In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Jack McInnes, Director of Marketing at Corti AI, an AI platform company serving the healthcare technology industry. Corti AI started as a research group from a Copenhagen university and has evolved into a developer-focused platform that enables health tech organizations, EHR companies, and healthcare professionals to build AI-powered applications through APIs, SDKs, and embedded solutions. Jack shares how Corti pivoted from expensive enterprise conference marketing to a product-led growth motion targeting developers, the critical role of authentic content in an AI-saturated market, and why trust-building through scientific rigor matters more than ever in B2B tech marketing.
Topics Discussed
- Transitioning from enterprise conference marketing to product-led growth
- Building dual go-to-market strategies for developers and healthcare enterprise buyers
- Creating authentic thought leadership content in the age of AI-generated marketing
- Structuring flat, cross-functional growth teams for agility
- Establishing trust and credibility in highly regulated industries
- Balancing automation efficiency with content quality and brand integrity
Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers
- Recognize When Traditional Channels Reach Diminishing Returns: Corti invested heavily in healthcare conferences and trade shows to stand out against major competitors, but found the ROI increasingly difficult to justify. The high costs and labor-intensive nature of this channel sparked their strategic pivot toward developer-focused product-led growth. For B2B marketers, this illustrates the importance of ruthlessly evaluating channel performance and being willing to redirect budget when enterprise sales motions become unsustainable for your company stage.
- Design Go-To-Market for Two-Sided Influence Dynamics: Corti discovered that marketing directly to developers creates bottom-up demand that influences enterprise purchasing decisions—similar to how children's marketing creates demand that parents must address. By enabling developers to build on their platform and experience its value firsthand, these technical users become internal advocates within healthcare organizations. This approach is particularly effective in industries where technical evaluators heavily influence procurement decisions, even when they don't control budgets.
- Preserve Content Quality as Competitive Differentiation in the AI Era: While AI tools make it tempting to populate every channel with high-frequency content, Jack emphasizes that automated content quickly becomes "trash" that trains audiences to ignore your brand. Corti's strategy involves investing in substantive Substack content from PhD researchers and subject matter experts, then using AI to reformat and distribute these valuable pieces across channels. The core principle: automate distribution, but never outsource strategic thinking or domain expertise.
- Structure Growth Teams Around Outcomes, Not Functions: Rather than traditional marketing hierarchies, Corti organized a ~10-person cross-functional growth team including engineers focused on user experience, performance marketers, activation specialists, and marketing generalists. This flat structure eliminates bureaucratic approval layers and enables everyone to "be in the weeds and building." For B2B tech companies at scale-up stage, this model prioritizes execution speed and customer-centricity over departmental silos.
- Build Trust Through Scientific Rigor, Not Marketing Hype: In a market saturated with AI vendors making inflated claims, Corti differentiates by publishing peer-reviewed papers in academic archives and employing former doctors and long-tenured healthcare professionals. Jack argues that B2B buyers—especially in regulated industries—desperately need partners who don't overstate capabilities and can prove what they deliver. This means rejecting the temptation to manipulate markets and instead ensuring your audience genuinely benefits from your message.
- Apply the "Hard Work Heuristic" to Content Strategy: Jack offers a useful framework for evaluating content value: if it was difficult to create, it probably means something; if it wasn't, it probably won't resonate. This counters the AI-driven tendency toward prolific but shallow output. For topics requiring domain expertise or novel positioning, marketers must carve out protected time for research, thinking, and writing—treating substantive content creation as irreplaceable strategic work rather than a task to automate.
- Respect Your Market by Avoiding Content Pollution: Corti recognizes that flooding channels with AI-generated content can damage subscriber trust and brand perception faster than it builds pipeline. This principle of "respecting the market" means considering whether each piece of content genuinely serves the audience before distribution. In an era where automation enables unprecedented content volume, restraint and selectivity become competitive advantages that preserve audience attention and engagement.
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Sponsors:
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co
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