Holly Chen leads growth marketing at Samsara, where the company’s AI-powered technology helps physical operations teams run safer and more efficiently. With a career that spans Google, Slack, Miro, Loom, and now Samsara, she brings a builder’s mindset to growth, AI adoption, and go-to-market transformation.
From helping build Google Store from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue to supporting Slack through its $100 million to $700 million hypergrowth stage, Chen has spent her career scaling teams, channels, and systems. At Samsara, she’s helped build a growth organization during a period when the company reported approximately 30% YoY ARR growth at nearly $2B ARR scale.
Named to our Marketers to Watch list, Chen shared her thoughts on bottom-up AI adoption, building agents, and creating demand beyond search.
What book or podcast do you recommend to marketing leaders?
“The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership” is the book I come back to most. It’s not a marketing book, but it’s shaped how I lead more than anything I’ve read. The core idea is the distinction between leading from fear and leading from trust. As teams navigate AI-driven change, that distinction matters enormously.
For podcasts, GTMnow, Lenny’s Podcast, and a16z keep me close to how other operators think and make decisions.
How are you and your team currently using AI?
Samsara’s products are built on AI, so the company has been early in adoption across both R&D and go-to-market. On the marketing team, we’ve built over 90 agents, with more in queue.
I think about agents in three categories:
- Individual productivity agents that are personal, shareable, and easy to modify
- Workflow agents that solve channel and painpoint specific problems
- Functional super-agents built by marketing ops or revenue ops that the whole organization can draw from
Our webinar planner, for example, pulls from Salesforce, Gong, and email calendars across teams to recommend the right webinar schedule.
I built my first agent a few months ago. I took an online Claude Code course on a Saturday and built a competitive ad intelligence agent that scans Meta’s ad library, analyzes the ad copy and creative, infers which ads are working based on what disappears and what stays, suggests new creatives we can try, and formats a weekly brief in a Google Doc shared to Slack.
It took me several hours, and I completely lost track of time until it was dark outside. I was in a flow state. That feeling of accomplishment was something I hadn’t expected. I’ve been building ever since.
The biggest barrier for most marketers isn’t the technology. It’s carving out a few focused hours to actually try.
What’s a prediction you have for marketing over the next few years?
The biggest divide I see forming in marketing organizations is between top-down and bottom-up AI adoption. In top-down organizations, a centralized team builds agents and workflows while most marketers are end users. In bottom-up organizations, every marketer is expected to build, experiment, and iterate.
It’s messier. You lose some people who find the chaos frustrating. But the marketers who come out the other side develop genuine AI fluency, not just familiarity, and they become change agents wherever they go.
I believe bottom-up organizations with proper guardrails will significantly outperform the ones that rely on a few AI experts. The brands that win won’t be the ones with the most automation. They’ll be the ones where every marketer has a builder mindset.
I’d also expect a new class of marketing platforms to emerge: an agentic layer that does for AI orchestration what HubSpot did for automation, because the current fragmentation across tools isn’t sustainable.
What’s the most innovative or exciting project you’ve worked on recently?
Samsara has been expanding well beyond its core safety and telematics products into areas like maintenance, asset tracking, and smart workflows. Each new product line often means new markets, new buyers, and new go-to-market motions. We can’t lift and shift the existing playbook.
To move fast, we built cross-functional pods with product, sales, ops, and marketing in the same room, structured to operate with startup speed inside an established company.
As a result, the new products reached $100 million ARR and now contribute to a quarter of net new ACV. It’s almost like working at five different stage startups at the same time. It has been an incredible learning experience.
What’s the most pressing business challenge you’ve faced in the last year and what have you done to solve it?
I just had my one-year anniversary at Samsara. Shortly after joining, I noticed our new pipeline was heavily concentrated in paid and organic search. The problem was that organic search volume was declining with AI-driven zero-click behavior, and paid search growth was flattening. Capturing existing demand was no longer enough.
We made a deliberate bet on demand creation, investing in LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, connected TV, display, podcasts, and out-of-home. These channels are harder to measure, so we built incrementality studies and onboarded intent signal tools to surface buying behavior earlier in the journey, even when no form was filled out.
We also made sales more proactive by giving them richer, earlier signals on in-market accounts.
The result was that marketing played a critical role in accelerating ARR growth at 30% year over year, which is a meaningful number for a company at $2 billion ARR scale.
What leadership muscle is most important for marketers to exercise?
The builder mindset. There’s a misconception that growth slows down in large companies, that the job becomes maintaining what works. The opposite is true at a company like Samsara, where the R&D team is moving so fast that marketing genuinely can’t afford to follow old playbooks.
The marketers who thrive here are the ones who treat every channel, product launch, and new constraint as something to figure out with fresh eyes. That means being genuinely comfortable saying, “I don’t know yet,” and then going to find out.
It also means expanding what you think a marketer can do. Growth marketers who build database agents. Field marketers who launch landing pages. The function is blurring in interesting ways, and the leaders who lean into that are the ones building the most leverage.
What’s the most game-changing piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
An executive coach once stopped me mid-sentence while I was explaining why a cross-functional team’s request was a poor use of budget. She asked: “Holly, are you committed to being right?”
That question reframed how I listen. The more energy I was putting into defending my position, the less I was hearing what they actually needed. When I stopped insisting on my solution and started asking about their problem, we found an approach using email, organic social, and customer success that delivered better results than either of our original ideas.
I now ask myself that question often, especially in high-stakes cross-functional work: Am I committed to learning, or am I committed to being right?
What gives you energy and inspiration outside of work?
I love exploring unfamiliar places. When I travel, I always take walking tours in new cities. Recently, I discovered SF City Guides, a volunteer organization that runs walking tours across San Francisco neighborhoods.
I’ve learned more about the city’s history, architecture, and the characters who shaped it through those tours than I did in years of living here. There’s something about San Francisco reinventing itself so many times, each neighborhood carrying its own layer of that history, that I find genuinely inspiring.
I now walk around the city and notice things I never saw before.
Marketers to Watch is a recognition series to spotlight highly innovative and forward-thinking marketing leaders in the community. If you have someone you’d like to nominate for the series, apply here.
