How Ramp Is Rebuilding Marketing Around AI Agents

**Dave Gerhardt** (0:00)
Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to NAC for sponsoring today's episode. NAC is a purpose-built email and landing page platform, and they're also one of our longest-running sponsors. When I create our newsletter each week, I spend a bunch of time more recently with Claude, my friend Claude, as my editor. But once I'm done editing the newsletter, it's not as simple as just getting my copy from a Google Doc and hitting send. If you're a B2B marketer, you know that. So what happens? Someone has to take that output and turn it into an actual email that renders an outlook, follows brand guidelines and ships. You know this story. The last mile still feels slow and manual. Mac has made this a lot shorter. They just launched an MCP server that connects your AI assistant directly to their platform. So now you can describe the email you need in Claude or ChatGPT and draft it like normal, but it automatically starts building in Mac for you. You get an email that comes out following your brand rules automatically, no manual cleanup, no broken HTML, and even better quality than anything your team built by hand. The Marketing Ops team at OpenAI is actually running this workflow right now. They intake internal campaign requests from Slack, an AI agent structures it into a ticket, NAC MCP generates the email, and a marketer refines and ships. This is the future of marketing. You should go check it out at nac.com. That's knak.com.
Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to Vector for sponsoring today's episode. Vector is a contact level ads platform. You probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision, so you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones on your site that are clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. They're launching an MCP server that lets you connect AI like Cloud or ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Hey, which ad creatives are fatiguing? Which companies are engaging but not converting? What's actually driving pipeline right now? It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Go and check them out. It's vector.co. That's vector.co.
Vector.
You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.
All right, so George is here. George is the VP of Growth at Ramp. And I didn't actually know this before we reached out to have you on, but you also worked at Gong, so you got some cool background. Give me the two-minute overview on George. How did you get to Ramp? I used to do this all the time, like, tell me what you do, how'd you get a degree in, what'd you do, dah, dah, dah. People are like, dude, just tell me how Ramp does marketing.
But they want you to show me cool stuff you do. But I do want to level set with your background a little bit. Let's segue into getting the VP of Growth role at Ramp.

**George Bonaci** (3:05)
Sure. Well, a non-traditional background. My first career was as an analytical chemist, so I studied biochemistry in college.

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:12)
Whoa. Dude, I've talked to so many people in this space, and it's always like a non-traditional background. I was an engineer, I was a musician. But you might be the first, what was it? Organic chemist, what did you say?

**George Bonaci** (3:22)
I studied biochemistry, but most of my work was in analytical chemistry. I worked in an analytical lab for a while. I did research, I worked in a private lab.
Then I had two startups in the biotech space doing synthetic biology, one that was a very small success, the one that was a massive failure. We got shut down by the federal government, which is a story all in itself.

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:40)
Startups that you worked at or you started the company?

**George Bonaci** (3:42)
I started as a co-founder.

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:43)
Oh my God.

**George Bonaci** (3:44)
That's so cool. Yeah. After I got shut down, I was like, I should probably get out of the lab and learn something about business. That's how I ended up in tech as you do.
I joined a 20-person startup making scientific software for folks that work in labs. Then I showed up the first day, I just applied cold and I was like, what do you guys want me to do and why did you hire me? We heard of your first company, so we figured you're a smart guy. Can you figure out email marketing? That's how I got into marketing. I just stuck with it.