Marketing Consultant in the Age of Agentic AI – Otso Karvinen
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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 across industries
In 2022 I joined Quru, one of Finland’s leading digital marketing and analytics agencies. As a strategist I worked with B2B and public-sector organisations across a wide range of industries.
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. With Aapo I co-founded Parvi, an agentic AI marketing and sales agency. We embed a Growth Strategist plus a team of AI agents into your company. The Strategist directs the agents and owns the quality of everything that goes out.
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.
Before founding Parvi I built and ran an agentic go-to-market system end to end. It covered marketing and sales automation across the funnel: search and paid media, content and ad copy, prospect research and qualification, meeting workflows, and the analysis that fed the next decision. Almost nothing routine in the funnel ran without an agent or an automation behind it.
Running agents at that volume also teaches you to watch the economics of the models underneath. I wrote about which Claude model and settings I run my agents on and what that choice does to the monthly bill.
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 B2B company selling online across several European markets: qualified lead volume grew substantially in a year, and campaigns became a leading source of the company’s new contacts.
- An in-house growth role: a thought-leader-led go-to-market strategy (Thought Leader Ads, organic LinkedIn content and outbound to engaged audiences and companies) drove significant year-over-year growth in the sales pipeline.
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:
- 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.
- 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 a team built around exactly this model: an experienced strategist leading the marketing, and agentic systems multiplying the output. We can talk any time.
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.
FAQ
What does an AI marketing consultant do?
An AI marketing consultant helps a company put AI to work in its real marketing and sales, not just in one-off experiments. The work usually covers three things: finding where AI creates real value, building the systems that do the work and setting the rules for what runs on its own and where a person stays in the loop. A good one builds and operates the systems rather than only advising on them from a slide deck.
What does AI marketing consulting cost?
Rates vary widely by scope and seniority. Experienced marketing consultants typically bill in the range of 80 to 150 euros per hour, and project work usually starts from a few thousand euros and grows with the size of the build. Ongoing agentic systems are more often priced as a monthly retainer than by the hour, because the value is in running and improving them over months rather than in a single deliverable. Ask for a clear scope and price before any work begins.
How does AI help in marketing and sales?
AI helps most when it takes over repetitive, high-volume work that used to eat a team's time. In practice that means things like SEO and paid-search automation, ad and email copy, prospect research and ICP qualification, meeting prep and follow-ups and data analysis that points to the next move. The goal is not to replace the marketer but to multiply what a small team can deliver, so people spend their hours on judgment and strategy instead of manual tasks.
What does agentic AI mean?
Agentic AI means AI that does work, not just AI you chat with. An agent has instructions, context and its own tools, and it runs a whole workflow either on its own or with a person checking the result. A plain chatbot answers a question. An agent researches a topic, writes the draft, checks it against your data and hands back something finished. That shift from advice to finished output is what makes it useful for real marketing and sales work.
Should you hire an AI consultant or train your own team?
It depends on how fast you need results and how deep the change goes. Training your own team is the right long-term move, but it is slow, and most teams do not have time to learn AI while still hitting their targets. A consultant is worth it when you want working systems in weeks rather than quarters, and when you want someone who has built the thing before. The strongest setups do both: a consultant builds the systems and leaves the team able to run them.
Where should you start with AI in marketing?
Start with the context, not the tools. Before an agent can do useful work it needs your business written down in a form it can use: your ideal customer profiles, your go-to-market strategy, your value propositions and the rules for what runs automatically. Once that foundation exists, the first automations should target the highest-volume repetitive work, because that is where time savings are easiest to prove. Buying tools before the context is in place is the most common reason these projects stall.
How do you choose a good AI marketing consultant?
Look for someone who builds and operates the systems, not just advises on them. Ask what they have actually shipped and what results it produced, and ask to see a real system rather than a slide about ideal states. Specifics are the signal: a consultant who can walk you through exactly how an agent does a task, and where it fails, knows the work. The biggest risk is the consultant who bills a lot and leaves a deck behind, so demand concrete detail before you commit.
