As AI reshapes marketing and traditional roles blur, leaders are rethinking their marketing strategies, how they build teams with the right mix of skills and attitudes, plus how they are integrating strategies to drive meaningful growth. At a recent Marketers That Matter® Forum hosted by Intuit, four of the industry’s most highly influential marketing executives shared strategies for thriving in today’s era of unprecedented change.
The expert panel of speakers included:
- Jessica Jensen, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, LinkedIn
- Tamara (Tam) Thompson, VP of Brand Marketing, Intuit
- Lindsey Irvine, Chief Marketing Officer, Square
- Emma Chalwin, Chief Marketing Officer, Workday
Moderated by Kathy Hollenhorst, Chief Community Officer of Marketers That Matter, the leaders discussed marketing’s evolution, implementing AI, balancing brand and performance investments, building agile teams and how to build a successful career. Here are key insights from the conversation:
Reflections on Marketing’s Ongoing Evolution
The marketing executives reflected on how dramatically their function has evolved, with AI and data fluency now defining success as much as creative prowess.
Emma Chalwin of Workday traced the transformation back three decades. “When I started in tech 30 years ago, there was really no way of measuring success. It was like, ‘Do you like the campaign? Yeah, we think it looks great,’ she recalled. “I really believe that we’ve had to move from being what I call ‘Mad Men and women’ to ‘math men and women, bringing data and insights to the table, blending the art and the science and continually evolving.’”
Chalwin also noted how the CMO role itself has evolved strategically. “Many more of my CMO friends now have a strategic seat at the board table,” she added. “Many of us report directly into the CEO. That wasn’t the case five or 10 years ago.”
LinkedIn’s Jessica Jensen described how shifts in the marketing industry have forced new skill development. “The permeation of data into almost all aspects of marketing, including the creative process, has been a major transformation,” Jensen said. “The evolution of measuring revenue growth through marketing forced a lot of marketers to learn skills that they didn’t have.”
Lindsay Irvine of Square spoke about the importance of keeping a focus on results. “Have a true revenue mindset and be able to explain marketing in terms of the impact on the business – both in terms of sales growth and in terms of adoption growth. Those are all things that the boardroom cares about and those are things that marketing uniquely drives.”
Tam Thompson of Intuit emphasized the impact of the accelerating pace of change. “Things are happening at a lightning-fast pace and a lot of that could be related to the advent of AI,” she said. “We’ve had to react to that in a way that I have never seen in my career.”
Balancing Brand Building with Performance Marketing
The panel explored how they balance long-term brand building with short-term performance demands.
Thompson described how AI is changing the equation. “With AI and LLMs coming into play, they’re actually scraping from culture, from media, and from social. We realize that it’s going to become more and more important to be out there and have really relevant content,” she said.
Irvine emphasized maintaining consistent brand investment to support year-over-year growth of upper-funnel dollars. But she said the real power comes from thoughtful integration. “Don’t think of brand versus demand and the percent split as separate,” Irvine said. “These things have to work off of each other,” she noted, describing how Square is connecting its “See you in the neighborhood” brand promise with performance advertising.
Chalwin cautioned against cutting brand dollars during difficult times. “Brand is one of the first things that people instantly say, ‘Oh, we’re spending too much on brand.’ But when you take your foot off the gas with the brand, guess what? The next year they’re complaining that nobody knows who we are or what we do.”
Making AI Practical and Accessible
The executives shared candid perspectives on their respective AI journeys.
“We’re all figuring this out,” Irvine said. “It’s very exciting; it’s also a lot. We’re not in the early days in terms of is AI a real thing, but I do think we’re in early days in terms of the true application of it.”
She described Square’s approach of dedicating specific resources to AI. “We have AI champions. These are people who were doing regular marketing jobs and really went all in on AI. They’re more technical in nature and their full-time job now is enabling these end-to-end workflows for marketers,” she said.
Thompson described Intuit’s way of embedding AI into products as “AI plus HI” – artificial intelligence combined with human intelligence. She applies the same thinking to her team: “Within marketing, adoption stands at 90%,” she said. “On the creative side, we’re using it to comp things up and accelerate campaigns within hours and weeks.”
Chalwin described Workday’s “Everyday AI” initiative which provides all 20,000 employees with access to AI tools and saved the organization countless time while empowering and enabling employees with the skills and confidence they need to leverage and harness AI effectively. Within marketing, AI-powered lead scoring has delivered results: “We’ve had 17% more conversions since we’ve started using AI tools,” Chalwin added.
Jensen said LinkedIn has created highly sophisticated applications. “We’ve built an agent in which you can create your campaigns on LinkedIn and that has saved 10,000 labor hours this year,” she said.
The importance of creating time for experimentation was also a recurring theme. Said Irvine: “Create real space within marketing to experiment, to test, to fail, and to show people the work. Without that, we’re all just running a hundred miles a minute.”
Building Teams for an Uncertain Future
When asked what traits they prioritize when hiring, the executives spoke about mindset over technical skills.
Chalwin led with curiosity. “Curiosity and a beginner’s mind, meaning the willingness to ask questions, is so important,” she said. “What got all of us to where we are today won’t get us to the next decade,” she said.
Thompson also emphasized curiosity, but added several other core requirements: “Agility, being able to react to change, and grit,” she said.
Irvine explained that she looks for “quarterbacks” who can connect across functions and interviewees who ask really smart and thoughtful questions. “Whenever I interview someone, I ask what questions they have for me,” Irvine said. She also now screens for AI readiness: “They don’t have to be an AI expert, but they must have clearly put thought into how they’re going to rethink their function with AI.”
Jensen emphasized the ongoing importance of clear, effective communication. “The number of people, particularly Americans, who are terrible writers is amazing,” she said. “And now people are farming it out to AI. So, if you take unclear thinking and put it into AI, you get more unclear thinking”.
Career Lessons from the Top
The executives shared advice for building sustainable careers, particularly for women aspiring to executive roles.
Jensen emphasized well-roundedness and gaining diverse experience. “Don’t just be a marketer, be a businessperson,” she said. “Do a tour in sales, do a tour in product, wear as many sweaters as you can in your career.”
She also addressed the importance of being proactive in getting away from unsupportive managers. “If you are doing a great job and your boss is not your champion, you need to change bosses or quit,” Jensen said. “I know so many women who are exceptional, and some boss is keeping them down. Don’t let it happen to you.”
Thompson agreed it’s all about the people around you that lift you up and give you passion to drive your work. “And I would say advocate for yourself. There is so much that needs to happen for people to see what you want to do and where you want to go. If you’re not advocating for yourself, you may not have that opportunity.”
Irvine encouraged lifting up others. “Pull yourself up and pull five other people forward with you,” she said. “Just put your head down and kick ass. Work on things that drive real business impact and be a good human.”
Chalwin shared wisdom she’d gained from a former executive at Salesforce: “Get comfortable being uncomfortable. If you’re too comfortable then you’re probably ready for the next thing.”
Chalwin also emphasized finding meaningful work that fuels your soul. “The rest is what I call salary work. But if that is more heavily weighted than your soul work, you’re not going to get high performance.”
The (Exciting) Road Ahead
The forum reinforced that marketing leadership in the AI era demands both technical sophistication and emotional intelligence. Success requires balancing art and science, brand and performance, planning and agility, while staying curious, embracing growth, and never losing sight of the humans at the heart of every business.
As Chalwin reminded the audience: “There’s never been a more exciting time to be in marketing.”
About the Speakers
Jessica Jensen, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, LinkedIn
Jessica Jensen is Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer at LinkedIn, leading LinkedIn’s global Marketing & Strategy organization. Her team oversees global marketing, brand and corporate strategy.
Prior to LinkedIn, Jessica served as the Chief Marketing Officer for Indeed where she was responsible for brand, communication, product, and acquisition marketing globally. Prior to that, Jessica served as the Chief Marketing Officer at OpenTable and the Senior Vice President of Marketing for Kayak, both part of Booking Holdings. Her extensive background also includes leading B2B marketing and strategy for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other Meta platforms, as well as consumer marketing and strategy at Apple for iAd. Previous to that, Jessica served as Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo! Shine and Yahoo! Health.
Tam Thompson, VP of Brand Platform Marketing, Intuit
Tamara Thompson is an expert brand and creative leader with a 20-year track record of driving major brand transformations at leading technology companies. As the VP of Brand at Intuit, she’s responsible for uniting the company’s powerhouse brands—TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp—under a single, cohesive Intuit platform narrative. Her focus is on leveraging her deep expertise in brand architecture to accelerate Intuit’s journey as an AI-driven expert platform.
Previously, Tamara was instrumental in shifting Autodesk from a complex B2B desktop software brand to a simplified, cloud-based platform. Prior to that, she held key marketing leadership roles at Intel, The Nature Conservancy, and Applied Materials. She is known as a heart-forward leader who thrives on developing talent and delivering high-impact global brand campaigns.
Tamara holds a BA in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
Lindsey Irvine, Chief Marketing Officer, Square
Lindsey Irvine is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Square, the technology platform that helps local businesses of all sizes run and grow to become neighborhood favorites. With nearly two decades of experience in marketing, strategy, and leadership across both large enterprises and fast-growing startups, Irvine is responsible for overseeing Square’s global marketing efforts, driving brand awareness, customer engagement, and market growth around the world, all in service of the company’s mission to empower businesses and entrepreneurs worldwide.
Before joining Square, Irvine was CMO at Benchling, a pioneer of the R&D Cloud powering the biotechnology industry. Prior to that, she spent nearly a decade at Salesforce, where she held several leadership roles, including global CMO for MuleSoft, and played a key part in developing go-to-market strategies across IoT, industry verticals, and cloud solutions. She is credited with driving high-impact global marketing strategies and helping position Salesforce as a leader in the enterprise software space.
Emma Chalwin, Chief Marketing Officer, Workday
Emma Chalwin is the Chief Marketing Officer at Workday, leading global marketing to champion brand growth and drive customer demand. An award-winning storyteller and recognized industry leader, Emma’s work has earned numerous accolades for creativity and innovation. She is an unwavering advocate for empathetic, courageous, and purpose-driven leadership, bringing a genuine, human-first approach to technological change—with the belief that AI is the engine and human potential is the focus.
Before joining Workday in July 2023, Emma served as the Executive Vice President of Field Marketing at Salesforce, successfully shaping go-to-market strategies and leading high-impact demand generation. Her extensive background includes global brand and marketing leadership positions at Adobe, McAfee, and Macrovision.
Emma holds a bachelor’s degree in European Business Studies from the University of West London, England, and is a U.S. Marketing Academy Fellowship Scholar.
Forum moderator Kathy Hollenhorst is a Marketers That Matter® Advisor & Chief Community Officer.
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