Navigating the AI Boom with Resilient Marketing

Introduction

Dave Steer, CMO of Webflow, brings over two decades of experience leading marketing at category-defining companies like GitLab, Cloudflare, Facebook, and Twitter. In his conversation with Benjamin Shapiro, Steer reveals why 80% of marketers are still treating AI like a simple copywriting assistant rather than leveraging it for transformative customer experiences. With Webflow's platform enabling teams to build AI-driven personalized websites, Steer offers practical insights on moving beyond basic AI applications to create competitive advantages through intelligent experimentation and dynamic web experiences.

The Big Papi Moment: Why AI Is Different This Time

Steer compares the current AI revolution to the commercial internet's arrival in the 1990s, calling it bigger than the iPhone moment. "This is how it felt like when the commercial Internet came, and that was a tectonic shift in how we thought about content, how we thought about media, how we thought about co ecting," he explains. The challenge isn't just technological—it's about people and process transformation. While technology can shift rapidly, getting teams comfortable with new ways of working takes time. Marketing teams are leading AI adoption because they love to experiment, but most are still stuck in what Steer calls "wave one"—using AI primarily for content creation rather than exploring its potential for personalization and optimization at scale.

From Content Creation to Intelligent Optimization

The real opportunity lies in moving to "wave two" of AI adoption: using artificial intelligence to create personalization on websites and enable testing at unprecedented scale. Instead of ru ing one A/B test, marketers can now run 100 simultaneous tests with AI helping identify what to test based on user interactions. Steer emphasizes that AI removes one of the primary blockers for growth marketers: knowing where to start. By analyzing website interaction data, AI can suggest optimization opportunities that would take human teams weeks to identify. This shift from manual testing to AI-driven experimentation represents a fundamental change in how marketing teams can drive growth.

The Two-Audience Challenge

Modern websites must now serve two distinct audiences: humans and robots. "You're still speaking to humans, so you need a website experience that is going to delight and maybe enable people to fall in love with you and your brand. But you're also speaking to robots," Steer notes. This dual requirement has given rise to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), where content structure must inform AI and LLMs crawling websites. Webflow has developed an AEO maturity model helping marketers structure their sites from stage one through stage five expertise. The critical insight: people's first impression of your brand now happens before they even visit your website, making content structure more important than ever.

Creativity as Competitive Advantage

While AI threatens to create a "sea of sameness" in marketing content, Steer sees opportunity in this challenge. He predicts that creativity will become the ultimate competitive advantage, bringing marketing back to its storytelling roots. The key is using AI as an accelerant while maintaining brand distinctiveness through what Webflow calls a "brand operating system"—design standards and variables with guardrails that enable teams to move quickly while staying on-brand. This balance between automation and creativity becomes especially critical as overall website traffic decreases but visitor quality improves, with more qualified prospects arriving further down the fu el.

Embracing the Experimentation Graveyard

Steer advocates for treating failed experiments as features, not bugs. "The sign of healthy experimentation is that you're going to fail. And failure is fine as long as you're failing fast and you're learning from it," he emphasizes. Marketing teams need psychological safety to fail and should celebrate every experiment, successful or not. The wi ers will be those experimenting in the open, sharing what works and what doesn't, becoming magnets for other marketers to follow their lead. This culture of experimentation becomes even more critical with AI, where the primary barrier to adoption is simply not knowing where to start.

Conclusion

The AI boom represents a fundamental shift in marketing that goes far beyond automated copywriting. As Dave Steer demonstrates, the real opportunity lies in using AI for intelligent website optimization, creating dynamic experiences that serve both human visitors and AI crawlers, and maintaining creative differentiation in an increasingly automated world. Success requires balancing experimentation with strategic direction, embracing failure as learning, and recognizing that while AI can accelerate testing and optimization, human creativity and storytelling remain irreplaceable. For the 80% of marketers still on the sidelines, the message is clear: AI isn't just another tool—it's reshaping how customers expect to interact with brands, and those who don't adapt risk being left behind.