Building 90 AI Agents Inside a $2B ARR Marketing Team | Holly Chen, Samsara

Samsara is one of the most advanced examples of AI adoption inside the marketing team of a large public company. Holly Chen, VP of Growth Marketing, shares the marketing team’s approach.

A big part of their success came from a deliberate three-phase rollout that moved the marketing organization from a leadership mandate to company-wide enablement and, ultimately, sustained momentum. The whole approach runs on a bottoms-up philosophy: the people closest to the pain points are the ones building the solutions, rather than AI development being centralized within a small team.

Holly also shares how AI has changed the way her team hires, why she looks for a specific kind of AI fluency in candidates, and why she believes every marketer needs to become a Marketing Engineer.

We discuss:

• The three-stage rollout: mandate, enablement, and sustained momentum
• Why bottoms-up AI adoption outlasts top-down mandates
• How a 230-person team built 90 AI agents (and how they keep them running)
• Samsara’s AI governing body 
• The hackathons and monthly AI Power Hour that keep teams building
• Why Holly values judgment over taste in the age of AI
• The biggest hiring mistake marketers make in the AI era

Connect with Holly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly

Samsara: https://www.samsara.com

Connect with Profound

Website: https://tryprofound.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/

X: https://x.com/tryprofound

Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer

Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

Resources Mentioned

• Gong: https://www.gong.io 
• Playwright: https://playwright.dev 
• Gumloop: https://www.gumloop.com/ 
• Holly’s Substack: https://hollychen.substack.com 

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.