SaaS companies today are under more pressure than ever to grow fast, but scaling beyond $100M ARR isn’t just about bigger marketing budgets—it’s about working smarter. Sahil Sethi, VP of Global Product Marketing at Freshworks and author of Product Marketing Level Up, has been exploring how AI, in collaboration with human creativity, is redefining the modern marketer’s playbook. In this conversation, Sethi unpacks the strategies and technologies helping companies thrive in today’s fast-evolving, AI-first market.
Mr. Sethi, thank you for joining us today. AI has been transformative across many sectors, but product marketing has its own unique challenges. McKinsey indicates that marketing and sales have seen some of the largest revenue increases from gen AI. Could you share how AI has impacted your space?
Great to be here. AI has certainly disrupted product marketing, particularly in SaaS. While other industries have seen mixed success, for us, AI has proven incredibly valuable. Much of the traditional marketing grind—like sifting through data or segmenting audiences—has improved significantly. It’s not just about customer-facing tools like personalized outreach, either. AI helps us process vast amounts of product data, which translates into accelerated pipeline growth.
On the backend, automating the data-heavy tasks allows companies to scale more efficiently, even with smaller teams. AI enhances our speed and precision, helping shorten the early go-to-market cycles. This efficiency is incredibly important for any SaaS company looking to gain and maintain momentum.
You’ve touched on the importance of AI, but let’s talk about “augmented intelligence”—AI and human collaboration. How does this apply to product marketing?
Augmented intelligence is all about AI enhancing human work, not replacing it. As I mention in Product Marketing Level Up, modern marketing success comes from blending AI’s precision with human creativity. AI can handle the data analysis and predictive modeling, allowing marketers to focus on the craft—the storytelling, and building emotional connections with customers. In SaaS, where products need to evolve rapidly based on user data, this partnership is constantly in play.
I think the AI conversation often overemphasizes ‘revolution’ rather than ‘evolution’. While AI helps speed things up, human teams still shape the strategy and creative direction. More broadly, AI-assisted work is opening doors for marketers to engage in higher-level strategy. That’s where the ROI of AI-enhanced collaboration becomes apparent—AI frees up time, and marketers reinvest it into more impactful work.
From a purely financial perspective, you can make the same argument. It reduces time-to-market and enables quicker pivots based on customer feedback. You invest in AI, and you get human cycles back—it’s a highly effective way to approach marketing today.
You’ve spoken about ROI and AI-human partnership, and there’s been a lot of buzz about AI technologies like hyper-personalization. What trends do you see shaping the future of product marketing?
One of the most exciting trends is causal AI. Traditional AI models are great at predictive analytics, but causal AI goes a step further. It helps answer questions like, “What happens if we change this one variable?” and provides clear feedback, with data points, about how it will impact your revenue model, or individual metrics like customer engagement. Causal AI will help us better understand our buyer personas and make smarter, faster decisions, and that’s going to be incredible for the industry.
In a more grounded sense, it could be a powerful tool for allocating marketing budgets more effectively because you can justify every dollar spent with a data-backed reason. This level of transparency and accuracy is exactly what investors are looking for—clear, actionable insights that optimize growth.
Looking ahead, where do you see AI taking product marketing over the next five to ten years?
I think the future will revolve around explainable AI. As models become more complex, marketers will need to understand why AI makes certain decisions—not just what those decisions are. Explainable AI will give us deeper insights into the “why” behind customer behavior, which will help refine our strategies with more confidence.
Ultimately, explainable AI will lead to more transparent, data-driven decisions, but human intuition and creativity will always be needed to bring those insights to life. As I emphasize in my book, AI won’t replace marketers—it will give them more time to focus on storytelling, empathy, and building connections with customers.
Thank you for your time, Mr. Sethi.
Thank you—it’s been a pleasure.
AI might be reshaping the future of product marketing, but as Mr. Sethi emphasizes, the differentiator will be how and where AI is integrated to enhance human creativity and decision-making. “It’s not a question of whether AI will take over,” Sethi says, “it’s about how we integrate AI to enhance what the team is already capable of.” Learn more about his insights in his blog and his book, Product Marketing Level Up.
