Hilary Smith — Chief Marketing Officer, Linnworks
Published:
The really hard stuff and the stuff that keeps people up at night over their profit margins or over bad customer experiences is unfortunately when inventory is misaligned, you are stocking out where you shouldn’t, things get shipped to the wrong place, you mis-ship the wrong product to the… wrong customer. And you start to look at all of your operations and think that the only way to solve it is to hire more people. And that is a huge margin squeeze.
What does Hilary Smith say on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström?
Hilary Smith, Chief Marketing Officer, Linnworks, says: CMO Hilary Smith discusses how visible marketing automation often masks substantial manual labor in inventory, order management, and fulfillment, which can undermine brand promises and profitability. She contrasts brittle, rules-based automation with AI-driven diagnostic tools that surface repetitive manual work, argues for unified operational back-ends to preserve omnichannel consistency and trust, and emphasizes keeping humans in the loop to capture lived customer experience and strategic judgment.
From: The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström
Cite as: Hilary Smith. (2026). On The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström. Retrieved from https://research.agilebrandguide.com/insights/hilary-smith-the-really-hard-stuff-and-the-stuff-that-keeps-people-up-at