A full-capacity crowd of senior marketing leaders gathered at Twilio HQ in San Francisco for the latest Marketers That Matter® Forum on April 23. The session brought together five CMOs for a candid, wide-ranging conversation on how AI is reshaping brand strategy, team structure, and the craft of marketing itself.
Panelists included:
- Chris Koehler, Chief Marketing Officer, Twilio (hear more from Chris here)
- Suzanne Philion, Chief Marketing Officer, Waymo (hear more from Suzanne here)
- Colin Fleming, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, ServiceNow (hear more from Colin here)
- Emily Ketchen, Chief Marketing Officer, Intelligent Devices Group and International Markets, Lenovo (hear more from Emily here)
- Wendy Bergh, Chief Marketing Officer, Rakuten (hear more from Wendy here)
Moderated by Kathy Hollenhorst of Marketers That Matter®, the conversation drew on the panelists’ experiences across B2B and B2C, spanning enterprise software, autonomous vehicles, consumer devices, e-commerce, and communications platforms. Together, they offered a grounded, experience-driven perspective on what the AI era looks like inside major marketing organizations.
Following are key insights from the conversation:
Brand Is One Advantage AI Can’t Commoditize
The panelists agreed that when AI can execute nearly anything, brand becomes the differentiator that matters most. Emotional resonance and values alignment are advantages technology cannot replicate.
“Every piece of your brand puzzle matters in the context of how your brand is perceived,” Lenovo’s Emily Ketchen said. “I love the notion of the continuous fluidity. You have to be listening, you have to be having conversations, and you have to understand where your customers are coming from.”
In a world where AI recommends products before a user clicks, being the trusted name that surfaces first is a material business advantage. The CMOs made the case that brands must be part of the culture, and they need heart, soul, and thoughtful human tastemakers behind the scenes.
That point dovetailed with a broader discussion of AI-powered discovery. “AEO or GEO — they weren’t in our vocabulary a year or two ago,” Twilio’s Chris Koehler said. “And now it’s all we’re talking about.”
Suzanne Philion of Waymo offered a specific playbook for how her team is responding. Rather than simply updating messaging, Waymo is publishing first-party safety data to become the source record that AI engines draw from. “You need the data to also tell that story,” Philion said. Credibility in the AI era requires proof, not just positioning, she added.
Wendy Bergh of Rakuten added that brand perception is not static. “Every interaction is like a reauthorization or requalification moment,” she said, noting that shared values and consistent experience are what enable brands to rise above competitors.
From Specialists to Generalists
When asked whether they had cut staff in the past six months due to AI, none of the panelists raised their hand. Two had added roles. That data point pushed back on the dominant media narrative that AI is eliminating marketing jobs.
The more precise argument from the panel: roles are transforming, not disappearing. “The trope is still true: AI will not take your job. The person next to you using AI will take your job,” said Colin Fleming of ServiceNow.
The deep-specialist model — careers built entirely around demand gen, product marketing, or brand — is giving way to a more generalist profile. Fleming described the org structure shift as moving from a pyramid to a diamond, with full-stack marketers at the center and a smaller cohort of high-judgment specialists at the top.
Emily Ketchen of Lenovo framed the stakes with a long-term view. “I would venture that all of us in the room are the first generation to manage an agentic workforce,” she said.
There was consensus that human judgment, curiosity, creativity, and emotional intelligence are becoming far more important.
What AI Is Actually Doing Inside These Marketing Orgs
The session also covered real-world AI use cases.
Fleming shared a detailed example. ServiceNow had no market research function, and building one conventionally could have cost millions. So, Fleming took a different approach. His team developed a synthetic persona environment called “Ask the Buyer,” trained on 22 years of proprietary research and built using Claude.
“We have four key synthetic personas: our CIO buyer, CHRO buyer, CRO buyer, and CISO buyer,” Fleming said. “They have names and personalities, they’re in our advertising, and they all have models training behind them.” The tool is now available across the entire ServiceNow MarCom organization.
Koehler described a shift toward building internal tools from scratch. His team used three AI platforms in parallel to develop a brand measurement tool that tracks brand health against business outcomes, which is a capability that previously required significant external investment and long lead times.
Bergh highlighted two use cases at Rakuten: an AI-powered analytics interface that lets any marketer on the team query data conversationally, and a creative scale-out workflow that initially improved production efficiency by 30% — with the team steadily pushing that percentage higher and higher.
Philion was candid about where AI is helping and where it isn’t yet ready. On the growth marketing side, agents are being used to serve contextual messages across the customer journey. On the brand and creative side, human oversight remains non-negotiable. “Don’t forget that the art is as important as the science for so many things in marketing,” she said.
Ketchen noted that AI works best when it makes the audience and customer experience more relevant and efficient. Her team at Lenovo used contextual AI across paid media to target B2B audiences, specifically CIOs and CTOs, within the high-interest context of fans of Formula 1®, with whom Lenovo is a global partner. This improved targeting efficiency by 55%.
AI Agents: The Hybrid Workforce Is Already Here
The panel reached a clear consensus on a forward-looking point: the marketing org chart now includes AI agents. Several CMOs referenced employees — in some cases, enterprising new hires — who had built agents to handle recurring workstreams, effectively expanding team capacity without adding headcount.
Managing a hybrid team of both workers and agents is not a future scenario; it is already underway in forward-leaning organizations. The panelists continually returned to one principle: discernment, taste, governance, and responsibility remain the domain of human expertise.
About the Speakers
Chris Koehler, CMO at Twilio
Chris Koehler is Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio. He is responsible for the company’s global marketing strategy. Previously, Chris was the CMO of Box, Inc. Prior to Box, Chris spent more than 25+ years leading Marketing, Customer Success, Solution Consulting, Demand Generation and Enablement teams at Adobe Systems, E*TRADE Financial, SunTrust Bank, and Claritas.
He holds a B.S. in Marketing from George Mason University, an MBA from Georgia State University, and was a graduate of the Harvard Business Analytics Executive Education Program.
Colin Fleming, EVP & CMO at ServiceNow
Colin Fleming is the EVP and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at ServiceNow, where he’s responsible for the global marketing and communications strategy and growing brand recognition worldwide.
An award-winning brand, storytelling, and experiential leader, Colin brings nearly two decades of experience building impactful brand and marketing programs. In his first year at ServiceNow, he was named to Forbes’ World’s Most Influential CMOs list, recognizing his leadership in transforming how the company shows up in market and pioneering AI-native marketing operations.
Before joining ServiceNow, he was pivotal in scaling Salesforce’s global presence as the Executive Vice President of Global Marketing and Chief Brand Officer, where his teams drove significant increases in market share and brand awareness.
Colin’s career began in an unexpected field—as a professional race car driver and Formula 1 test driver for Red Bull Racing. His transition from the fast-paced world of racing to marketing was fueled by his passion for brand strategy and ahem driving high-speed growth and transformation.
Emily Ketchen, CMO and SVP, Intelligent Devices Group and International Markets at Lenovo
Emily Ketchen is Lenovo’s Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President for the Intelligent Devices Group and International Sales Organization. She leads global marketing strategy and execution across Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group and Motorola – driving growth in brand and product demand, customer insights, sponsorships, and creative direction. She also oversees marketing across international markets spanning EMEA, Asia Pacific, North America, and Latin America.
With over 30 years of experience, Emily has held senior leadership roles at HP, including Head of Marketing for the Americas and Regional Head of Marketing for Asia Pacific/Japan, where she built integrated marketing strategies and led global go-to-market initiatives. Earlier in her career, she held leadership positions at Publicis & Hal Riney, Grey San Francisco, Dell, Poppe Tyson/Bozell Advertising, Falcon Cable TV, and Iberia Airlines of Spain.
Emily is a Board Member of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Outward Bound California. She was also recently recognized by Business Insider as among the 25 most innovative CMOs of 2025.
Fluent in Spanish and French, Emily holds a degree in International Relations from Pitzer College, part of the Claremont Colleges, and studied at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, and IEP.
Suzanne Philion, CMO at Waymo
Suzanne Philion is Chief Marketing Officer at Waymo, the fully autonomous driving tech leader serving hundreds of thousands of rides each week across five U.S. cities and growing.
Prior to Waymo, Suzanne served in executive communications roles at Yahoo and Verizon. She started her career in the public sector, including serving for over a decade as a Foreign Service Officer with assignments at the U.S. Mission to NATO, U.S. Embassy Bogota, and various assignments in Washington, D.C.
Suzanne received her B.A. with honors at Binghamton University, and her M.A. with honors at Georgetown University.
Wendy Bergh, CMO at Rakuten Rewards
Wendy Bergh is a dynamic and results-driven executive with a track record of scaling startups and Fortune 500 companies. She specializes in driving transformative growth through exceptional customer experience, strategic product expansion, and data-driven marketing that accelerates acquisition, conversion, and retention. Known for building high-performing teams and exceeding financial targets, Wendy blends strategic vision with hands-on operational leadership.
Most recently, Wendy was General Manager of Zoom’s multi-billion-dollar Online business. Her earlier leadership roles span high-impact positions at ServiceNow, Minted, and Walmart, where she played a pivotal role in digital transformation and business growth. Wendy holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.A. from Colby College.
Forum moderator Kathy Hollenhorst is a Marketers That Matter® Advisor & Chief Community Officer.
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