AI Growth Marketing

What was discussed

Guest speaker Choi Je-him called his talk "So What's the Problem?", the question an executive at his first job used to ask him five times over, the five whys. AI is a field where it is hard to claim a right answer, so rather than walk through features that go stale within a week, he said he would share real cases instead. The point is not picking up features but learning how other non-developers solve their own work with AI. The proof: all five award winners at the OpenAI Codex Skillathon he took first place in were non-developers.

He said he talks to AI all day and does four things with it: define the problem, design the approach and the criteria for sign-off, build it with MCP, vibe coding and skills, and then document the conversations as an asset for the organization. Cashback payout inquiries, once handled by hunting with Ctrl+F and copy-pasting, moved to vibe coding; the Monday ritual of screenshotting competitors' Instagram accounts and assembling them into a deck became a Codex crawler. The advice he tossed out as a joke landed too: "Never brag about the productivity you've gained. Cut five hours down to one and you'll just get four more hours of work."

Nam Sung-pil, who joined the fireside chat, came from a humanities background. He studied French philosophy, the study of the imagination, in an open major, changed his mind during military service, and moved into marketing; the secret behind his first-place finish in a Google keyword competition was "testing, relentlessly." AB180 started out as a search engine company before finding its footing with Airbridge, a mobile attribution product (MMP). Its first paying customers were Baemin and eBay Korea, about as tough as final bosses get, and because so many older handsets were still in use, the team walked the Yongsan electronics market to test on them.

He also explained why AB180 distributes Amplitude and Braze while building its own product, Airbridge. Becoming an MMP requires partnerships with Google, Meta and TikTok (ad IDs are sensitive data, so those are hard to win), the company had to make money until then, and above all digital growth never comes from any single element. After supporting some 500 companies in Korea, AB180 went global three years ago, choosing Vietnam and Turkey, markets nobody else was going to, because the data pointed there, both being strongholds for casual games and consumer apps.

AB180 is "a company that is serious about AI," and the CEO himself spends 90% of his time with it. Every one of their websites has been rebuilt with AI. Asked for a principle for non-developers working with AI, he named clarity: "Make the AI interview you." He did not buy the "SaaS-pocalypse" either. SaaS is not dying, he said, it is splitting into more specialized pieces. And the essence of AI marketing, he concluded, is the same as growth hacking: a large output from a small input.

The roundtables of six to eight people landed on much the same conclusion. In the AI era, marketing is won not by the person who runs great ads but by the person who defines the problem well. The marketer shifts from someone who executes to someone who designs operations and automation, and there was broad agreement that AI can assist with analysis while the final judgment and the planning stay with people. Token efficiency, domain knowledge, and clear documentation that turns one person's AI skills into an asset for the whole organization came up again and again.