What the World's Best Retention Marketers Taught Me About AI

Every week there's another post claiming there's one AI tool you have to start using.

The reality is a little less exciting and a lot more useful.

I recently read a piece where some of the sharpest retention marketers in ecommerce were all asked the same question:

What's actually in your AI stack today?

I expected everyone to give roughly the same answer.

ChatGPT.

Claude.

Maybe Perplexity.

Instead, every person had built an entirely different workflow.

One marketer had spent years of client data inside NotebookLM before using Perplexity to understand how customers really speak on Reddit.

Another connected every Klaviyo account they manage into Claude so they could spot patterns across multiple brands.

Someone else built an internal retention pipeline with Claude Code that reportedly saved thousands in development costs.

Others have created libraries of prompts, custom skills, dynamic website experiences and automated reporting.

The tools were different.

The thinking wasn't.

The marketers getting the biggest gains from AI aren't asking it to do their jobs for them.

They're removing friction.

They're shortening research.

They're automating repetitive work.

They're creating systems they can reuse every single day.

That's the bit that often gets missed.

AI isn't becoming one tool.

It's becoming your marketing team.

Research has one specialist.

Writing has another.

Analysis has another.

Reporting has another.

The businesses that benefit most won't necessarily be using the newest model.

They'll be the ones that deliberately build workflows around the problems they solve every week.

My own stack looks different again.

I lean heavily on Claude for long-form thinking, Perplexity for research, and Flaunt as an AI data analyst to uncover patterns I'd probably miss manually.

Could I swap one of those tomorrow?

Absolutely.

The tool matters far less than the process.

The marketers who'll pull away over the next few years won't be the ones using the most AI.

They'll be the ones who know exactly where AI adds value—and where human judgement still wins.