AMA: Box Head of Product Marketing, Platform and Integrations, Vishal Naik on AI and Product Marketing

A powerful practice that the team implemented on the Gemini marketing team while I was still at Google was centralizing our foundational assets into a "Product Marketing Guide" (PMG). This deck was the single source of truth for everything: brand messaging, user personas, journey maps, market context, and more. Its primary value was as a cross-functional alignment tool, giving anyone the necessary context to understand a product deeply. To your question about frequency, these weren't refreshed o ...Read More

In sticking with the theme of this AMA being focused on AI, this is where I use Deep Research. Deep Research is an amazing way to supercharge your desk research. The key is to guide your chosen AI tool into a structured workflow: Market & Customer Discovery: Use Deep Research to analyze market trends, profile competitors, and generate detailed customer personas based on online conversations and data. Prompt it with questions like, "Analyze the key drivers and challenges for the [your industr ...Read More

AI has fundamentally changed developer marketing by enabling a level of persona and messaging analysis that was previously impossible. The impact isn't just about speed; it's about the depth of insight you can now achieve. Here are two techniques that PMMs should adopt because of this shift: 1. Build Hyper-Realistic Personas. AI, especially with deep research capabilities, allows you to go beyond surveys and interviews. You can now summarize massive amounts of data to understand the developer mi ...Read More

You should absolutely not use AI in Marketing under two conditions, both of which are entirely within your control. The first is a matter of security: you should not use AI for work until you have verified the tool's data policies are safe for corporate information. As we saw with early leaks, using consumer-grade tools for proprietary work is a major risk. Do your due diligence. For instance, the terms for Gemini in an enterprise Google Workspace account are fundamentally different from a perso ...Read More

The rise of AI completely changes how we talk about features because the competitive landscape is fundamentally different. Suddenly, every company has an AI product and an AI mandate, which means you're no longer just competing with direct rivals; you're competing with every other AI solution for a finite slice of your customer's AI or innovation budget.It forces you to stop leading with features and start leading with an emotional benefit. Your features are still critical, but they now serve as ...Read More

My approach to driving AI adoption is a two-part strategy: first you show what's possible, then you shepherd the team along the journey. 1. Lead by Practical Example. The best way to inspire is to deliver results. I build custom AI agents that solve immediate, tangible problems for our team. For instance, when we needed to record live demos, I built an agent to be our scriptwriter. When I showed the team how we could create high-quality scripts on the fly, it wasn't just a novelty; it was a clea ...Read More

Make a Gem. Or an agent in Box AI Studio. Or a custom GPT. The key isn't a single prompt; it's building a custom agent that acts as your personal copywriter. Here's what I do to get AI to be a great Blog writer. Or maybe not a great writer, but at least to leverage AI to write like me, which is at least good enough to have been hired as a PMM :)Whether you use a Gem, a Box AI Agent, or a Custom GPT, the process is the same. Here’s how you can train an AI to write like you, using a blog as an exa ...Read More

While I primarily use Gemini and Box AI, the principle is the same for any platform: generative AI thrives on context. My approach is to start with a detailed, five-to-six sentence prompt that explains exactly what I’m looking for. Think of it as a mini brief to your AI assistant. I don’t rely on a rigid structure, as modern models are highly effective at understanding natural language and intent. From there, I never treat the initial response as final. I shift into an editorial role, using foll ...Read More

As a former member of the Gemini team, I use Gemini Advanced daily. I especially lean on its more powerful features, like the ability to do deep research for analysis or creating custom Gems to handle specific, recurring tasks. I have a blog writer Gem that my entire team uses and its been a major time saver. Gemini Live is also something that I like to use for things like when I'm on the drive in to work and I need to explore a complex topic. Beyond that, I'm a big fan of Box AI. Its real power ...Read More