What happens when a marketing leader goes all in on AI, not just for himself, but for his entire team? Ronan Bray, Head of Marketing & Growth at Cloud Assess, joins the podcast to unpack exactly that. From a two week Christmas break spent teaching himself to build apps, to rolling out a fully connected go to market platform that pulls live data from HubSpot, Google Search Console, and Notion, Ronan shares the real story of AI adoption inside a B2B marketing team, mess, momentum, and all.

This episode is a practical playbook for any marketing leader wondering how to move a team from AI curiosity to AI capability. Ronan gets specific about what worked (starting small with personal projects), what didn't (announcing a team wide AI mandate with almost no context), and where he still won't let AI near the steering wheel, like paid ad spend and image or video creation.

Guest Introduction

Ronan Bray is Head of Marketing & Growth at Cloud Assess, where he leads a global marketing team driving pipeline with over 85 percent of ARR from inbound. Over 16 years he has scaled B2B marketing for ASX listed companies and his own startups (three reaching acquisition or buyout), building on experience at HubSpot and Drift.

Key Topics

• Ronan's personal path into AI, from everyday ChatGPT use to picking Claude as the team's core tool to avoid spreading focus too thin
• How a two week Christmas break and a personal "vibe coding" project (a lawn care scheduler built in Lovable) became the spark for wider team adoption
• The simple three question framework Ronan uses with his team: where's your time going, what's repetitive, and what's the ideal end state
• Building a go to market hub in Lovable that connects HubSpot, Google Search Console and Firecrawl to surface content gaps and sales insights automatically
• Why Ronan's team keeps a human in the loop on all content, even though AI can draft it, because audiences and algorithms can both tell when something is fully AI generated
• The security guardrails Cloud Assess put in place around domain locking and vulnerability scanning when building internally with Lovable
• Why Ronan won't hand over paid ad spend decisions to AI, even with tools connected to Google Ads
• What's next for Ronan's team: using AI for image and video generation to communicate fast moving product releases to sales and customers

Resources & Links

Companies & Tools

• Cloud Assess: Ronan's company, an AI powered training and assessment platform, referenced throughout as the environment for his AI rollout
• Lovable: the AI app builder Ronan and his team use to build internal tools, including their go to market hub
• Claude: the AI assistant Ronan's team standardised on for everyday tasks and custom team projects
• HubSpot: the CRM feeding deal and pipeline data into the go to market hub
• Firecrawl: the web scraping tool connected to their platform to analyse blog and competitor content
• ChatGPT: the tool Ronan first used for personal AI adoption before switching to Claude
• Notion: used by Cloud Assess's product team to track features, later integrated into the go to market hub
• Higgsfield: an AI image and video tool Ronan tested via MCP, which he found fell short for a recent website rebuild

Contact & Credits

Host: Shahin Hoda

Guest: Ronan Bray

Produced by: Shahin Hoda and Alexander Hipwell

Edited by: Alexander Hipwell & Dave Somido

Music by: Breakmaster Cylinder

Podcast Co-ordinator: Jonah Igsie

APAC's B2B Growth Podcast is Presented by xGrowth