AI, Agents, and the Return of Marketing Fundamentals: Alex Beresford, Chief Growth Officer at TaxFix

In this episode of Brave New Digital World, Andy Carvell sits down with Alexander Beresford, Chief Growth Officer at Taxfix, to talk about what happens when traditional marketing fundamentals collide with generative AI.

Alex shares lessons learned moving from PayPal to early-stage startups, focusing on brand momentum, building infrastructure, and the shift from scale to zero-to-one. The discussion highlights the growing gap between teams using contextual bandits and generative AI and those still relying on legacy systems.

They explore what growth teams might be overlooking today. Positioning and messaging remain crucial, even as performance metrics take center stage. Marketing will soon need to influence not just people, but also software agents making decisions for them. It’s important to move quickly with AI experimentation, but not to treat AI as a cure-all.

The discussion covers curiosity, speed of experimentation, machine-readable data, and why core marketing principles still matter in an AI-driven world.

Find Alex on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderberesford/

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger