Recap: My "AI x Marketing // GTM" Talk at Build Club

A few things I've learned (and still figuring out) on this AI marketing journey.

Was invited to give an “AI x Marketing: Building GTM Systems” talk at Build Club last week.

150+ people turned up. Really heartening to see the marketing community in Singapore being so passionate about AI.

As a marketer trying to make sense of this post-AI world, there are a few things I’ve come to believe:

1. Community matters more than ever.

2. We learn faster (and better) from each other than figuring everything out alone.

3. No one has this figured out. We’re all still students.

Below are some highlights from the session, plus the deck I shared.

Designing Agentic Systems

I think agentic systems should be built around two simple principles:

• Repeatability

• Your biggest bottleneck

Repeatable systems let you run proper evaluations, handle errors cleanly, and feed context back into the workflow without things breaking.

Bottlenecks force clarity. Identify the biggest constraint in your role or business, then design a system specifically to remove that choke point.

Agentic Systems = Workflow Layer + Data Layer + LLM Layer

3 things every agentic systems needs:

1. Workflow Layer: This is where everything gets built and automated. It handles the logic, the routing, and the sequence of tasks.

2. Data Layer: Feeds your workflow with the information it needs, such as internal and/or external data

3. LLM Layer: Uses a model to interpret inputs, make decisions, and generate actions or outputs.

Bottleneck → Supply or Demand Constrained

Generally speaking:

• Supply Constrained: Build operational efficinecy agentic systems

• Demand Constrained: Build demand gen/customer acquisition agentic systems

Why I think bottleneck identification is important?

In the AI world we’re in, there’s just too much noise. And too little time.

We need to cut through the noise and fight the fomo. And not explore endlessly or try to build every single type of agentic workflow out there.

This was actually me 4-5 months ago, where I was trying to build everything, test everything, and ended up spreading myself too thin.

Now, I’m super focused on the parts of agentic marketing that actually is required for my role.

Remember: The market rewards depth over breath

Mockup of a Demand Generation n8n Workflow

I also built a mock workflow in n8n using the problem statement below.

Your role: You’re a demand generation marketer at Airwallex.

Your goal: Acquire more net-new F&B customers in Singapore for Airwallex’s payment gateway.

Workflow steps

1. Scrape Google for “online bakery”–related keywords in Singapore

2. Render the HTML to extract content

3. Pass everything into LLMs to do three things:

   1. Extract the email

   2. Check if the business is actually doing online bakery (look for terms like “show now”, “delivery”, etc.)

   3. Draft a cold email

4. Store the results in Google Sheets so you can use them immediately

The end result?

You’d get something like this. And once this is built, you can schedule it to run daily or weekly… giving you a steady, predictable stream of leads without manual effort.

Agentic Workflow Improvements

Agentic workflows aren’t something you set once and forget.

99% of the time, you won’t get it right on the first try.

That’s where evaluation and iteration of your workflow becomes very important.

For example in this workflow, I noticed that

• Using an LLM to identify emails from the rendered HTML wasn’t reliable → better to use a dedicated email-finding API (like hunter.io).

• Some scraped results were already existing Airwallex customers → run them through your CRM’s API to filter and keep only net-new customers.

Wrap Up

It was a really cozy event. Packed, but in a good way. Lots of genuine conversations, people sharing what they’re building,

I honestly learnt a lot just from talking to everyone. The questions, the small chats after the session, the random “hey, I’m trying this too” moments.

Events like this remind me why community matters so much in a post-AI world. None of us have everything figured out, but together we move a lot faster.

Thanks again to everyone who came up to chat. Hope to see you all at the next one.

PS: Here’s the link to my deck if you want to look through it.

I test AI workflows on real marketing problems.

And turn the useful ones into 10x Playbooks.

So business owners and solo marketers doing it all themselves can skip the guesswork… and copy what actually works.

→ I drop one of these 10xPlaybooks 🚀 every week. Don’t miss the next.

John