For more than a decade, marketing automation has been one of the most thankless workflows in B2B software. Marketing teams spend over half their time on monotonous tasks: building segments, QAing nurtures, cleaning lists, pulling reports, debugging syncs. Most of that work shouldn’t have been manual a decade ago. With AI, none of it has to be.
Today, we ship Conversion Agents: the first agent layer built natively into a marketing automation platform. With Conversion Agents, marketers describe what they want and AI agents do the work. We call it “vibe marketing.”
The problem with legacy marketing automation
Marketing automation hasn’t fundamentally changed since 2010. Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, and Eloqua were built for a world where MOps teams would manually configure every workflow, segment, and nurture. The platforms are powerful, but they’re also brittle, expensive, and demand armies of specialists to operate.
In the last 12 months, AI changed every other corner of the GTM stack. Sales reps stopped doing manual research. SDRs stopped drafting outbound from scratch. Support teams stopped writing macros. Engineers stopped writing boilerplate.
The legacy MAPs responded by bolting “AI features” on top of their existing systems. But bolt-ons can’t fix architectures that were never designed for agents to operate inside them.
We believed the category needed to be rebuilt from scratch, with AI agents as the system itself.
What we set out to build
Four years ago, James and I started Conversion to bet against Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, and Eloqua. We thought the category had stopped making customer love a priority. So we spent the next four years sitting with MOps operators. The people debugging syncs at 2am, cleaning lists on Sundays, building segments nobody else understood, holding the back-end of every revenue org together.
We learned three things that shaped the product:
- Most MOps work is structured, repetitive, and high-stakes. Building a segment, QAing a nurture, pulling a report. Each task is well-defined, follows clear rules, and has a small surface area where the cost of a mistake is high. It’s the perfect fit for agents.
- The data layer is the bottleneck. AI is only as useful as the data it can act on. Most legacy MAPs sit downstream of the CRM and warehouse, syncing data through fragile pipelines. Agents on top of stale data are agents that hallucinate.
- MOps teams want leverage, not replacement. They want to spend less time on busywork and more time on the work they were actually hired for: positioning, narrative, lifecycle strategy, pipeline architecture.
Conversion Agents is the product they asked us to build and the one we wished we had. I couldn’t be prouder of the outcome.
Introducing Conversion Agents
Conversion Agents lets marketing and MOps teams describe what they want in plain English and have AI agents do the work. It runs in two modes.
Chat Companion
A real-time agent that handles in-the-moment requests. Type “send a re-engagement nurture to enterprise accounts that haven’t logged in this month, A/B test two subject lines.” The agent pulls live data from your CRM and warehouse, builds the segment, drafts the copy, sets up the test, and hands it back as an artifact for one click to launch.
What used to take hours takes 10 minutes.
Recurring Agents
Autonomous workflows that run on a schedule or a trigger. They post Friday performance digests in Slack. They qualify and route every new lead. They monitor sync health across your CRM and warehouse. They flag broken nurtures before your VP sees them in the dashboard.
They run while you sleep.
Native data layer
Both modes are built on a native data layer. Conversion is built directly on Salesforce, your warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift), and your product events. No other platform gives agents this much real-time context across your marketing stack.
How it works
- Connect your stack. Salesforce, warehouse, product events, ad platforms, and email infrastructure. One workspace, no copy-paste between tools.
- Pick an agent or describe what you want. Out-of-the-box agents handle the most common workflows. Chat Companion handles everything else.
- Review the artifact. Every action produces a reviewable artifact, from a draft email to a segment definition to a workflow diff. Approve, edit, or roll back before anything ships.
- Run on schedule or on demand. Promote any chat agent into a recurring workflow. Set the trigger and let it run.
Every action is logged. Every artifact is reviewable. Every workflow can be paused, edited, or rolled back. The system is built for trust.
Marketo parity, with agents native
Conversion was a marketing automation platform first. Mid-market teams who’d outgrown HubSpot used us for real depth: dynamic segmentation, Liquid templating, custom objects, advanced lead routing, warehouse syncs, two-way Salesforce sync, attribution programs.
Then we scaled to enterprise. Then we built agents on top of all of it.
The result: full marketing automation parity with the tools you’ve already invested in, plus a native agent layer that none of them can match. Enterprise teams don’t have to choose between the mature MAP they need and the AI-native future they want.
What this means for marketing leaders
For VPs of Marketing and CMOs, Conversion Agents changes three things:
Speed. Campaigns ship in hours instead of weeks. Experiments run in parallel. The cost of testing an idea collapses, which means your team runs more experiments and learns faster.
Leverage. A four-person MOps team running Conversion can support a 200-person sales org. Your existing team takes on more without burning out, and the work that used to require specialist headcount now runs autonomously.
Personalization at scale. Every contact gets the right content at the right time. Agents read every signal across your CRM, warehouse, and product events and tailor each touch to the account. The 1:1 experience that used to require an army of specialists now runs by default.
This is the vibe marketing shift. Marketers describe what they want and the system ships it. The job changes from “configure the workflow” to “design the strategy and let agents execute.”
What customers are seeing
Conversion Agents has been in production with select customers. Across those teams, the outcomes have been consistent:
- 44% reduction in MOps execution time
- Average of 1,800+ hours saved per team annually
- A meaningful increase in campaign experimentation velocity
- A reduction in specialist MOps headcount needs
A note on what’s different
Building this took four years. There were a lot of ways we could have shipped earlier. We could have layered an AI chatbot on top of a traditional MAP. We could have shipped a campaign generator that sat on the side. We could have called the whole thing “AI-powered” without rebuilding the core.
We didn’t, because none of those approaches would have actually solved the problem MOps teams told us about. Agents are only useful when they have access to your real data, when they can take real actions, and when they integrate into the workflows your team actually runs. The whole architecture had to change.
Conversion Agents is the product we couldn’t have shipped any earlier.
Looking ahead
This is chapter one. Over the coming quarters, you’ll see continued investment in the agent layer: new out-of-the-box agents for lifecycle, attribution, and account-based motions; deeper integrations with the GTM stack; and a developer platform that lets your team build custom agents specific to your business.
We’re building toward a future where the only thing between a marketing team and their pipeline goals is the quality of their ideas.
Get started
If you’re already a Conversion customer, Conversion Agents is live in your workspace today.
If you’re new to Conversion, book a demo and we’ll show you what your team’s day looks like when agents are doing the work.
And if you want to see what we built, watch the launch film. The team who shipped this product also shipped something fun.
Thanks to the entire Conversion team for shipping this. Thanks to our investors at Abstract Ventures, True Ventures, and HOF Capital for believing early. And thanks to every MOps operator who let us sit with them for four years. This is yours.
Neil