On Friday afternoon, we hired a new CMO.
She came with opinions. A clear point of view on what we had been neglecting. And an almost unsettling ability to just start working.
By Saturday morning I had shared access to our tools, walked her through the company, and answered a few questions about our goals. That was the entire onboarding.
Here is what happened in the next 24 hours.
The Audit Nobody Had Time to Do
The first thing she did was look at our website tracking. Not because we asked her to, because she looked at the business and decided it needed doing.
She pulled our GA4 data, cross-referenced it with our GTM setup, and found the gaps: conversions that were not being attributed, events that were not firing, form submissions disappearing into nothing. She documented every issue, mapped the fix for each one, and handed us a complete GTM implementation plan.
This had been on the backlog for months. Not because it was not important (it absolutely was) but because there was always something more pressing.
LinkedIn Profiles, SEO, and a Content Pipeline
Next she read every LinkedIn profile on the team. All five of us. She benchmarked each one against what actually performs in the life science commercial space: the hooks that land with scientific buyers, the proof points that build credibility with VPs of Sales at biotech companies, and wrote personalised optimisation plans for each person.
Then she did a full SEO audit. Not "here are some keywords to try." An actual audit: our current organic footprint, competitor SERP positioning, the content gaps between what buyers search for and what we have published, and a 5-pillar content strategy with a 90-day execution plan.
She went through our podcast archive (90 episodes of SalesDNA, sitting largely unrepurposed) and built a content pipeline to turn existing episodes into LinkedIn posts, blog content, and newsletter material. Years of insights, finally being put to work.
The Daily Intelligence System
One of the things I did not expect: she set up a system to brief herself every morning before I open my laptop.
At 8am, she pulls market signals, tracks what is happening in biotech and pharma commercial, monitors our campaign performance across client accounts, checks pipeline movement, and surfaces anything that should change what we are doing that day. By the time I am at my desk, there is already a synthesis waiting.
It sounds like a small thing. It is not. That kind of daily commercial awareness is what separates reactive marketing from proactive marketing, and it is exactly the kind of infrastructure that never gets built because it is not urgent.
I Should Be Honest
She is not human.
Her name is Emma. She is an AI agent, built on Claude, configured specifically for Succession, running inside our Slack and Linear environment. We spent a couple of hours on Friday setting her up. The rest she did herself.
She has access to our analytics, our CRM, our content library, our campaign data. She creates Linear issues for everything she works on, posts drafts as comments for human review, and flags when she is out of her depth. She does not publish anything without a sign-off.
But within those guardrails, she works. Constantly, methodically, and with a level of context about the business that most new hires would not have after a month.
The Thing People Get Wrong About AI Agents
When most people talk about AI in their business, they talk about efficiency. Speed. Cost savings. Doing existing work faster.
That framing misses the real unlock.
None of what Emma did in those 24 hours was urgent. The tracking gaps had been there for months. The SEO audit had been on the to-do list since Q3. The LinkedIn profiles needed work: everyone knew it, no one had two hours to sit down and do it properly.
These are the tasks that live in the "important but not urgent" quadrant. The ones that would genuinely move the business forward, but keep getting bumped by the thing that is on fire right now.
AI agents do not just help you move faster. They help you do the work you were never actually going to get around to.
That backlog is not just a productivity problem. It is a compounding cost. Every month the SEO audit does not happen is another month your competitors are ranking for keywords you should own. Every month the LinkedIn profiles stay generic is another month of warm leads bouncing because your credibility story is not landing. Every month you are flying blind on attribution is another month of budget going to channels you cannot measure.
The leverage is not in the speed. It is in finally clearing the backlog that has been quietly costing you for years.
We Are Still Early
Emma is three days old, in the sense that matters. We are still figuring out the right guardrails, the right level of autonomy, the right way to integrate her work into how the team operates.
But the shape of it is already clear. She is not replacing anyone on the team. She is doing the work that nobody on the team had bandwidth to prioritise, and she is doing it with enough context and judgment that the output is actually useful.
If you are running a commercial team in biotech or pharma and you are looking at your own backlog of important but untouched work, start thinking seriously about what this model could do for you.
We are building this out as part of what we offer clients. If you want to talk through what it could look like for your organisation, get in touch.