Marketing has become a function overwhelmed by complexity, fragmented tooling, and short-term performance obsession. António Alegria, co-founder of DOJO AI, believes that this complexity is not only unsustainable — it’s broken. But AI, when built thoughtfully, can help marketers refocus on what matters: brand, strategy, and sustainable growth.
In this in-depth conversation with Sandra Leonor, Head of Ops at Laika Ventures, António reflects on the evolution of the marketing role, the pitfalls of current AI tools, and why giving marketers ownership again is both necessary and exciting.
Sandra Leonor (Laika Ventures): You work at the intersection of AI and marketing at DOJO AI. When did you start noticing a shift in the marketer’s role due to AI?
António Alegria (DOJO AI): Honestly, I think the shift began well before ChatGPT made AI more mainstream. With the digitization of marketing and the increasing central role for content and brand distribution and advertising of platforms like Google and Meta — which are heavily AI-driven — marketing teams found themselves drowning in complexity, and with a tendency to get worse.
Sandra: So AI wasn’t simplifying marketing — it was adding more layers of complexity?
António: From 2010 to the early 2020s, these tools, and channels were using AI as a way to solve marketing, but in fact it brought much more complexity, since it increased the operating possibilities, the number of tools – breaking marketing. When we found ourselves in 2020, the average enterprise was using roughly 130 different applications and the number of Martech vendors exploded from 150 to 15,000 in less 15 years. AI was already being used for optimization and so-called “personalization”, but mostly at the level of tools and channels — not to transform how teams actually work. As a result, they were being too operational instead of doing fundamental work of strategy, being creative, and focusing on selling more, growing the brand and having sustainable growth. In other words, marketers ended up spending more time managing integrations in different tools, than doing actual marketing.
Sandra: You mentioned earlier that marketers were overwhelmed with tools and data. What are some of the most damaging ways that AI or data misuse has affected marketing teams?
António: It’s related to the concept of attribution, being able to understand where we’re putting our efforts and what are the returns of marketing spend. Many tools and technologies claimed to have a very clear idea of attribution, which many times was false since it came from let’s call it classic AI, and were fooling the marketing teams.
Sandra: Teams were relying on data that looked reliable — but actually misled them. Is that it?
António: Yes, so these teams were working with siloed data, wrong data, with the promise of being correct and being able to bring value. And the teams were investing a lot on performance marketing, not investing in brand, investing in these tools, which we understood in 2020, before the AI boom, that it was not sustainable. Teams were investing more money than what they were bringing to the business, not growing the brand, not knowing who the brand is, and marketing ended up being discredited.
Sandra: Has anything changed recently — especially with the rise of tools like ChatGPT and newer forms of AI?
António: Looking back to 2022 and 2023, there was in fact an inflection point where AI started to be used by marketers, not as a tool that they have to manage, but with the potential of something that could transform the way they work. But there still is a big gap between enterprises and challenger brands in terms of AI adoption. Statistics tell us that 60% of enterprises are starting to use AI versus the challenger brands that are lagging behind with 40%.
Sandra: Why do you think that happens? Why are challenger brands falling behind?
António: Because enterprises can spend lots of money to try to connect technologies to workflows to several channels and several tools. And challenger brands have more difficulty and keep on using lots of tools.
Sandra: You told me before that you’ve always liked the marketing role in a company and that there was a big opportunity to apply this technology of the moment in that industry. Was this shift that led you to build DOJO?
António: We’re trying to bring to marketers the ownership and agency on strategy and execution in a sustainable and effective way to the business. We want to make marketing, not an area that is constantly living in challenges, being discredited and not being trustworthy, or reliable to the rest of the organization, but as an area that is an example, something to be proud of, enabling marketers to raise their heads again and with other areas such as product and sales.
Sandra: You mentioned that marketers can now go back to being more strategic and less operational, focusing on what is truly marketing (caring about the brand, understanding who they are, who is the target, and defining actions in that way). So marketing became too focused on performance, and now we can actually change that?
António: Yes, because marketing became a function very much dependent on performance marketing, almost in an exclusive way, calculating how much to spend, let’s say x, to then expect the return x+y. But this is only true to ads that target people who are already ready to buy, they have that intention and are looking for that sort of product. So when that specific ad appears they will convert, but it is not linear. You can't convert 10 today, 20 tomorrow and 30 after that. It will actually start to decrease.
Marketing got stuck in a loop of spending on ads to convert existing demand — the low-hanging fruit. But once that fruit is picked, the returns diminish. I witnessed many companies swinging between over-investing in performance, then trying to invest in brand in a very ad hoc way. It is very complex to do effective and at scale campaigns (with many different campaigns running and one single human can manage them). It became a very overwhelming job of constantly managing tools, dealing with fragmented data, and losing sight of strategy. Because it is overwhelming, marketers can’t take a step back to think about where they are, where they want to go, how they can execute and can’t think strategically. They end up in a cycle: spend, burn out the channel, panic, switch to brand, then back again. It’s not strategic. It’s not sustainable. And I think AI can help with that. AI can help them to understand the impact of their work, to learn, adjust, and return feedback into the system.
Sandra: One of the challenges is trust. Trusting the data, as you mentioned. Many times we trust in the suggestions that tools provide us, when in fact they are inducing errors. We trust them blindly, even when there aren’t results, because the data is supposedly correct. So how do you build confidence in AI-generated outputs, both internally (DOJO can trust the data that it is collecting and working on) and with clients (how can we guarantee that they trust our data)?
António: 39% of marketers report they don’t feel confident in using AI in a safe way and a third of them have accuracy concerns. This has been a foundational principle at DOJO. A tool must be reliable for daily use and to actually transform how you work — and most AI tools aren’t.
Sandra: So the problem is how most tools are built?
António: It’s easy to build a flashy demo that does 80% of the work, but hard to build the final 20% that ensures the tool is truly dependable. We invested heavily to achieve that and we did it in three ways:
1. We focus on transparency - showing the user what was the thought process, providing an easy to use UX (user experience), what were the data sources used by the system and by the agents;
2. We have a system that is able to learn and improve with users feedback;
3. And it adapts when encountering errors and problems. DOJO’s architecture is built to use multiple different agents, with validation layers. Users can see which data sources were used, how reasoning happens, and whether outputs align with known facts in our system. Our multi-agent architecture allows internal consistency checks. When a system works 99.9999% of the time, it changes how you work. You stop second-guessing, and start focusing on impact.
Sandra: With this kind of system, how does the marketer’s role evolve?
António: First, from the user's point of view, I think it’s important people use, test, and try different use cases that they never thought of before and try it with AI, and understand where you can go further. I see a lot of regular people that don’t know what’s possible with AI. These tools are capable of much but it’s not hyper available, either because you need to integrate with other platforms and it may not work 100% of the time. It’s in fact complex and a lot of marketers still use AI for content production. Only 70% of marketers use it weekly.
Sandra: That’s lower than I’d expect.
António: There is experimentation but not much systemic integration, which goes back to the point solutions. DOJO is solving this fragmentation problem which opens a lot of doors to marketers. In our platform the marketer doesn’t have to understand AI and its several use cases and its potential, because they have everything connected, with frameworks and an user experience that allows you to do your job, think about your job, in what you want to do, and we take care of those details for you. While using the tool, you will learn how useful AI is. We’ve seen a huge potential for generalists. So, marketers will become more strategic and generalist. They don’t need to be tool specialists (Google ads, Meta ads) anymore — they need to think across marketing, product, sales.
Sandra: So, in your perspective, there will be a shift from incredibly specialized professionals in using certain tools and techniques, as we’ve seen until now in marketing but also in other areas, to AI taking care of that and people returning to the basics.
António: Exactly. Marketing teams expanded a lot with these specialists and data analysts. There was an over-head that made it difficult to operate as one. Most marketers today are still stuck in operational loops, overwhelmed by tools, chasing dashboards without clarity. DOJO, for example, handles complexity, integrations, and execution layers. It’s like giving them an Iron Man suit to operate at the goals level, outcomes level, value level and understand how to operate every day. AI — if integrated well — gives them time and agency to think, to plan, to execute strategically and iterate in real time. Marketers start to operate on the same day, same hour, instead of quarterly cycles.
Sandra: By changing the role, there will be a need to change their skills. What kind of skills do you then think that marketers will develop?
António: Back to fundamentals — brand strategy, cross-functional thinking, outcome-driven mindset, performance marketing but on a strategic level. This time it’s not a specialization in tools but rather understanding how the different marketing areas connect, how can I leverage them to execute my goals, how does marketing contribute to the other areas of the company, such as product but specially sales.
Sandra: How about data analytics skills since there will be more data to analyze?
António: I wouldn’t say marketers will need technical data analytics skills but they will need to understand the data in a structured way and how data can impact the execution.
Sandra: And what about learning how to write good prompts?
António: In terms of using AI tools, I wouldn’t say they will need prompt engineering knowledge since, in my perspective, tools will evolve so that the user doesn’t have to. The irony is that tools like DOJO help marketers relearn marketing. They rediscover what makes good content, good messaging, good growth — instead of just “how to gain the algorithm” or fighting dashboards. More than adapting their skills, marketers feel overwhelmed since what they are doing doesn’t fit their skills. Tools will become more natural and human.
Sandra: We’re almost in the end. What excites you most about this new era of marketing?
António: What excites me more is the democratization of excellent marketing and great enterprise marketing and best in class marketing to the challengers brands. That challenger brands can finally compete with enterprise-level sophistication. That marketing can be fun again. Another thing that excited me is that we can connect brands to performance, to revenue, almost in real time. Not waiting for quarterly results, but measuring and iterating within hours. It’s connected with something that I’m very passionate about: bringing speed and agility in how a function works. That’s very transforming in how people work.
Sandra: And what concerns you? Is there anything in this future of AI and Marketing that could scare you?
António: I don’t think I have special concerns since I’m very optimistic about how things can evolve. However, I can say that in DOJO we’re working towards fighting the noise that exists in marketing — a lot of content powered by AI, with bad quality. I think it can get worse with social media and the other channels that exist. This doesn’t concern me from the marketers’ perspective but from a consumer, market and audience perspective. People can have a hard time managing the increase in noise. I worry that those platforms (Meta, Google, TikTok, etc) optimize for volume, engagement over value. Marketing can become too effective. Persuasion is very powerful. It’s not about convincing, it’s about manipulating. That scares me — for society, not just marketing.
Another concern is over-centralization of AI platforms. This is not so much marketing-related but AI-related. We may end up with just a few AI providers/vendors shaping everything.
Final statement:
Marketing doesn’t have to be a function overwhelmed by tools and noise. As António puts it, with the right kind of AI, marketers can finally focus, move fast — and take pride in their craft again.