Laura Mantilla Vargas

Laura Mantilla VargasAug 17, 2026

There is a rule in our user acquisition lead's head that every AI I have connected to our ad account gets wrong. It is not complicated. He can explain it in about four seconds. But it has never been written down anywhere. I spent two months building a Meta ads agent. Most of that time went on finding rules like that one, inside people, and getting them out. Then I put all of it into a dashboard, so that nobody would ever have to ask me how much we spent yesterday. Guess what? They kept asking me. 🫠 Everyone said the dashboard was great. We all went from 4 different dashboards to 1. But opening it was still a step. Asking me was not. What I did about that is most of the reason this took two months and not two weekends. I am a marketer. I have never shipped production code. Wrote it all up, including the parts nobody warns you about before the famous "weekend build". I am still not certain we got all the rules out of people's heads. P.S. I'm Laura, I'm a Creative Director at agents.nas.com and I'm documenting what I learn while becoming an AI-first marketer.

Laura Mantilla VargasAug 27, 2026

BREAKING NEWS: I've purposely made myself 15% redundant at work 🚨 Last month, I built an agent that has been saving me at least 6 hours a week of Meta ads monitoring and budget optimisation. I'm a marketer. I had never written code before. And I made it. It ran on my laptop, which is shut half of every other day (and almost all day over weekends). So once my team had access to the agent, they didn't really have access to the agent... unless I was online. It also ran on my subscriptions. When the credits ran out (no, I'm not risking auto-renewal) it stopped answering anyone at all. These are the things we overlook when we decide to build our own agents. MCPs, CLIs and APIs are so accessible now that we think we can build anything. (I see all of you, me included, commenting "Claude" under every post about an agent that does X, Y, Z). Most of those agents lack depth, and plenty have real data safety problems. Mine is semi-retired now, replaced by a production-grade version our engineers built at agents.nas.com. It does the same job, but with better answers, and it's not on me if it breaks. We could build that one because marketing is what we know. But, for example, sales is not. So we are currently buying an AI SDR instead because we don't have the depth of knowledge to build that one ourselves. If you are a CEO, CMO or VP of marketing, you are probably somewhere in the middle of this. Not sure whether to build or buy. So I wrote up the 3 lessons from building my own, the 3 options you have moving forward, and the 5 questions that decide what's the next step. Check out the framework below 👇 👇 👇

Laura Mantilla VargasAug 24, 2026

This is what a living AI brain looks like. It exists because of one reason: the pile of daily question to know how your marketing is doing. "What's my CPA?" "Are my creative fatiguing?" "What channel is performing the best this week?" "Do I have any new winning creatives?" Each might sound like a five minute job. But they are not. I need to open Meta to check on spend and creatives. Then Google, to see what people were typing to get to our landing pages. Then the CRM, to see which of those leads ever replied. Then I wait for someone in ops to tell me what those customers were even worth, because of course that lives somewhere else. So many tabs, so many people to chase... and there go my hours. Meanwhile what I actually want to be doing is cracking the next ad test. 🫠 Our data is messy too. Anyone who tells you theirs is perfectly in check is lying. Especially if they grew fast and run a lot of experiments. Fast action is messy. That's the trade. So our engineers built us a brain. It plugs into every source and keeps them connected. Every 15 minutes it goes back and checks everything again, spots what changed, learns what's working. And anyone on the team can just ask it stuff. It answers, and it quotes the source, so you can see exactly where the number came from. A source of truth. Finally. *insert a chorus of angels here* Because it's genuinely annoying when a simple question just sits there while you work out which of eleven places to check first. It writes our reports too (so we finally don't have to do it manually with all tabs open🙏). And it connects to all of our agents, so each has full knowledge of our business before taking action. Oh yeah, and this brain works 24/7. So if I go on leave, my team can still access all the info in one place. That's why this is the first thing we build when a company brings us in. Before any other agent. Because an agent can't optimise your ads or go find your customers if it has no clue what your business actually is. Everything else sits on top of this. And if you are in marketing, yes, you probably need one. If you are CMO or a VP of marketing, you need something like this. Wanna know more? https://lnkd.in/e9jXJbUa