How your marketing team can adopt AI in one day

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We all know it’s time to get on board with AI or get left behind. But what’s not clear is how.

There are seemingly infinite tools you can use, infinite problems you could solve with AI…and infinite hurdles to get your whole team on board: lack of time, fear of breaking things, unclear ROI, tool sprawl. It’s easy to stall out.

Here’s my solution: the Marketing AI Hackathon

This idea isn’t just borrowed from engineers, or even Clay’s recent GTM hackathons. It’s also rooted in something we did when I was leading marketing at Asana. We carved out intentional space for experimentation.

Every quarter, the entire company participated in a set of one-day hackathons and two themed “special weeks”: Polish Week, for user-facing improvements you could ship fast, and Grease Week, for internal tooling and process fixes.

These rituals were built into our culture—and they worked. Some of my favorite moments at Asana (and some of the most fun features, like the flying yetis and unicorns when you complete tasks) came out of these special weeks. Fun, sure. But also shippable.

Yet so few companies make time for things like this.

When I saw Clay was running hackathons with their customers, I had some flashbacks. And I realized: a hackathon ritual for marketing teams (and maybe your entire GTM team) is a viable way to get your team to adopt and try AI. And this newsletter was born…

In this newsletter:

• Part 1: The AI adoption challenge »

  • Why Hackathons are a great solution

  • How the Clay team runs hackathons with customers

  • How you can run an internal marketing AI hackathon with your team

• Part 2: What to build during your marketing AI hackathon »

  • Tools we recommend for hackathons (and adopting AI in general)

  • Details on project ideas you can actually ship in a day

  • Access to our prompt library, idea generator, and mini-tools (for paid subs)

• Part 3: What team MKT1 made during our own hackathon »

  • How we turned a spreadsheet

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