World's #1 Banking CMO: How AI Is Changing Billion Dollar Banks Today | Tim Rutten, CMO @ Backbase

Tim Rutten, CMO of Backbase, the €2.5 billion Amsterdam tech company whose AI-native Banking OS powers 120+ banks worldwide, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman with the clearest AI ROI numbers we have heard on the show: double the pipeline on 25% less budget. Topics include the custom go-to-market operating system his team built on the Vercel stack, why real bank deployments are 99% deterministic, the 90% cost reduction banks are finding in customer care, and why most enterprise workloads do not need frontier-model intelligence. Plus, where the AI bubble breaks, what happens to judgment and taste when anyone can generate output, and a bulls-versus-bears round on LinkedIn, banking apps, and sales spiffs. Key Takeaways: - Backbase's marketing org runs on GTMOS, a custom go-to-market operating system built on the Vercel stack and wired into Salesforce and the company's finance tools, and the numbers behind it are specific. As Tim Rutten, CMO at Backbase, put it: "Double the pipeline, 25% head cut on my budget... So with 25% less budget, I'm actually still doubling the pipeline." The unlock came from rebuilding how the team works rather than layering tools on top of it. - Shipping AI into a regulated industry means using AI more narrowly than you might expect. On what real bank deployments look like, Tim Rutten said: "the actual implementations are almost 99% deterministic, and there's this one little percent that actually gets them to gain, to reason at the right moment in time." That same architecture caps the bill, because most banking workloads are repetitive and rule-bound. But the same rigor can net fantastic results from AI in broader applications as well. - Backbase treats AI slop as an architecture problem, containing content generation inside hard boundaries. Per Tim Rutten: "You have tone of voice, you have guardrails that we don't have AI slop. There's like 22 rules that are applied. If they don't check out, the agent needs to rewrite and continuously learns to rewrite." The human half of the risk is harder to engineer around, as Asad Zaman, CEO of Sales Talent Agency, framed it: "a lot of people that didn't have a skill are using AI for that thing. And if you didn't have a skill in an area or judgment or taste in that particular area, you have no mechanism to stress test the quality of what is coming out." - On how the AI bubble pops, Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion, put the risk on the business model sitting underneath the capex: "if everybody presumes the way that all these companies make money is selling tokens… and then all of a sudden it turns out selling tokens is a really terrible business. Well, then that's a thing that would compress." Tim Rutten lands in a similar place on timing while staying long on the outcome: "a little bit bearish on timing, massively bullish on the future… it will happen nevertheless, but it's going to be a very rocky ride." Connect with the Hosts & Guests: Host: Sam Jacobs, CEO at Pavilion - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/ Host: AJ Bruno, CEO at QuotaPath - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajbruno3/ Host: Asad Zaman, CEO at STA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/azaman1/ Guest: Tim Rutten, CMO at Backbase - https://www.linkedin.com/in/timrutten/ Topline is more than a YouTube Channel: Subscribe to Topline Newsletter: https://toplinemedia.substack.com/ Tune into Topline Podcast, the #1 podcast for founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-podcast Join the free Topline Slack channel to connect with 600+ revenue leaders to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-slack Chapters: 00:00 Introducing Tim Rutten 03:11 Inside Backbase And 120 Banks 09:42 90% Cost Cuts In Call Centers 12:04 Why The Application Layer Wins 15:23 Europe, The US, And Regulation 21:50 Where The AI Bubble Breaks 27:24 Why Banks Skip Frontier Models 34:34 Bank Budgets Shift To AI Native 38:23 Real ROI At Lloyds And JPMorgan 44:31 Quiz Pro Quo 49:37 GTMOS, The Go To Market OS 52:02 Double Pipeline On 25% Less Budget 53:53 Judgment, Taste, And AI Slop 1:06:15 Real Time Marketing By Christmas 1:09:30 Bulls and Bears