Margot Koehler is drawn to companies at a turning point: when a complex category begins to break into the mainstream. That instinct has taken her from energy and climate technology at Opower to cybersecurity at Endgame to restaurant and retail technology at Toast, where she now serves as Senior Director, Global Integrated & Brand Marketing. Working at the intersection of brand, growth, and category creation, she focuses on making companies relevant to customers and connecting brand investment to business results.
Koehler believes effective leadership requires the contextual judgment of knowing when experience provides the right playbook and when the business calls for a different approach.
Named to our Marketers to Watch list, Koehler explained how Toast is using AI to test ideas earlier, the customer insight behind its “Built for Busy” brand platform, and why calculated risks lead to meaningful career growth.
What book or podcast do you recommend to marketing leaders?
I recommend Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. I come back to it whenever I am making a consequential call with imperfect information, which is most of leadership. Marketing teams often confuse a good outcome with a good decision, or a disappointing result with proof the strategy was wrong. The book has helped me separate what I know from what I am assuming, hold strong opinions without becoming rigid, and get more comfortable changing course when the evidence shifts.
How are you and your team currently using AI?
We are doing a lot with AI at Toast, but I’m most excited about how we use synthetic research to pressure-test hypotheses, sharpen positioning, and improve creative before it reaches market. It does not replace real customer research but helps us to make earlier decisions with a higher hit rate. That speed matters in a highly competitive category and allows us to devote more time to the ideas with the most potential for impact.
What’s a prediction you have for marketing over the next few years?
My prediction is that the best brand work will be built at the intersection of engineering, product, and data, not through traditional campaigns alone. AI will make execution cheap and abundant, shifting advantage to the proprietary assets a company can create: distinctive data, a clear point of view, useful tools, research, and customer proof. Those assets will shape the AI answers that increasingly influence a buyer’s shortlist. Brand’s role is expanding from packaging the story at the end to helping create the knowledge that makes a company useful and trusted.
What’s the most innovative or exciting project you’ve worked on recently?
One project I am especially proud of is “Built for Busy,” Toast’s new brand platform. Most people hear “busy” and think overwhelmed. Restaurant people hear a full dining room, a buzzing kitchen, and the business they worked to build.
We took that insight to Times Square with living billboards featuring real restaurant people, then used the attention to reinvest in restaurants. The most gratifying signal has been hearing marketers at competing companies say, “I wish we had come up with that.” Every marketer knows that feeling. The best work makes an audience feel seen and makes the competition wish the idea were theirs.
What’s the most pressing business challenge you’ve faced in the last year and what have you done to solve it?
The most pressing challenge has been making brand accountable with the rigor of a performance engine without reducing it to last-click attribution. I’m proud of the measurement infrastructure and testing systems we’ve built to answer the questions that matter: Is brand expanding the pool of prospects willing to consider Toast? How much incremental pipeline is it creating that would not have existed otherwise? Where do potential customers know us but not yet see Toast as the right choice? How can the product experience and our messaging change that?
Many brand marketers avoid that level of scrutiny. They should not. It is how brand earns a place in the company’s most consequential investment decisions, creating a shared language for where to invest, what to test, and how growth happens.
What leadership muscle is most important for marketers to exercise?
Contextual judgment: knowing when to apply a proven playbook and when to discard it. Too many marketers arrive with the answer already formed: “This worked at Shopify, so it should work here.” That is how expertise becomes a liability.
The strongest leaders pair pattern recognition with a deep read of the business in front of them: unit economics, customer behavior, competitive context, and the company’s actual constraints. The job is to balance what is strategically right in theory with what is relevant and timely in practice. Great marketing leaders can do both without becoming rigid or reactive.
What’s the most game-changing piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
One of the leaders I most admire was Opower’s first CMO, who later built the wildly successful brand Lovevery. He taught me that radical candor means you can care deeply about people while pushing them to reach their potential. His other lasting advice came when I was deciding whether to join Toast: growth requires calculated risk.
Linear career paths are disappearing, especially in marketing. The right move is not always the safest or most obvious next step. It is the one that expands your surface area, gives you bigger problems to solve, and builds the most competitive career story you can tell.
What gives you energy and inspiration outside of work?
I’m building an AI platform around a system failure we’ve normalized: parents recognize that something feels different about their child long before they can access expertise. Specialist waitlists can stretch beyond 18 months during critical developmental windows. AI can help invert that model and give families earlier access to credible research, personalized guidance and clinicians who understand their child over time. This personal work makes me more bullish on AI’s ability to democratize expertise and help underserved communities.
Marketers to Watch is a recognition series that spotlights highly innovative and forward-thinking marketing leaders in the community. If you have someone you’d like to nominate for the series, apply here.
