Marketing Consultant in the Age of Agentic AI – Otso Karvinen

What kind of marketing consultant are you looking for? If the answer is “someone who can handle both the strategy and the execution, and understands what AI is changing in marketing right now”, I might be your person.

I’ve worked in marketing for over 15 years, and these days I build and operate agentic AI systems for marketing and sales. I’m based in Helsinki, Finland, and I work with clients both in Finland and globally. I also keep a running list of AI events in Finland, which is a good way to keep track of how quickly things are moving here.

In this article I’ll walk through my path, my skills and some of the results I’ve helped companies get. Not because CVs are all that interesting, but because hiring a consultant is ultimately a trust decision. You should be able to judge beforehand what you’re actually getting. There’s also a more informal introduction on my about page.

(Agentic AI, in short, means AI agents that don’t just answer questions but autonomously do real work: they research, analyze, write and run entire workflows. More on that further down.)

My path to marketing consulting

The freelance years, 2011–2016

My career started in exactly the role this article is about. I worked for five years as a freelance marketing consultant: first copywriting and translations, and through those, SEO. I helped dozens of companies from multinationals to small municipalities, in Finland and abroad.

Social media marketing was only just becoming a thing, and I got to do organic and paid social in the platforms’ early years. For a well-known musical institution I grew the social media following from 6,000 to over 100,000 in six months. I also wrote and optimized the copy for over 50 holiday destinations when a large tour operator expanded into Europe. (Without AI, because it didn’t exist yet.)

Those years also included a couple of years working for Wikitravel, at the time one of the biggest travel websites in the world.

Nallikari: marketing manager in tourism

After the freelance years I moved into tourism. As the marketing manager of Nallikari Holiday Village I built the marketing strategy, the processes and the measurement: analytics, conversion tracking and channel-level reporting. In two years, organic visitors and the social media following more than doubled, and I helped grow the destination’s revenue with quality social content and targeted advertising.

Visit Oulu: large development projects

At Visit Oulu I led two large tourism marketing development projects involving about 60 of the region’s tourism companies: a joint e-commerce store for the region (Elämysten Olohuone) and the creation of the Pohjolan Rengastie tourism brand, launch campaigns and website included. As the project manager, my role ran from strategy to execution. A side product was Elämystestaajat, a UGC campaign well ahead of its time.

Quru: B2B strategy for dozens of companies

In 2022 I joined Quru, one of Finland’s leading digital marketing and analytics agencies. As a strategist I helped dozens of companies: manufacturing, B2B service providers, eCommerce stores, SaaS companies, financial institutions, government agencies and NGOs.

The core of the work was marketing strategies, campaign strategies and measurement models. In practice: which channels to use for what, how to split budget and resources across them, and how to prove the results.

In 2024 I became Quru’s Marketing Director, and in October 2025 Head of Growth. I was in charge of Quru’s own marketing and sales, and my job description included leading our AI agents alongside the teams.

The turn: agentic AI

I’ve used AI in my work since ChatGPT launched, but the big turn happened in the Head of Growth role. I built Quru an agentic go-to-market machine where agents did real sales and marketing work every day. Over the past six months, both the technology and my own skills have developed faster than ever before.

That work pulled me in. I’m now co-founding a new AI-native marketing and sales agency.

What agentic AI means in practice

Agentic AI means AI isn’t just a chat you ask for advice. Agents have instructions, context and tools, and they run entire workflows either fully on their own or with a human checking the output.

In the setup I built for Quru, agents handled things like:

• SEO automations
• paid search automations
• LinkedIn and Meta advertising automations
• copywriting and ad copy
• discovery meeting prep, transcription and follow-ups
• assembling proposals
• prospecting and ICP qualification
• marketing data analysis and recommendations based on it

In practice, nearly every sales and marketing task had some automation or agent supporting it.

This is also the difference I keep writing about: I’m not a consultant who shows you slides about agents and ideal states. I design, build and operate these systems myself, and I know what’s actually possible and what isn’t.

How working with me starts

The first weeks are always a deep dive into the business:

• the business, the industry, partners and competitors
• historical data, won and lost deals, customer satisfaction
• the ideal customer profile: who buys and why, who you win and who you don’t

On top of that I build an agentic context layer: a set of files where your business is laid out so that AI understands it and can use it. It covers things like your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas, go-to-market strategy, value propositions, sales motion, the technology you use, and the ground rules for what runs automatically and where a human is always in the loop.

It sounds like a lot of work, and it is. But it’s the foundation agentic marketing runs on, and you can’t skip it.

Location doesn’t limit any of this: I’m a Helsinki-based AI marketing consultant, and my clients are both Finnish and international companies.

A few results

Some examples of the kinds of results I’ve been part of:

• A B2B e-commerce company: paid advertising revenue doubled in a year on the same budget.
• A Finnish B2B service and manufacturing company selling online to the Nordics and Central Europe: qualified leads grew over 400% year over year, and almost 80% of the company’s new contacts came from our campaigns.
• Quru: pipeline grew over 250% year over year with a thought-leader-led go-to-market strategy (Thought Leader Ads, organic LinkedIn content and outbound to engaged audiences and companies).

No one ever gets results alone, and a good consultant says that out loud. But in these, I was doing the planning and the work.

B2B marketing consultant, freelancer or an agency?

When a Finnish B2B company goes looking for a marketing consultant, in my experience it’s usually looking for one of two things:

1. A pair of hands, someone for a clearly scoped piece of work. In that case a freelancer or an agency is often the right call.
2. An outsourced head of marketing: an experienced person who brings the perspective, spars with the marketing manager or leads a more junior marketer, and owns the direction.

I do both, but I’m at my strongest in the latter, combined with building agentic AI: leading the marketing, plus the systems that multiply what a small team can deliver.

One thing is fair to say out loud: I don’t sell these services as a solo freelancer anymore. Client work happens through our new agency, built around exactly this model: an experienced strategist leading the marketing, and agentic systems multiplying the output. The name will be announced soon, but we can already talk.

A buyer’s biggest fear is often the hand-waving consultant who bills a lot and leaves behind a slide deck or two. I get that fear completely. That’s why this article is full of specifics. Demand the same from every consultant you consider.