The exact AI playbook (MCPs, GPTs, Granola) that saved ElevenLabs $100k+ & helps them ship daily

When you're editing, as much as possible, try and edit the underlying prompt rather than the actual output.

I like that you have here the, "You are a," and then gives a very specific identity and job to be done at the top of this. And then you have very specific instructions where you say, "You must do A, B, C, D," and it's quite particular.

This saved us $40,000 a year for the tool, so immediately canceled it. Over $100,000 in agency costs. I think the highlight, though, is just not having to deal with more SaaS vendors, more agencies, constantly trying to get upsold. [upbeat music]

Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have a great conversation with Luke Harries, Head of Growth at ElevenLabs. Luke shows us how to make everything a launch by making everything automated with AI. He shows us his secret flows for generating case studies and tweets on the fly, how he saved his company tens of thousands of dollars by, yes, being a marketer that coded in Cursor, and explains what an MCP is and how he hooked it up to WhatsApp. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Orkes, the company behind open source Conductor, the platform powering complex workflows and process orchestration for modern enterprise apps and agentic workflows. Legacy business process automation tools are breaking down. Siloed low-code platforms, outdated process management systems, and disconnected API management tools weren't built for today's event-driven, AI-powered, cloud-native world. Orkes changes that. With Orkes Conductor, you get a modern orchestration layer that scales with high reliability, supports both visual and code-first development, and brings human, AI, and systems together in real time. It's not just about tasks. It's about orchestrating everything: APIs, microservices, data pipelines, human-in-the-loop actions, and even autonomous agents. So build, test, and debug complex workflows with ease. Add human approvals, automate back-end processes, and orchestrate agentic workflows at enterprise scale, all while maintaining enterprise-grade security, compliance, and observability. Whether you're modernizing legacy systems or scaling next-gen AI-driven apps, Orkes helps you go from idea to production fast. Orkes, orchestrate the future of work. Learn more and start building at orkes.io. That's O-R-K-E-S dot I-O. Hey, Luke, thanks for joining.

Thanks for having me.

In 2025, we've talked a lot about vibe coding, Cursor this and v0 that, but we have not talked enough, I think, about vibe marketing. So what do you think the future of an AI CMO is in the next couple years?

There's all these tools like Lovable and Cursor, and the rate of software production's going to go exponential, but it's not gonna matter if no one's actually using your tool. And so what's important is actually getting the product into market, getting people to know about your new features. At ElevenLabs, we have this launch process. So basically, every new feature we do, every new model, we run it through this massive checklist, which is like, okay, we need to first work out what are the value props? Then we need to work out what's the core messaging. Then we need to work out who's it for. Then we need to turn that into the blog post, the X post, and it, it takes a lot of time, these massive launch processes. And so the thing I'm really excited for the AI CMO is being able to go from every single new feature or new product and translating that into your entire launch process, making the assets, making the videos, making the images, but then also going beyond the launch. So what are those then evergreen channels that you'll be testing? And so, uh, let's say ElevenLabs, we launched the best speech-to-text model. Okay, we need to be running Google Ads for that. So then it will spin up, understand all the various keywords, spin up the Google Ads. It will optimize the landing pages. So I think this entire thing is gonna change massively, um, and we're already using a few of these different workflows, and I'm excited to talk you through them.