in life in general, or as a marketer, let's say. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, hi everyone.

I'm Suzy Everest, and I guess first and foremost, I'm a mom. I have to start with that because that's really been been my life over the past 2 years and it's it's been wonderful, but yeah, I live in Barcelona. I'm originally from the US and I've been working in tech in some sort of capacity for, you know, over 15 years now. So, I've really seen it grow and evolve and have been really lucky to work with like some massive companies like Amazon and Meta, but then also smaller startups and smaller companies.

So, it's been been an interesting ride working in this space. And yeah, as I mentioned, I moved to Barcelona 3 years ago. I'm really enjoying my time here. It's an amazing place to meet all sorts of passionate people that love good food, good weather, spending time together. It's been such an amazing move and I love love living in Spain. And yeah, until the How's your Spanish, by the way?

It's okay. It's just okay. You know, it's it's difficult because I work in English and I have a lot of expat friends. So, I spend a lot of time speaking in English. But as I mentioned, having a kid is a really good way of like forcing yourself to learn the language. That That was my point, you know, like Yes. Your kid like it will help you to learn.

Totally. Yeah. So, as he's learning to speak, I'm also learning alongside him. so, so yeah, it's getting better, but I think right now I'm kind of like learning through osmosis more than like attacking it. So, I hope I can like spend some more time on that in the fall. But that. I've I've I'm in the same the same situation. Now, like this year I've been like attacking a bit.

Yeah. And like if I don't speak proper Spanish in a couple of years, I will be really ashamed of myself. It's been 3 years already for me as well. So, time is ticking. Yes. But I don't want to spend all of our time talking about not knowing Spanish. You've mentioned that you worked in bigger corporations, which which is like for a lot of people, that's a dream, you know, to work in Amazon, you work in Meta, Google, blah, blah, blah.

But now you're also working for a like a highly energetic startup in a really competitive you know, a market. Like how is it for you? Like do you prefer the startup world or big corporation? Do you miss anything? Yeah, I mean there's pros and cons to each, right? So I know this is like a very political answer, but I think there's good parts about working for big companies.

Like you have a ton of access to like internal knowledge. There's so many teams doing different things. So like if you want to learn how to do different types of campaigns or understand like how people are growing inside of the business, you can just like ask a product manager or a marketer on other team and you learn so much from them. So I really do miss that part because I think when you're working in a smaller company, you really have to figure it out yourself and it can take some time to get there.

So that's the part that I miss the most about big companies. But yeah, smaller companies are amazing because you get to know everyone that you're working with and you like build such great rapport. And the biggest difference is you actually get to do things rather than like navigating the system of a big company. Do you know what I mean? Like you're not trying to get alignment with three layers of leadership before publishing something.

You can just do it on your own. And for me, like it's very motivating and fulfilling to actually create something and put it out into the world. I find more energy from that than trying to like build cross-functional alignment. which I feel like you're trying to not to step on anybody's toes, but you're also definitely in favor for the startup world. Yeah, so I I like that part of startups.

So, so yeah, and but it's interesting. I feel like I kind of did it backwards. Like I think a lot of people start their careers working in smaller companies and then they build up to these big companies and I went the opposite. So, I had to learn unlearn a lot of things which is can be challenging sometimes, you know. No, I 100% agree. Like one of the things that when we hire a new person or like when I was working at the startups as well was if they're coming from a like a big corporation, it's always like a hard adjustment process because as you said, in a big corporation, there's always someone who knows what you or like has what you want or like what you're asking.

In a smaller startup, there's a lot of chance that you will get the answer either we don't know or like we don't have a documentation or would you like to be responsible of of this new thing that that you just asked. Yeah. And coming from there as I said, like you're now in a more competitive market. I'm not saying like Face Meta wasn't a competitive market, but like it was a big team.

How are you handling this competitiveness in in your industry? Like you didn't mention where you're working, but you might also want to tell a bit about that as well. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so right now I am a product marketer at Gitbook and we create technical documentation for APIs or technical products or really any team that has a product and we have like around 40 people on the team, so it's really tiny.

But it's amazing cuz they've been around. All right. Compared to Hardal, how how big is your team? We're like 15. Okay, yeah. Yeah. So, almost triple the size. Yeah. Yeah. So, in terms of the market that we're in, we're in the documentation market. And I think like typically people when they think of documentation, they think of like Google Docs or Notion is really popular. But we're really more on like the technical side.

So if you're creating developer portals or API documentation, that's where we play. And how we think about our competition, it's really about and how I think about competition, it's really about like pushing yourself to be the best that you can be. I think when you're in a market where there isn't a lot of competition, you're not really forced to innovate as much or you don't move as fast.

And then when you have competitors that are like continuously pushing the bar, that actually motivates you to do the same. So I think like the analogy there is like with sports. I used to be a rower and we would have these races on a rowing machine and you had to like get certain times in order to progress to like the next level. And if you had to do that race by yourself in a room alone, you would always perform so much worse than if you had like five people next to you.

And so people would create those environments so you could have a higher performance. So a basic concept, but I think that really relates in tech as well. But yeah, so it really pushes us to innovate, but also it pushes us to figure out how are we different than competitors, too. Because I think right now people are inundated with so much information, how do you stand out? How do you show that you do this aspect of problem-solving differently or better?

And so that's kind of how we think about our competition and navigating it. I've told you this before. I think the market that you're in is like critically important for a lot of companies, especially on the more let's say scale-ups and startups. This is like archiving, having a proper documentation, especially on the technical side of things, is it's always been has like a problem. And especially with AI now, things are changing super fast in this area, too.

Like where do you see the future of documentation in general? Yeah. So, it's interesting. Like I think like I mentioned, everyone has this concept of documentation in their head because they've probably gone to like a help center before when like a feature is broken. Okay. And that's really like the status quo of the role that documentation has played. Or, you know, you go to a developer portal to figure out how to integrate with an API.

But now with AI, instead of documentation being somewhere that you go in order to like fix a problem, it's really like the first step that you take to understand a product. So, you actually have to read the documentation. And when I say you, I'm I mean agents. That's really the future here. So, agents, in order to understand how to use the product, are going through documentation in order to, you know, solve the the problem that they're trying to solve.

And so, it's now the front door of the product experience. And so, if you have something out of date or incorrect in your documentation, it's not just like a problem for one developer. It's going to be exponentially shared across thousands or millions of users. And it's going to be a problem for like your entire product experience because agents don't know how to kind of differentiate, tell if something's off.

So, the future of documentation is it's going to play like such a critical foundational role. And the way that we're thinking about it is it's not just like documentation now. We're thinking about it as like infrastructure for products. And you need to have like the infrastructure in place and high-quality infrastructure in order to scale and and to grow. And the metaphor that I'm kind of playing around with right now about this is like the difference between using a car manual when your car breaks down versus having to use like IKEA instructions in order to be able to know how to build the product.

Exactly. You don't want to try to build an a chair from IKEA without looking at the the instructions. So, I I think that's kind of happening right now in in the tech world as well. I mean, I think I remember, as you said, like going into help centers or with with like documentations in general, if you had a problem, it was like you would check, but you wouldn't spend a lot of time on it because you kind of knew that you wouldn't get an answer there.

Oh, and like unless it's like a really, really, really frequent problem. But now, I've been seeing that, especially when it's a technical problem for a product, with with agents in the I am proper documentation, you can actually solve your problem. You can actually do something properly, which is I think an amazing feeling. What you said for agents, like can I say that now you're kind of also like targeting proper documentation for agents?

Or are you still like agents and people at the same time? Like what's the idea? Yeah, I mean, like people are still reading documentation. So, we we still care about that, and we want to have a good enough experience for them, but I do think like agents are growing incredibly fast in terms of like the percentage of our traffic, and so we are kind of pivoting our strategy and how we're building the product to think agent first, and be more of like this headless solution, and and try to understand like how agents actually read documentation, and like what level of detail they really need, and in order to make sure that whoever is using your product at the end of that agent request gets the the solution that they need.

In 2025, I think less than 10% of our traffic on like all of the documentation that we host was AI bots or scrapers or agents. Now, like we're 60% of our traffic is coming from agents. How do you How do you market for agents? It's like a whole new level of marketing in my mind. That is the the new frontier. I don't have the answer for that one.

But I I think in terms of marketing, I think it's showing like other users like how you can access documentation, update documentation, and like keep documentation fresh through agents, and like building all of those like connections like by creating an MCP server Mhm. for agents to be able to access that documentation to edit it on our behalf. So, I don't think we've figured out marketing to agents specifically, but our marketing to the people that use agents for now.

We'll get there eventually. And I mean like I think that's a struggle for everyone, right? Like one, is my website visible for agents? We even like create like like a free tool for that just people to check. And then, the second thing is like how much agent like traffic are we getting? And three, which is the most important part, how am I going to increase this traffic, you know, like not all people have the proper answer, and I think it's like a super new approach to marketing in the sense of like not targeting humans but agents.

And do you think like your job got harder after the AI taking over, you know, a way? Yeah, it's a good question. I feel like it's gotten harder in certain ways and easier in others. Like the way that it's gotten harder is I mean before like in product marketing I would figure out like what's our go-to-market strategy, talk to customers, understand like the marketing dynamics, and then like share that with the lifecycle marketer or a performance marketer or social media manager and they would like go off and you know, use that messaging strategy their different channels.

Now with AI, I think for marketing like as a whole, we're expected and can build all of these things ourselves. So it's gotten harder in that like I'm also creating campaigns in all these different channels that before there would be like a person dedicated to it. That might also be a reflection of like working at a small startup. So it's not necessarily the case across the board, but I think it's gotten harder in that way of like you're owning end to end kind of what you're creating and having to like understand the different dynamics of all those different channels.

But it's it's fun that way too cuz you get to own it. I also find that it's harder because I spend a lot of time like arguing with AI. It's not like I create a prompt and then I'm like, great, let me use that and go with it. I find an like an unfortunately high number of hours spent like going back and forth. And that's been been surprising and like a little frustrating to be honest.

So yeah, I'm always curious to hear like how people don't do that so that I can spend more time doing that. what you said is quite correct. I think that's one of the I'm not going to say like a problem, but one of the challenges of this new world where every role is now like a full cycle role. You're like from end to end responsible for everything.

Although like AI definitely helps a lot. You just also need to like we need to also understand that we are not experts of on everything. Like you cannot be a marketer who is an expert on tracking, but also creatives, also copywriting, also reporting that like that's impossible. But I feel like that's what people kind of expect now a bit. Yeah, yeah. Especially in startups for sure, but not only on startups.

I feel more and more these full cycle roles popping up. Yeah, totally. I think that expectation has grown a lot just because it is possible now. Like before, it would be an impossible ask. So, you're not necessarily going to get like the highest quality outcome if you're doing all of those things, but it is possible and you and you can figure it out. So, I think I think like I said, like it it can be really fulfilling to go from start to finish with that and see it it all plays out, but it's definitely harder and and more time-consuming in a way.

So, for you, the easy part is being able to do this, actually. Yeah, yeah. I I think like knowing that I can figure out how to do anything is really nice. And I think like on the product marketing side, too, a lot of what we do is trying to understand like market dynamics and staying on top of the news and what's happening in the space. And like that used to be really tough or you would have to buy like a $3,000 like research industry research report.

And now you don't have to do any of that. So, that's really nice. You can like stay on top of things much faster. It's cheaper and faster. Yeah. Yeah. But I would say like considering everything, do you think it's also I'm not going to say do you think like it's a yes or no, but like how is it for you to target more technical people? Because you're if I'm understanding correctly the whole thing, your target audience is quite technical because they are the ones who are kind of responsible of this technical documentation.

Is it again easier or like different than your previous audiences? Yeah, I think it is different from previous audiences. Like I've marketed to HR professionals, to marketing professionals, to product professionals in the past. I think in this space, marketing more to like developers, technical writers. It's just like they don't have a lot of patience for like marketing BS, you know, they just want to like cut through the noise.

Like like if you have like a really spiffy slogan, it's like red flag, don't trust this company. But like I think they they care more about actually understanding like how the the tech works. Like actually seeing like results, or like data behind the claims that you're making. Mhm. And I think this audience, I mean, they're just very They're just looking at everything through a really critical lens, and and I think you just have to be a a lot more transparent and straightforward with them.

So it can be challenging in some ways cuz I think there's like a lot of like marketing shortcuts you can take to make things look cool. Yeah. Have like a nice finish, but it doesn't necessarily have a lot of like weight to it. and so with this audience, you you can't really cut corners like that, and so that could be tricky. To me that sounds like an amazing audience, by the way.

Like super direct. You just You just do a good product, and then that's the marketing of the whole thing. That's That's That's the feeling at least I'm getting. But of course it must be tricky to convince an audience like that as well, because they're quite skeptical. And they want to see all the options, and then I think we circle back to the main point of like what are the competitive advantages that you have, and I feel like you double down on those.

But thank you. Thank you for the insights. we always end the podcast with a the same question, which is which is What has been lately inspiring you that you would like to share with us? Mhm. Well, I thought about that question, and I just picked the closest thing next to me, which is this book that I'm reading, which is called Sophie's World. Which Have you heard of it?

Yeah, of course. Is it really famous cuz it's like so new to me and I was like, "Wow, I had found this like hidden gem." But it was like written in 1991 by a Norwegian author and it's basically like the history of philosophy, told through the lens of like a 14-year-old girl. And I've been finding it really inspiring because, I mean, I don't like philosophy isn't something that I'm like personally passionate about, let's say.

Or like when I was studying it in school, I was not so into it. But now as I'm getting older and, you know, the world is changing and, you know, I'm evolving as a person, like I'm finding a lot of connection with this topic and like the big questions of the world. And so it's a really fascinating book because I'm learning so much about how philosophy has evolved and how humans understand kind of our place and how things work in the world.

And yeah, it's just super inspiring because it's, you know, opening my eyes to like how much we still don't know, how we're in like such a crazy time right now with AI and and how these questions are still relevant today. We haven't solved them. And that's what's really inspiring. Great great book, by the way. It's been a while since I've thought about this book. I think the language of it as well, it's like for everyone.

Like you can I first read this book when I think it was in like ninth grade or something because our teacher recommended it and then I read it again when I finished university for some reason, I don't know. And like every time I read, I found something that was like quite inspiring for that moment. For example, I still remember that there was a thing about being on top of rabbits like fur and then going down and like not being curious about the world.

And like how crazy the world that we're living in. That stuck for me for a really long time. So, Yeah. amazing book. I think maybe it's time to read it again. Thank you. Thank you for the recommendation. Of course. Yeah. Thank you so much for your time. It's been amazing. I would love to ask more but I trying to keep this podcast not too long since everybody has like 5 seconds like times to focus.

But, thank you for joining us and thank you for everyone for joining us and listening and have a great day. Yeah. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Talk to you soon. Have a good one. Ciao. Bye.