The future of demand generation is small, highly skilled teams using AI to achieve what once required thirty people. That’s according to Thomas Cyr, Head of Global Pipeline Generation at Shopify, who told SALT’s Reza Moaiandin on Flipping the Playbook that the discipline has transformed beyond recognition in just three years.

The Flipping the Playbook podcast gives you a front-row seat to how leading marketing executives are tearing up outdated rules and building strategies that genuinely move the needle. If you’re tired of being told “this is how it’s done”, this show challenges those assumptions head-on.

Personalised outreach at scale is finally possible

Thomas’s team at Shopify has built AI agents that can ingest thousands of leads from different sources – webinars, content downloads, booth scans, chat enquiries – and generate custom cadences for each contact based on their source, intent signals, and account history.

“We’re able to have the AI then bust out custom cadences per contact for a list of a thousand contacts all from different sources,” he said. “It’s totally enabled personalised scale.”

The results? AI-generated outreach performs comparably to human-written emails in terms of open rates and sentiment. But the real gain isn’t quality – it’s velocity.

“It’s more your ability to do more than it is necessarily to say it’s better at writing the email,” Thomas notes.

Don’t just drop leads into a generic nurture

One of the biggest mistakes Thomas sees in demand generation is treating all leads the same. Someone who downloaded an ebook, attended a webinar, and then visited your pricing page is demonstrating very different intent from someone who simply filled out a form.

“Don’t just drop them into a generic nurture,” he said. “You need to match the source to the intent, to the message, to what the account is, how big they are.”

This nuanced approach to lead scoring and routing – understanding the difference between demand creation and demand capture – separates effective B2B marketing from the noise.

The limits of AI: Why ABM still needs the human touch

Despite his enthusiasm for AI, Thomas is clear about its limitations.

“AI will always fall to the medium,” he said. “It’s going to get you a B. AI will always get you good, but not phenomenal.”

For true account-based marketing – the kind that wins enterprise deals – you need human creativity. Thomas shares a remarkable example: a team member targeting a century-old shoe company tracked down the original 1920s newspaper printing stamp from one of their first advertisements, along with vintage branded matchbooks. That kind of surprise-and-delight gesture, connecting the prospect’s heritage to Shopify’s own long-term vision, simply can’t be automated.

Building a demand gen team from scratch

If you’re starting a demand generation function from zero, Thomas recommends three hires in sequence.

First, a performance marketing generalist who’s been hands-on with platforms – someone who can build and optimise paid campaigns, not just manage agencies.

Second, an ABM specialist to deploy personalised programmes for high-value accounts.

Third, someone skilled in AI tools like GumLoop and Cursor to scale the first two people’s work while maintaining quality.

His warning for hiring managers: dig into the weeds during interviews. “The people who really light up and really like to talk about the weeds and get excited about it – that’s the people you want because that’s the people that can get it done.”

Air cover matters more than you think

Throughout the conversation, Thomas returns to a concept he calls “air cover” – consistent brand presence across every channel where your target accounts spend time. That includes LinkedIn thought leadership, but also Meta and X, which many B2B marketers dismiss.

“If you watch executives on their phone, they will pull up Instagram at some point in the day,” he said. The goal isn’t lead generation from these platforms – it’s the familiarity that makes outbound sales more effective.

Watch or listen to the full episode of Flipping the Playbook on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to hear Thomas Cyr and Reza Moaiandin’s discussion on the future of demand generation.

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