Hello $Firstname AI Edition, Chapter 19: People and Skills for Personalisation

In Chapter 19 of Hello $Firstname, Michel Stevens reads ‘People and Skills for Personalisation’.

Michel Stevens is course director at CXM Academy and has spent his professional life on exactly what this chapter is about: the people and skills behind customer experience. In this chapter, he reads the first of three deep dives into the back end of the Pyramid of Personalisation.

The chapter opens with Pernille at the Royal Danish Theatre. Her team has spent years building a website, an app, and a marketing automation platform. Now it is time to stop building more cars and start driving the ones they have. As the chapter puts it, owning a Formula One car is worth nothing if no one has the skills or the time to drive it.

To map the skills a team needs, the chapter builds on Scott Brinker’s Five M model of marketing technologists: marketers, maestros, modellers, and makers, plus the manager who brings them together. For each role, it explores how generative AI changes the work, from brand LLM guardrails for maestros to vibe coding for makers.

A key insight is that maestros and makers build, while modellers and marketers execute. Early on, you need maestros and makers to put platforms and data processes in place. Later, you rotate in modellers and marketers, whose skills mirror the two sides of the Bowtie of Personalisation: insights and content.

The chapter also argues that generative AI makes human craft more important, not less. If you do not know what good looks like, how can you prompt for it or recognise it when it comes back? It then looks at AI agents as part of the team, with examples from Royal Unibrew and Landfolk, and at how the operating model shifts from trial and error at the Hack level, through separate campaign and automation teams at the Pack level, to agile, journey-centric teams at the Stack level.

In his reflection at the end, Michel takes the chapter’s argument one step further. If the surviving skill is knowing what good looks like, the next question is: good for whom? Underneath all five roles sits one skill that belongs to none of them alone, a real working knowledge of the customer. When anyone can generate five hundred versions before launch, the scarce and valuable person is the one who knows the customer well enough to pick the right one. Michel calls that customer fluency.

More resources from the Hello $Firstname universe

You can buy the physical book here: https://amzn.eu/d/6jV4QZT

If the Amazon EU link does not work in your country, please search for Hello $Firstname: Profiting from Personalisation, AI Edition on your local Amazon store.

You can download the illustrations and models from the book here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/resources

You can also learn more about the Personalisation Cards and Canvas, which help teams turn the Bowtie of Personalisation into practical use cases, here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/personalizationcards