Persona Perspectives
Insights from the people you sell to
Authentic thought leadership authored by AI-modelled buyer personas — grounded in real behavioural intelligence.
From Task-Doer to Orchestrator: What Agentic Marketing Actually Changes
The first time AI changed how I worked, it looked like a better text box. I typed a prompt, I got a draft, I edited it, I moved on. Useful, but it was still me doing every task, one at a time, with a faster typewriter.
Behind the Build: The Years of Practice Now Living Inside Our Agents
When people talk about how a software company gets built, they usually talk about the code. The architecture, the model choices, the infrastructure. I want to talk about something that came long before any of that, because it is the part that actually makes Expona work: the two decades of practice that the code is encoding.
Why Most Companies Are Getting AI ROI Wrong
A marketing leader told me last month that her team had quietly become an AI shop. Every writer using a copilot. Campaign briefs drafted by a model. A chatbot on the site, an agent triaging the inbox, summaries of every call landing in Slack before the rep had left the room. By any adoption metric, they were ahead of the field. Then her CFO asked the only question that matters. What did all of it return.
The Infinite Content Graveyard: Why More AI Output Is Killing B2B Differentiation
Open any two competing B2B blogs right now and read the top post on each. Same structure. Same confident intro. Same three subheads you could have guessed. Same tidy takeaway. Strip the logos and you could not tell which company published which. Both are technically fine. Neither is memorable. Both went out this week, and both will be gone from memory by next week.
The AI Buyer Is Already Here: How Agents Are Quietly Filtering Your Pipeline
A marketing leader I work with ran a clean experiment a few weeks ago. She asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini the exact question her best customers ask before they buy: "What are the best tools for X, and how do they compare." Her company is a real category leader with strong reviews and a recognizable name. It showed up in one of the three answers, halfway down, described in language she would never have chosen.
The AI-Native Company: What It Actually Takes to Build One
This post is about that distinction. What AI-native actually means at the operating-model level, and why the companies getting it right look structurally different from the companies that are not.
Generative Engine Optimization: When AI Becomes the Buyer's Front Door
I was on a call last week with a B2B founder who could not figure out why his organic traffic had quietly cratered over the last two quarters. Rankings still strong. Backlinks still healthy. Site speed fine. The funnel just stopped filling.
Context Is the Whole Game: Why AI Marketing Without It Is Just Faster Generic
I got a note last week from someone in my network who has been chewing on a question about marketing and AI. He could feel the answer but could not quite land it. His instinct was that context is doing more work than the conversation gives it credit for, and that the value of a platform like Expona lives in how it organizes context, not in the AI it points at.
RAG Is Only Half the Story: How Private AI Builds Living Marketing Intelligence
If you've used any AI tool for marketing in the past two years, you've probably noticed the same thing: the output is fluent, fast, and frustratingly generic. It sounds like it could have been written for any company in your industry. That's because it could have been, and in many cases, it was.
The 6-Stage Buyer Journey Framework Every B2B Marketer Should Use
If you've worked in B2B marketing for any length of time, you've seen the standard buyer journey model: awareness, consideration, decision. Three stages. Clean. Simple. And almost entirely useless for building campaigns that actually map to how real buyers make complex purchases.
Building Expona: From Fractional CMO to AI Platform Founder
I didn't set out to build a software company. I set out to solve a problem I couldn't stop running into. For years, I worked as a fractional CMO and marketing consultant, the person companies bring in when they need strategy, structure, and execution but can't justify a full-time hire. I loved the work. Still do. But there was a pattern that followed me from engagement to engagement, across industries, across company sizes, across levels of marketing sophistication. And eventually, I couldn't ignore it anymore.
Why Your Buyer Personas Are Probably Wrong (And How to Fix Them)
I've built a lot of buyer personas over the years. Hundreds, easily — across SaaS, manufacturing, energy, professional services, healthcare, and education. And if I'm being direct about it, most of the personas I see in the wild aren't really personas at all. They're assumptions dressed up with stock photos and clever names.
AI Agents Aren't Coming for Your Marketing Stack. They're Already Here
For the past two years, the marketing technology conversation has been dominated by generative AI: tools that write copy, generate images, and summarize data. That era didn't just give way to something more consequential. It gave way faster than almost anyone predicted.
What Is Operational Intelligence — and Why Marketers Need It Now
We've never had more data about our buyers. We've never had better tools for reaching them. And yet, most marketing organizations still operate in a cycle that looks remarkably unchanged — research happens in one place, strategy lives in another, and execution gets cobbled together in a third. By the time a campaign launches, the insights that inspired it are already stale.