Rasmus Leth Skjoldan: How One CMO Rebuilt the MarTech Stack Around AI

Two decades in CMS, Content and MarTech, eight years in Magnolia and now CMO at Hello Retail. You've spent your whole career, most of your career, thinking about how marketing technology actually works. Can you talk us through your journey? Yeah, it is approaching three decades now. It's a very long time. So I was just, you know, opened up what used to be called a Netscape 2 browser back in 1995. So that was the starting point that completely, totally blew my mind. And I just knew I had to work with this new internet thing. So that's been my pretty much my entire career until like just a couple of years ago, basically with the whole AI explosion. Right. So I was super fascinated with how people engage with software. Super fascinated with what it can do for marketing teams. So, yeah, that's been... That's been my journey. And you mentioned AI and most CMOs are layering AI on top of what they already have, on top of what they already do. But you rebuild your entire MarTech stack around Claude. Can you also walk us through like how you do that? Where did you start it? What did you keep? And also what did you just toss out? Yeah, totally. So I decided to be extremely hands on myself and I didn't want to sort of delegate the task of figuring out this AI thing. To someone junior, I felt it was such a profound foundational change that I had to be extremely involved with how we're using AI. And to your point, we have indeed not rebuilt every piece of software we use, but we have certainly sort of integrated everything through AI and also replaced a couple of things. But I'm not so interested in replacing like SaaS solutions. There's a lot of debate about how SaaS is dead and so forth. I don't think that's true. And I also don't think it's the right approach. But you can get incredibly creative about how you integrate things in the MarTech stack by using AI. So it's full on every day, sometimes nights as well for me, hands on, sort of both building up the team and enabling my team to use AI better. And how does that actually look like in practice? So what changed in your day to day and what can you do now that you couldn't do before? Yeah, part of it is pure speed, right? So and I think the most important part for me is the sort of the elimination of coordination and all of the handovers that tend to go wrong at times in marketing where you have a campaign plan, and you brief your different teams on it and they have to control the different parts of the tech stack. And that sometimes goes great. And a lot of times it sort of slightly deviates from the original strategy or the original plan. And with AI, we're just able to completely circumvent that situation. So everything goes directly from proper strategy work to execution. It's a very, very difficult and different task to do. It's a very different kind of work for me and my team just compared to like eight months ago. It's been a profound. That is how fast it's changing for you. Yeah, it has. It has been a monumental shift, really. Huge change. Just as big a change as sort of me finding the internet back in the 90s, really. It really has. Your session was specifically about how video feeds into your AI environment. And as a TwentyThree customer, how does it connect to your setup? We worked with TwentyThree on getting early access to the new AI features of the TwentyThree platform. So we've had sort of a month or two of head start before you released it with full access to what's called the CLI and skills. So we've been able to not just test, but actually build with it. And we have several new things in real production that are live on our website where we take full advantage of the new AI features. So I would say we're quite sort of somewhat far ahead in terms of adopting AI features and also integrating how we can start to use video in completely new ways. I think for us as a small team, being able to orchestrate the real, like cross channel use of video is quite powerful. And we can absolutely only do that because of the AI coding tools we're now sort of deploying. So it's a massive change in how we can take chapters of videos and put them in just the right places on the right channels and so forth without needing specialized teams to handle each one of the platforms. Exactly. So you already explained a bit on how it works, but I was wondering if you could get even more specific, like maybe one process that changed completely from eight months to now. Yeah, yeah, totally. So based on the new TwentyThree AI features, we feed sort of our long videos into the AI system. It creates chapters based on the transcripts that we get out of of TwentyThree. And then we sort of feed that into our SEO pipeline. So it means that we get a pretty incredible blog post out of just one long video. We get not just sort of eight videos, but we get entire blog posts based on the video. So we have a video at the top, rich text at the bottom, entirely created through an agent process based on Claude. So we have a lot of integrations into other tools that we use. Which other tools do you use as well? So we deploy to something called Netlify, where we host our website on. So we actually also rebuilt our entire video hub just through the TwentyThree API. So we have a bit of a different setup than some other clients. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we have a lot of different tools to control the user experience of our video collection to the finest detail, really. You are also part of a panel, right? You just had your solo session. Yeah. But you also have a panel called Video the Marketing Leader's Perspective. And what is the conversation most marketing leaders are having about video? And what are the topics that you think they're still missing out? Yeah. I think a lot of marketing leaders are taking video from campaign into brand and really using video to transport the core message about the company. And they're using video to communicate product depths at a whole new level, which is sort of goes far beyond the campaign video. So I think that's interesting and definitely a big change. Yeah. Yeah. For me, what I feel that some people are missing are the sort of the extreme advantages you can get on the marketing operations side from all of the new AI tech to sort of use video in much richer ways and sort of let video permeate all of your marketing. Also, in all of those cases where you don't have a huge marketing team to control it. So I would say video for marketing operations is a sort of a huge new opportunity. If you could say one thing to a person here at TwentyThree Summit 2026, who is about to go back to their organization and push video forward, what would you say? Get help. Yeah. Get help. SOS. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But I honestly, I mean it because I've been involved with too many video projects where we should have gotten help. We should have looked out for a better agency to help us or a better video consultant or really professional video people. There are so many cases of you think you understand the format of a particular type of video, but you actually do need like a professional help to get it. Yeah. Like just right. So I would say that do not underestimate what it takes to create great video and sort of recognize and acknowledge that there are people in the world that have spent their entire careers on getting extremely good at producing video. Right. So get their help. They're out there. They're fairly sort of easy to get to. Thank you so much, Rasmus. It was so nice to hear from you.