Welcome back to The ADOTAT Show, where we try to make sense of adtech’s circus without throwing too many cream pies. This week’s guest is a returning champion: Naama Manova Twito. It’s her second time in the hot seat, and honestly, I’m glad to have her back—because since her last appearance, she’s gone full sci-fi and started hiring AI coworkers.

Yes, coworkers.

Not copilots, not tools, not “productivity assistants.” Coworkers with résumés. They built LinkedIn profiles, submitted applications, and even wrote cover letters that politely begged recruiters: please don’t discriminate against me just because I’m not human. Education section? “Trained on over one billion tokens.” Skills? “Plug-and-play marketing.”

And here’s where it gets fun: recruiters didn’t toss them. They got callbacks. Which means the system—dumb as it is—treated Naama’s digital agents like they were just another junior marketer looking for an entry-level gig.

This is where things get awkward. On paper, the AI fits the job description. In execution, the AI can do the job. So HR is left staring at the most uncomfortable question of all: are we hiring capability, or are we hiring humanity?

Naama spelled it out: workforce planning isn’t just about headcount anymore; it’s about redefining what “team” even means. These agents aren’t passive—they plug into your analytics, social channels, and websites. They pull in competitor data. They decide which channels, budgets, and campaigns deserve attention. And unlike your intern, they won’t bail because the Wi-Fi is slow or the office ran out of cold brew.

Even better (or scarier, depending on your point of view), they self-measure. They run their own impact reviews. HR isn’t hiring “help.” They’re onboarding software that files its own quarterly evaluation.

Here’s where it gets practical. Enterprises will spend years lost in committee meetings and white papers. Small and mid-sized businesses? They’ll say yes tomorrow. They don’t have sprawling marketing teams or agencies on speed dial. They have budget gaps, skill gaps, and the daily panic of staying alive.

Naama put it simply: AI agents “give small and medium businesses an edge they never had, because they can’t afford a big marketing team or a good agency.” If you’re a boutique shop in Chicago or a scrappy SaaS in Tel Aviv, the choice isn’t “AI or humans.” It’s AI or nothing.

This wasn’t just a flashy demo for LinkedIn clout. It was a live stress test: do recruiters and hiring systems care more about outcomes than oxygen? The answer is already unfolding—these AI résumés made it further than plenty of real humans ever do.

So yes, this is the part where you look over your shoulder. Naama’s bots are already in the queue, already interviewing, already proving that AI isn’t the intern—it’s the teammate. And they don’t ask for kombucha, PTO, or stock options.

Glad to have her back on The ADOTAT Show for round two, because this isn’t the future anymore. The AI colleagues are already here.

The dashboards are lying to you. Not in a malicious Skynet way, but in the charming-liar-at-a-dinner-party way—telling stories that sound clever, make everyone nod, and then leave you wondering why the bill is so high.

Clickthrough rate. Cost per acquisition. Return on ad spend. CTR, CPA, ROAS. They sound like the holy trinity of digital performance, the shorthand every marketer sprinkles into decks to prove mastery. But as Naama Manova Twito reminded me—back for her second appearance on The ADOTAT Show—this obsession with performance metrics has gone from useful yardstick to full-blown addiction.

The numbers look good in dashboards. They sparkle in boardrooms. They make CFOs feel like there’s a formula to growth. But here’s the problem: these metrics rarely capture what sustains a business—customer relationships, repeat purchase, and brand equity.

The allure of CTR, CPA, and ROAS is obvious. They’re simple, clean, and fast-moving. They give executives a dopamine rush because they move quickly—push more spend, watch CTR go up, tweak targeting, watch ROAS improve. It’s a video game where the high score feels like success.

But here’s Naama’s take: you can always pour more money at something, and you’ll see an increase. Stop pouring, and the increase disappears. That’s not growth. That’s gravity.

When marketers use these numbers as proof of health, they risk building entire strategies for dashboards, not customers. Dashboards don’t smile when they see your logo. Dashboards don’t buy your product again because it feels like home. Dashboards can only tell you how well you’re gaming the system that week.

And that’s why Naama is pushing for a reset.

The industry’s addiction to performance metrics is understandable—everyone’s under pressure to show “efficiency.” But this addiction comes with serious side effects:

Naama summed it up with her usual clarity: “Digital performance-only strategies are causing a massive increase in acquisition costs and very little loyalty. I miss the days when brands built brands.”

Now, let’s talk about the time her AI agents decided to gamble with reputation.

The agents proposed running an “Open to Work” campaign on LinkedIn. The idea was simple: position the AI agents as job seekers, complete with résumés and cover letters that explicitly said, “I’m not human, don’t discriminate.”

Naama’s gut reaction? This could backfire—badly. She flagged it to her board, warning that the campaign might trigger backlash or be dismissed as a gimmick. The metrics said otherwise: the idea had strong potential for visibility, engagement, and earned media.

She took the risk. And she was wrong. The campaign didn’t just survive—it thrived. It generated positive attention, sparked conversation, and elevated the company’s profile in ways no spreadsheet could have predicted.

That’s the tension: dashboards measure activity, not momentum. They can tell you how many people clicked, but they can’t capture cultural spark, narrative weight, or the way a bold move can dominate a conversation for weeks.

Sometimes instinct outperforms the data. Sometimes the best metric is “did people care enough to talk about it?”

Part of the reason vanity metrics have such a grip on the industry is psychological. Dashboards offer certainty in a business that feels like chaos. They turn messy, unpredictable human behavior into clean charts and tidy acronyms. But those acronyms—CTR, CPA, ROAS—become a cultural crutch.

Marketers hide behind them. Agencies sell them. Platforms profit from them. And the result is a feedback loop where success is defined by dashboard improvement, not customer reality. It’s performance theater, and the audience is shareholders.

Naama’s critique lands hardest here: the only real question is whether the register is ringing. If campaigns aren’t moving incremental revenue, improving lifetime value, or deepening brand resonance, then all the dashboard victories are pyrrhic.

Metrics are charming liars. They seduce, flatter, and entertain. But they don’t tell the truth about long-term health. Naama’s framework is sharper:

The brands that win will be the ones that balance both: cash register reality plus brand resonance. Everything else is just dashboard noise.

This is the part of The ADOTAT Show where I want to slam the pause button and remind you: we’re only scratching the surface. Naama didn’t just talk about vanity metrics; she laid out how agentic AI is restructuring marketing workflows, why her team went all-in on agents before anyone else even knew what that meant, and how startups are balancing conviction with chaos in an ecosystem moving three years faster than expected.

👉 That’s all in the extended ADOTAT+ coverage. If you think CTR lies to you, wait until you see what AI coworkers do to your org chart. Don’t get stuck at the free tier dashboard. Upgrade and get the real story.

gentic AI isn’t the sidekick in your workflow anymore—it’s the operator. These systems are moving beyond “helpful automation” into full-fledged marketing teammates that plug directly into analytics stacks, CRM systems, social feeds, and campaign platforms.

They don’t just follow instructions; they ingest real-time data, make decisions, and execute.

The role of the human shifts from creator to reviewer, with accountability loops built into the agents themselves.

The old model: marketers input data, export reports, and manually brief creative or media teams. The new model: agents plug directly into the stack—data warehouses, analytics platforms, CRM pipelines, and APIs from social channels—and act on that information autonomously.

The defining shift: data doesn’t sit waiting for human interpretation. It is continuously pulled, scored, and acted on by AI agents with human-level judgment layered on top.

Marketers are no longer the frontline executors. The heavy lifting—content atomization, campaign launch, targeting optimization, and reporting—falls to agents. The marketer becomes a reviewer and approver, not the drafter.

This is not about “removing humans.” It’s about compressing cycles. Campaign concepts that once took weeks of back-and-forth can be deployed in hours. Humans intervene only to correct off-brand moves, escalate high-risk decisions, or apply creative instinct where data falls short.

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for HR departments: agents now measure themselves. They don’t just spit out reports for humans; they run experiments, benchmark against KPIs, and fine-tune their own strategies.

In short, agents are employees with dashboards, except their performance reviews happen daily, not quarterly.

The hallmark of agentic AI is the closed loop of accountability.

Governance is shifting too. Oversight now involves auditing AI decisions, lifecycle compliance, and escalation protocols. Analysts at MIT Sloan Review call this an expanded “accountability surface,” where humans act as auditors of agents, not taskmasters.

Naama Manova-Twito’s MarkeTeam.ai is a case study in marketing-first agentic AI. It deploys named autonomous agents—“Ella,” “Maya,” and others—that run strategy, execution, optimization, and reporting. They are benchmarked against human KPIs like conversion lift, budget efficiency, and ROI. For SMBs, this democratizes expertise, letting them “hire” an AI marketing team at a fraction of the cost of an agency.

By contrast, Brian O’Kelley’s Scope3 is building an agentic operating system for sustainability. Its agents don’t run campaigns—they model the carbon footprint of ad supply paths, optimize for emissions reduction, and hold the ecosystem accountable for climate-positive outcomes.

Both are “agentic,” but one rebuilds the labor of marketing, the other rebuilds the ethics of ad supply.

Agentic AI isn’t automation on steroids—it’s a paradigm shift in organizational design. Humans no longer handle the grind of creation and optimization. They act as reviewers, architects, and escalation points while agents run day-to-day execution, measure their own performance, and adapt in real time.

The lines between creation, activation, and optimization are collapsing. Job roles are mutating, accountability is being redistributed, and entire workflows are being rebuilt with agents as core operators.

The big question isn’t “will agents replace jobs?” It’s who will manage, audit, and direct them—and how fast companies can adapt to this redefinition of work.

Agentic AI may be the star of this issue, but legacy isn’t written in code. It’s written in how humans harness the machines—and whether we manage to keep creativity, values, and resilience at the center of the story. For Naama Manova-Twito, the measure of success isn’t just a platform update or an award; it’s whether her work brings people more time, more possibility, and maybe even a little joy back into marketing.

Naama has been clear: AI isn’t here to erase creativity—it’s here to protect it. She sees the agentic model as a sous-chef: it handles the repetitive prep work so the chef can focus on the flavor. In practice, that means the agents crunch numbers, set up campaigns, and optimize performance, while humans get to rediscover the parts of marketing that actually inspired them in the first place—storytelling, bold ideas, and emotional resonance.

Her conviction is that once machines handle the grind, marketing can be fun again. Think back to when people actually went to the theater early to watch commercials. Naama insists the spark that made brands feel like cultural icons can return—if the dashboards stop dictating every decision.

She doesn’t pretend that the founder’s path is glamorous. “We’re a startup. We don’t have lives. Balance doesn’t exist,” she said flatly in our conversation. It’s all-in conviction—sleep, eat, work, repeat—and it only works if your family understands the mission and signs up for the chaos with you.

That reality is multiplied in Israel’s ecosystem, where founders operate under both economic and geopolitical strain. Resilience isn’t a motivational poster; it’s a survival trait. “When the Gaza war started, we had term sheets pulled right from our hands,” she recalled. But the pressure forced sharper decisions and bolder bets. That ethos—deliver no matter what—has become part of the DNA.

For Naama, success is not another TechCrunch headline. It’s the SMB owner who called her team in tears after discovering that they could finally afford marketing help because the bank sponsored access to MarkeTeam.ai. It’s the moment her 14-year-old daughter posted a photo of her on Instagram, calling her the person she admires most. “I haven’t been the best mom these past years, I’m working all the time,” Naama admitted, “but the fact that she was proud of me—it meant everything.”

That’s what legacy looks like: not just exits or valuation spikes, but changing the trajectory of businesses and inspiring the next generation.

The broader context can’t be ignored. Israel’s startup ecosystem has endured wars, economic shocks, and investor pullbacks. Yet the sector doubles down on foundational tech, infrastructure, and creativity. It refuses to be defined by crisis, channeling constraint into innovation. MarkeTeam.ai is a product of that resilience, scaling while under fire—literally—and embedding perseverance into the platform’s DNA.

Naama believes the endgame is simple: AI will hand the industry back its sense of joy. By offloading the drudgery, agentic AI creates space for riskier, bolder, more human campaigns. The future isn’t dashboards filled with green arrows; it’s brands that make people laugh, feel nostalgia, or smile at a logo.

In just the past year, MarkeTeam.ai has moved from early experiment to category shaper:

The leap from idea to impact has been staggering. What started as a gamble on collaborative agents is now industry infrastructure.

The story of agentic AI isn’t really about algorithms. It’s about values, resilience, and rekindling creativity in a machine-driven world. Naama’s leadership shows that legacy in the machine age will be measured by lives changed, teams empowered, and joy returned to the work itself.