Topline

Tim Rutten, CMO of Backbase, the €2.5 billion Amsterdam tech company whose AI-native Banking OS powers 120+ banks worldwide, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman with the clearest AI ROI numbers we have heard on the show: double the pipeline on 25% less budget. Topics include the custom go-to-market operating system his team built on the Vercel stack, why real bank deployments are 99% deterministic, the 90% cost reduction banks are finding in customer care, and why most enterprise workloads do not need frontier-model intelligence. Plus, where the AI bubble breaks, what happens to judgment and taste when anyone can generate output, and a bulls-versus-bears round on LinkedIn, banking apps, and sales spiffs.
Key Takeaways:
- Backbase's marketing org runs on GTMOS, a custom go-to-market operating system built on the Vercel stack and wired into Salesforce and the company's finance tools, and the numbers behind it are specific. As Tim Rutten, CMO at Backbase, put it: "Double the pipeline, 25% head cut on my budget... So with 25% less budget, I'm actually still doubling the pipeline." The unlock came from rebuilding how the team works rather than layering tools on top of it.
- Shipping AI into a regulated industry means using AI more narrowly than you might expect. On what real bank deployments look like, Tim Rutten said: "the actual implementations are almost 99% deterministic, and there's this one little percent that actually gets them to gain, to reason at the right moment in time." That same architecture caps the bill, because most banking workloads are repetitive and rule-bound. But the same rigor can net fantastic results from AI in broader applications as well.
- Backbase treats AI slop as an architecture problem, containing content generation inside hard boundaries. Per Tim Rutten: "You have tone of voice, you have guardrails that we don't have AI slop. There's like 22 rules that are applied. If they don't check out, the agent needs to rewrite and continuously learns to rewrite." The human half of the risk is harder to engineer around, as Asad Zaman, CEO of Sales Talent Agency, framed it: "a lot of people that didn't have a skill are using AI for that thing. And if you didn't have a skill in an area or judgment or taste in that particular area, you have no mechanism to stress test the quality of what is coming out."
- On how the AI bubble pops, Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion, put the risk on the business model sitting underneath the capex: "if everybody presumes the way that all these companies make money is selling tokens… and then all of a sudden it turns out selling tokens is a really terrible business. Well, then that's a thing that would compress." Tim Rutten lands in a similar place on timing while staying long on the outcome: "a little bit bearish on timing, massively bullish on the future… it will happen nevertheless, but it's going to be a very rocky ride."
Connect with the Hosts & Guests:
Host: Sam Jacobs, CEO at Pavilion - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/
Host: AJ Bruno, CEO at QuotaPath - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajbruno3/
Host: Asad Zaman, CEO at STA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/azaman1/
Guest: Tim Rutten, CMO at Backbase - https://www.linkedin.com/in/timrutten/
Topline is more than a YouTube Channel:
Subscribe to Topline Newsletter: https://toplinemedia.substack.com/
Tune into Topline Podcast, the #1 podcast for founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-podcast
Join the free Topline Slack channel to connect with 600+ revenue leaders to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-slack
Chapters:
00:00 Introducing Tim Rutten
03:11 Inside Backbase And 120 Banks
09:42 90% Cost Cuts In Call Centers
12:04 Why The Application Layer Wins
15:23 Europe, The US, And Regulation
21:50 Where The AI Bubble Breaks
27:24 Why Banks Skip Frontier Models
34:34 Bank Budgets Shift To AI Native
38:23 Real ROI At Lloyds And JPMorgan
44:31 Quiz Pro Quo
49:37 GTMOS, The Go To Market OS
52:02 Double Pipeline On 25% Less Budget
53:53 Judgment, Taste, And AI Slop
1:06:15 Real Time Marketing By Christmas
1:09:30 Bulls and Bears

Buyers stopped picking up the phone. They research on their own, ask their peers, and now they ask AI which vendors to consider before a single salesperson ever hears about it. So where does that leave marketers?
Sam Jacobs sits down with Alexander Kesler, founder and CEO of Infuse, to break down the dark funnel and what it means for B2B demand gen right now. They get into why most of the buying journey happens before you're ever contacted, how AI tools are generating "day one" shortlists on the spot, and why the real game is earning a spot on the day zero shortlist — the vendors a buyer already trusts no matter what ChatGPT says.
Alex has spent 25+ years building companies across marketing, media, and data, and is the author of two books on B2B marketing best practices. His advice for marketers comes down to one thing: stay flexible, read the research, and build the relationship before the buyer is in market.

What we get into:
Why the traditional B2B sales funnel no longer reflects how today's buyers actually buy
What the Dark Funnel is and why 80% of the buying journey happens before prospects contact sales
The difference between Day Zero and Day One shortlists and why every marketer needs to understand both
How AI and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) are reshaping vendor discovery
Why building trust and thought leadership before buyers are in-market is the new competitive advantage
Alex Kesler's advice for modern B2B marketers on staying relevant in an AI-first world
Chapters:
00:00 Intro 00:36 Meet Alex Kesler and Infuse 03:10 The dark funnel explained 05:16 Why buyers don't want to talk to sales anymore 08:07 The AI buying journey and Day One shortlists 11:28 GEO: Winning recommendations from AI search 14:07 Day Zero vs. Day One: The new marketing playbook
16:06 Marketing 101 is making a comeback 16:27 Why ABM can limit your growth 17:35 The #1 trait every modern B2B marketer needs 19:20 Alex's leadership philosophy: Do the right thing 20:36 Where to find Alex and Infuse
Try Infuse: infuse.com

A rep says "follow up on that" on a call, then buries it under five more calls and a late-night inbox. Three days later the deal's gone cold, but the CRM still says it's live. The manager forecasts off that. 

The CRO forecasts off the manager. The board asks the CEO if anyone actually has a grip on the number. The whole thing was built on a promise nobody kept. 
Adam Liska worked on the early Gemini models at Google DeepMind before leaving to close that gap. His company, airspeed, just raised a $20M Series A on a bet that "revenue execution" is the next real category, not another tool that logs calls and calls it intelligence. 
Sam Jacobs traces the full arc with him: DeepMind to founder-led sales to the unglamorous work of turning a founder's instincts into a system a team can actually run. 
What we get into: 
Why "follow up on that" breaks the forecast chain from rep to CRO to board What "revenue execution" means, and why it isn't revenue intelligence with a new label 
Whether you own the interface or hand it to a chat model and live as middleware 
The Nashville lunch that became airspeed's first six-figure deal 
The real sequence from founder-led to scalable: capture the data first, then build the playbooks 
Owning your data instead of renting Salesforce's architecture 
The modern Turing test, AI-native orgs, and where the back office is headed
Chapters:  
00:00 Intro
00:44 From DeepMind to airspeed, and the $20M Series A 
01:30 "Follow up on that" — the execution gap that breaks forecasts 
04:00 What category is this? Revenue execution, defined 
05:40 Headless vs. owning the interface 
08:00 The origin story: leaving DeepMind in 2022 
11:39 Founder-led sales and the Nashville lunch that closed a six-figure deal 
13:18 The hard part: turning founder-led into a repeatable system 
14:14 Why they recorded everything from day one 
16:35 Owning your data, and where the source of truth lives 
19:03 The playbook: data first, then hierarchical playbooks 
20:52 Influences: the modern Turing test and AI-native orgs 
23:37 Where to find airspeed 
Try airspeed: goairspeed.com

Marc Ferrentino, Co-Founder and CEO of Quotient and former chief technical architect at Salesforce, joins Sam Jacobs and Asad Zaman to separate AI-marketing hype from what actually works today. Marc's core claim: the 'AI CMO' is marketing fiction, and the real near-term unlock is clearing the roughly 70% of a marketer's day lost to busywork, so smaller teams can finally operate like big ones. Topics include the collapse of specialized marketing roles into cross-functional generalists, why the apprenticeship model that trained classic marketers is most at risk, where the durable edge moves as performance marketing gets automated... and how taste separates real work from AI slop. Plus, a Quiz Pro Quo trivia round on famous tech emails, an honest look at ageism facing marketers in their 40s and 50s, and a Bulls and Bears debate on legacy martech, HubSpot, and Figma.
Key Takeaways:
- Marc's near-term promise to marketers is not an AI CMO but the removal of busywork. As he puts it: "companies that come out and claim to be your AI CMO… I think that is the most misleading marketing, but it's also just not true." Buckle up for a story or two about how he's seen the "AI CMO" blow up in people's faces.
- The hiring bar is shifting from raw craft to AI fluency. In Marc's words: "we're all looking for the 10x developer, but the 10x developer who knows how to use AI is a 100x developer. And so it's the same thing with the marketer… the marketer who knows how to use AI is a 100x marketer… That's the person we want on the team." And he shares how his own developer interviews changed to match.
- Marketing roles are not disappearing, but the specialist ladder that trained seasoned marketers is eroding. As Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion, put it: "I see the collapse of specialization within a particular function. That doesn't diminish the need for the function, but does create an opportunity for those that are more fluent in all of these cross-functional tools." His deeper worry is the pipeline: "the apprenticeship model is the thing that's most at risk," raising the prospect of "a lack of classically trained marketers."
- Ageism is real in marketing hiring, and it often hides inside neutral-sounding language. Asad Zaman, CEO of STA, observed, clients are saying things like: "I'm looking for somebody with high energy. High energy is like, I need somebody who is 30 to 33… high energy is like an age, basically." To what extent do the hosts agree with this perspective? Only one way to find out...
Connect with the Hosts & Guests:
Host: Sam Jacobs, CEO at Pavilion - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/
Host: Asad Zaman, CEO at STA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/azaman1/
Guest: Marc Ferrentino, Co-Founder & CEO at Quotient - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcferrentino/
Topline is more than a YouTube Channel:
Subscribe to Topline Newsletter: https://toplinemedia.substack.com/
Tune into Topline Podcast, the #1 podcast for founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-podcast
Join the free Topline Slack channel to connect with 600+ revenue leaders to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-slack
Chapters: 
00:00 Introducing Marc Ferrentino
02:09 Where AI Actually Works Today
04:05 The 'AI CMO' Is a Lie
07:10 AI Multiplies, Not Replaces
12:11 The Collapse of Specialization
15:10 The Apprenticeship Model at Risk
16:11 The Real Edge Is Brand
21:18 AI Slop and the Taste Problem
23:02 Marketing for the Rest of Business
35:15 Are the Models Asymptoting?
39:01 Quiz Pro Quo
44:44 Ageism in Marketing
49:18 Curiosity over Age
58:34 The 100x Marketer
1:03:54 Bulls VS Bears

A CEO walks into a board meeting knowing exactly what to say then freezes. A sales rep doomscrolls between calls and shows up to the next one flat. A founder grinds toward the exit, only to sacrifice their relationships and themselves along the way.
The problem isn't always strategy, skill, or effort. Sometimes, it's the nervous system.
Kevin Bailey knows this firsthand. After building a high-growth tech company with around 100 employees, he noticed something strange: some days he was exceptionally creative and productive. Other days, he'd stare at his computer for hours and accomplish almost nothing.
That experience eventually led him to earn a master's in applied neuroscience from King's College London and co-found Dream Fuel, a mental performance coaching company helping founders, executives, and sales teams perform at their best under pressure.
Sam Jacobs sits down with Kevin to unpack the neuroscience of peak performance and why the mental skills used by professional athletes, fighter pilots, and special forces operators may be just as critical for CEOs and revenue leaders.
What we get into:
Why founders and executives need mental performance coaching not just executive coaching or therapy The four nervous system states that shape how you perform under pressure Why a freeze response can lower your IQ and leave you struggling for words How doomscrolling between calls can hurt your performance on the next one The neuroscience behind breathwork and nervous system regulation Why presence and awareness are the foundations of peak performance How to move from fight, flight, or freeze back to a state of centeredness Why grinding doesn't have to come at the expense of your relationships or your life The mental performance advantage professional athletes have understood for years How to reach the end of the founder journey with both the outcomeand yourself intact
Chapters:
00:00 Intro 00:34 Meet Kevin Bailey and Dream Fuel 01:44 From tech founder to mental performance coaching 04:19 Why mental performance matters more in the age of AI 05:57 Why CEOs need the kind of coaching elite athletes already have 07:24 Therapy vs. mental performance coaching 09:03 What Michael Jordan can teach us about presence under pressure 11:31 The four nervous system performance zones 12:38 Why executives get stuck in fight, flight, and freeze 13:46 What doomscrolling does to your dopamine and performance 15:07 How to regulate your nervous system 15:30 The neuroscience of breathwork and centeredness 17:08 What changes when you master mental performance 18:55 How to win without sacrificing everything that matters 20:19 Kevin's biggest influences and recommended resources 21:49 Where to find Kevin Bailey and Dream Fuel 22:35 Outro
Try Dreamfuel: dreamfuel.com