Sam Richard automated the first hour of every workday.
As Chief Revenue Officer at ngrok, she used to spend every morning checking dashboards and manually looking for trends. Today, AI handles that routine instead, surfacing the signals she needs without the manual work.
That mindset shows up everywhere. Sam built a local AI assistant to help manage her family’s schedule, keeping her kids’ data on local models for safety and privacy reasons. At ngrok, she uses AI to monitor product and customer signals, and treats every repetitive task as a candidate for automation.
Sam believes the best way to start using AI is simple: narrate your day, pay attention to where time gets lost, and let AI help identify the bottlenecks worth solving.
Sam explains how she chooses between local and frontier models, how LLMs are changing customer acquisition at ngrok, and what growth leaders can learn from building AI into their daily workflows.
We discuss:
- How she automated her morning dashboard review
- Choosing between local and frontier models
- The household AI assistant she built for her family
- The AEO and SEO experiments behind ngrok’s website rebuild
- Why ngrok referrals from LLMs are growing 40 percent month over month
- Her advice for any growth leader getting started with AI
Connect with Sam
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-crowell-richard/
ngrok: https://ngrok.com
Connect with Profound
Website: https://tryprofound.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/
The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.
