A conversation with Mark Abramowitz and Laura Heisman
The companies winning at AI aren’t necessarily the ones using the most models or tools. They’re the ones who can answer one essential question: What business problem do we need to solve? That premise anchored a recent Marketers That Matter® Visionaries conversation between Mark Abramowitz, CMO of Dataiku, the Platform for AI Success, and Laura Heisman, CMO of Dynatrace; two marketing leaders who sell AI platforms to enterprises and are navigating the same pressures their customers face.
With Marketers That Matter® Chief Community Officer Kathy Hollenhorst leading the discussion, they explored what it takes to build genuine credibility in markets where every company claims to be an AI company and buyers are growing more skeptical by the day.
Moving From the What to the Why
A year ago, many leaders in the marketing community were consumed with which AI tools to use, how to get started, and how to not fall further behind. That conversation has shifted, Hollenhorst observed. The question now is why AI should be applied to any given business problem in the first place.
Heisman captured the moment with clarity. The conversation inside marketing teams has evolved from “What can generative AI do for my content?” to “What are we trying to accomplish, and how do we redesign our workflows to get there?” That shift, she suggested, is where real progress begins.
Abramowitz said that beyond all the hype, AI is an enabler, and while it’s likely the greatest technological advancement most of us will see in our lifetimes, it’s still just technology. The businesses getting the best results are not chasing tools. They’re thinking deeply about what they’re truly trying to achieve and letting that drive the decisions on which AI tools best support the outcomes they seek. For marketing, which means many of the fundamentals remain the same: building the brand, establishing a high-quality pipeline, and telling the brand story consistently across every touchpoint.
Both leaders said the stress of this moment is producing an unexpected benefit. Heisman has heard more candor among CMOs, with peers comparing notes honestly about where they’re struggling with AI tool integration, not just sharing polished wins.
Successes and Stumbles
Heisman pointed to two wins at Dynatrace. A Marketing AI Slack channel has become an unexpectedly effective learning hub where the team shares AI wins and misfires, and the team doesn’t hesitate to ask beginner questions. The second win was a big learning with an AI SDR system that stumbled through a troubled initial version before being rebuilt into a pilot that’s now heading toward full implementation. Her takeaway: every pilot provides learning so keep experimenting.
At Dataiku, one of the clearest wins has been an agentic lead process built on the company’s own platform, pulling signals from Salesforce, Gong, Sixth Sense, and HubSpot to accelerate response time and surface both direct and indirect buyer interest. One area Abramowitz is focused on: closing the gap between how much Dataiku is doing with AI internally and how much of that story is actually being told externally — because the proof is already there.
Meaningful progress comes not from deploying the most AI tools, but from building a structure and supportive culture that promotes using those tools effectively across the team.
Governance Is Not the Enemy of Speed
One of the sharper reframes in the conversation came from Abramowitz on governance. The conventional assumption is that guardrails slow teams down. His experience is the opposite: for teams unsure of what is permitted, ambiguity is the real drag on efficiency. Clear guardrails give people room to innovate confidently within them.
At Dataiku, that principle is built into a three-tiered model. Any marketer can independently build lightweight agents at the first tier; the second tier draws in marketing operations for broader, more integrated workflows; the third escalates to an AI engineering team for the most consequential processes. It’s a structure that mirrors Dataiku’s own AI success formula, connecting people, orchestration, and governance, applied from the inside out. Abramowitz described it as encouraging innovation at the edge while ensuring that high-stakes business processes get the systems-level thinking they require.
Heisman’s Marketing AI Council at Dynatrace, modeled on one she’d built at VMware, operates on the same logic. This group is drawn from team members eager to experiment rather than those assigned to a committee. “We have to stay on top of what’s available and useful for the team, without letting tool sprawl take over. Every time I come back from a conference or networking event, the team prepares to hear from me: ‘Here are the 10 tools I learned about. Can we go check them out?’”
Beyond Tech Skills: Hiring for Curiosity and Systems Thinking
When it comes to hiring marketing talent, Heisman’s baseline is curiosity and willingness to try new things. She’s seeking candidates who clearly have a disposition to engage rather than resist. The marketers she wants to bring aboard are those who are passionate about the business and see AI as another dimension of that passion, not a separate threat to manage.
Abramowitz is increasingly hiring for what he calls systems thinkers. These are people who can work across brand, demand, product, and content rather than staying locked inside a single function. His reasoning is structural. “Over time — and that means months, not years — the way marketing organizations are structured is going to become more horizontal,” he said. AI agents will handle distribution. A marketer’s value will depend on whether their work can be fed into those systems and amplified. Siloed expertise, on its own, will not be enough.
The Importance of Clarity and Training
Abramowitz noted that burnout is a legitimate concern for marketers and that FOMO is itself a source of exhaustion. His antidotes are perspective and strategic clarity. “At some point, you’ve got to focus on what you’re doing, not what everybody else is doing,” he said. “With plans and strategy, you can ignore some of the hype and focus on the business outcomes.”
Heisman emphasized the importance of training initiatives; an investment she believes too many organizations are still deferring. Leaders need to lead and put real AI training on the table for their teams, she said.
Marketing has the Leverage
As the conversation wrapped up, Heisman offered great advice for all marketers. “Keep networking, talk to your peers, talk to others and invest in training,” she said. “Because everyone’s going through this, so be part of this transformation and feel great about being AI first.”
Abramowitz closed with a message of optimism. “Marketing has never had this much leverage before,” he said. “The constraints used to be budget and headcount. But today, it’s about creativity, courage, and clarity. And if you have that courage, clarity, and commitment to make it happen — this is the best job in the world right now.”
About the Visionaries
Mark Abramowitz, Chief Marketing Officer, Dataiku
Mark Abramowitz is Chief Marketing Officer at Dataiku, where he oversees global brand and demand strategy and is responsible for building awareness of Dataiku as the platform that unifies people, governance, and AI systems to deliver results at scale. Prior to Dataiku, he served as SVP of Product and Solutions Marketing at ServiceNow, spearheading the launch of Now Assist — the fastest-selling product in ServiceNow history — as the company scaled from $6 billion to nearly $11 billion in revenue. Before ServiceNow, he spent 15 years at Salesforce and five years as SVP of Product Marketing for Service Cloud.
Laura Heisman, Chief Marketing Officer, Dynatrace
Laura Heisman is responsible for Dynatrace’s global marketing organization. With more than three decades of marketing and communications expertise, she plays a pivotal role in creating, optimizing, and personalizing the end-to-end customer experience. Before joining Dynatrace, she worked for iconic technology brands including Citrix, GitHub, and most recently as SVP and CMO at VMware. Laura holds a B.A. in Communications from San Diego State University. As an advocate for women in technology, she has served as a mentor and executive sponsor for women’s employee resource groups.
MTM Visionaries airs live on Zoom and is moderated by Kathy Hollenhorst, Chief Community Officer for Marketers That Matter. In each episode, two new Visionaries share their game plan and how that impacts today’s teams, talent, and you.
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