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Tereza Kohutová has built her career crafting marketing strategies that can deliver real, measurable results. As CMO of the fintech startup Patron GO, she’s leading a team focused on growth hacking and scaling their user base, all while staying nimble enough to adapt to market changes in real-time.
Tereza’s path to Patron GO has been anything but linear. With a degree in Destination management from the University of Birmingham, UK, she began her career at the government agency Marketing Birmingham before taking on roles at Bezvavlasy.cz, Knihobot and PalmApp – with each one sharpening her ability to adapt strategies across industries.
When it comes to AI, Tereza has a very pragmatic view when it comes to it’s strengths and weaknesses. “I use AI constantly,” she explains, “but I trust it the way you trust a friend who’s brilliant at trivia and terrible at boundaries.” For Tereza, the value of AI doesn’t lie in replacing human marketers, but making them sharper, faster and more able to focus on steering the campaign in ways no AI model can truly grasp.
Her hands-on management style means that Tereza is involved in every step, from strategic planning to campaign execution. This same approach extends to her use of AI. She doesn’t just set up a tool to run, she actively shapes how it’s used so as to not let it run out of control. Or as she puts it: “When AI runs the engine, you better make sure you’re at the wheel”.
With Tereza’s more reserved use of AI, she’s not letting the speed of AI come at the price of control over the process. Thanks to this nuanced approach, we thought it would be best to start by asking how this use of AI has changed the way she’s approached marketing in the past few years.
Honestly, AI didn’t revolutionise my job in some philosophical sense, it just made everything faster. And I mean everything. Campaigns that used to take a week now take a day. You need fewer people on your team, but way more knowledge. You need to stay up to date with new tools daily because they’re reshaping literally every marketing channel from email, search, ads, to product onboarding. Every single day. If you blink, you’re behind.
But speed is not everything. With great speed come some very bizarre suggestions. When we started using AI to generate content in-app for Patron GO we gave it anonymised, aggregated examples of our data mapping so it could propose savings ideas based on real bank transactions. One model, quite helpfully, suggested that users who pay for public toilets should start a micro-savings account and put away 50p every time they pee. Technically, it’s a “smart” savings habit. In reality, it’s not the most elegant financial tip. Though I’ll give it points for creativity.
And that’s the thing. AI gets it wrong. Not because it’s not intelligent, but because it doesn’t fully understand every single context. And in fintech, context is everything. Financials are a super sensitive subject to us all. So yes, I use AI constantly. But I trust it the way you trust a friend who’s brilliant at trivia and terrible at boundaries.
AI made me faster. But it also made me sharper. Because when AI runs the engine, you better be sure you’re at the wheel.
Honestly, the exciting part isn’t about one fancy AI tool. It’s the little ecosystem we’ve put together that actually works for us. We pull in what we need through Make and build the rest with our own internal IT development, so it fits the structure of our projects instead of the other way around. It’s not glamorous, but it’s deeply practical.
At Patron GO, we use GPT models for generating in-app quests based on behavioural data, which is pretty standard now. But what I actually enjoy even more is something our founder hacked together using Lovable. It’s a small AI tool that scans your preferred media in your field. I actually have TechFinitive as one of my listed sources! And it cross-references it with your LinkedIn profile, your post history, what’s performed well for you, and a few other signals. Then it suggests content topics you might want to talk about next. It’s not rocket science, but it feels a bit like old-school Bloglovin or RSS feeds, except with better targeting and slightly less 2008 Tumblr energy. Basically, it helps you think faster. And for someone like me who wants to stay relevant and occasionally be witty online, that’s genuinely helpful.
In your experience, how effective is AI at understanding and predicting customer behaviour compared to traditional methods?
Without AI, doing proper personalisation would be a nightmare. Or a full-time job for a team of 20 people. With AI, we’re finally able to go beyond just slapping someone’s first name on an e-mail. At Patron GO, we’ve built communication layers that shift not just the content, but the tone and emotional charge based on how people use the app and how they work with their finances. Some people need encouragement. Some just want the numbers. Some want us to leave them alone until payday. And AI helps us catch that nuance fast.
But AI doesn’t actually understand people. It mimics patterns. It doesn’t feel cultural or emotional context. That’s why I still use ChatGPT more like a creative sparring partner than a full writer. It’s great for drafting ideas, testing voice, or even throwing out one-liners that occasionally make me laugh out loud. But I’m always the final editor. Because honestly, a 20-year-old guy in a small town in South Moravia doesn’t respond to messaging the same way as a 20-year-old guy in London. And no AI model knows what that difference feels like.
So yes, AI helps us scale. But we’re the ones making sure it still sounds human. That it lands. That it actually fits. Because this is fintech.
How can AI-enhanced marketing create a connection that feels authentic to the humans who receive the communications?
To me, authentic marketing is when your brand has a real value. A value created by experience, your own knowledge, beliefs and ideas. And of course cultural and market context. AI is great at faking tone, but it doesn’t know your values. It doesn’t know your internal debates. It doesn’t know the late-night Slack messages about whether something feels off. That’s what makes a brand real.
At Knihobot, when we launched a new book-buying partnership with a chain of discount stores, we didn’t sugarcoat anything. We spoke in our usual, slightly chaotic, super honest voice. It could have been generated by AI. But we would still have to be telling AI what our values, what our tone-of-voice and what our message to those particular customers were. Because marketing needs to sound real. Not perfect. Not corporate. It needs to sound and feel human.
I think authenticity with AI is still very possible. Even at scale. But only if someone is curating it, not blindly outsourcing it to a prompt and not even re-reading the generated answer. If you’re using AI to amplify your message, cool. If you’re using it to write your identity, that is a no-no for me. AI can mimic your voice. But only you know what you actually want to say.
Where do you think AI enhances brand trust, and where does it risk undermining it?
What ethical considerations do you think marketers should be aware of when using AI-driven tools?
Yes, and honestly? I love it! AI completely changed the way I start creative work. That blank-page, blinking-cursor dread? Absolutely gone. I don’t even use those huge rolls of wrapping paper to draw out my ideas, do the brainstorming or spend hours crossing ideas out. I usually start by dropping in a few ideas, some context, a vibe I’m aiming for and let the model do its magic. Not because I’ll use it as is, but because it makes me think differently. It expands my brain basically.
Sometimes it’s the phrasing of a line that gets me. Sometimes it’s the fact that it took my idea into a new direction I wouldn’t have explored on my own. I’m still the one doing the actual editing, sense-checking, and refining, but AI gives me a faster runway. Like someone brainstorming with me at speed, without needing the full 30-minute kick off call.
And weirdly, that’s where the fun is. The balance between chaos and control. You’re still the creative lead but you’ve got this extra super fast colleague that never runs out of energy and quite often surprises you with a communication gem. I wouldn’t say it replaces any part of my creativity. It absolutely fuels it. And that, for me, is where the real value of AI is.
I think we’re finally being pushed back into what we’re actually good at: understanding people. Emotions, friction, nuance. That is exactly the stuff no model fully grasps.
Sure, AI can write, analyse, automate. But it doesn’t know that in one country, the word “debt” is normal and in another, it’s taboo. When I lived in the UK, I used to live off an overdraft as a student and pretty much throughout my first job too. It did not feel wrong – overdrafts are a thing that is not frowned upon in the UK. But in the Czech Republic? You cannot just switch on your overdraft like that. You have to have a certain amount of cash in your account and you have to have a certain credit history to be able to “afford” an overdraft. So people in the Czech Republic just don’t spend money when they don’t have them. Or take loans which are extremely frowned upon. AI doesn’t “feel” this. It can’t read the room. And when it comes to fintechs, it is all about those sensitive nuances.
I believe that marketers are becoming more like curators. Translators. Architects of meaning. We don’t need to build every piece from scratch. But we do need to decide what matters, what gets amplified, and what needs a human eye. Especially in startups, where your messaging has to flex daily and your product changes weekly, someone has to hold the narrative thread.
I actually think we’ll actually get more creative with AI, not less. Because when you’re not buried in task hell and have the option to have all the less exciting marketing activities automated, you’ve got time to think bigger. We’ll write better stories, build stronger brands, and maybe finally stop wasting three hours choosing between three shades of purple. And that’s the kind of future I’m here for.
