As the leader of Startup Marketing at OpenAI, Sarah Urbonas crafts the global strategy to help accelerate founders building and scaling AI companies. Urbonas brings extensive experience in product marketing and partnerships to her role, having previously helped companies like Brex, Vimeo, and Dropbox successfully transition from B2C to B2B markets through integrations, strategic packaging, and growth campaigns. Her global perspective is shaped by more than a decade in San Francisco’s tech ecosystem, complemented by stints in New York, Mexico City, and Lima.
Named to our Marketers to Watch list in partnership with The Wall Street Journal, we spoke to Urbonas about her fascinating role at OpenAI and her thoughts on what’s ahead for marketers in the rapidly evolving AI era.
What book or podcast do you recommend to marketing leaders?
My bookshelf is basically a graveyard of half-read marketing and business books, so reading one cover-to-cover is a strong indicator that it’s no-fluff. I recently finished The Culture Map by Erin Meyer, which was a masterclass in how to communicate with cultural nuance to forge stronger relationships. It’s easy to forget that we’re often only experiencing one flavor of communication and fall into a one-size-fits-all marketing trap, especially when living in a tech hub like San Francisco. These lessons have helped make me a more well-rounded collaborator and marketer. I wish I’d read it years earlier.
How can marketers better adopt AI?
Simple: start talking about it. It can feel kind of vulnerable to share how you’re using AI, but it acts as a forcing function to both use it regularly and expose you to new use cases. At OpenAI, we start every marketing team meeting by sharing surprising ways we’ve used AI. Some recent favorites were vision mode to repair a fireplace, voice mode to play trivia on a road trip, and custom GPTs to prep for team off-sites. This helps us level-up our AI literacy together.
What’s a prediction you have for marketing over the next few years?
I think we’ll see a shift sooner than later where the best marketers won’t be the fastest executors, but rather the clearest thinkers and strategic influencers. We’re already seeing AI meaningfully augment and automate tasks like content creation and optimization, so the real differentiator will be marketers who can define strategy, craft narrative, and deeply understand their audience. AI will raise the floor, but the ceiling will still be defined by creativity and judgment.
What’s the most innovative or exciting project you’ve worked on recently?
My team recently hosted OpenAI’s first-ever hackathons in New York and Paris where top developers built an entire product in less than seven hours using our new coding agent. The final projects totally blew me away. Good marketing is ‘show don’t tell,’ but great marketing helps people experience something real and let the results speak for themselves. I’m still buzzing from the energy and inspired to lead with a ‘build, don’t show’ mentality for future in-person events.
What’s a common challenge you’re seeing companies experience with marketing AI?
The biggest challenge – and pitfall – I’ve seen companies face is how to position AI products. The 101 is a highway in San Francisco that has a tech billboard every half-mile, and a year ago almost all of them had ‘AI-powered.’ Today most of them say something about ‘agents.’ When I talk to startups about their marketing strategy, I love to push them to think about if it passes the ‘101 test’ to cut through all the hype-y buzzwords and clearly communicate value. In my opinion, the AI solutions winning their categories don’t talk about AI, they anchor on the problem they’re solving in a differentiated way.
What leadership muscle is most important for marketers to exercise?
Managing up. It’s easy to get heads-down in tactical work, but the most effective marketers make sure their leadership team understands why something matters, not just what they’re doing. That means translating metrics into business outcomes, proactively flagging tradeoffs, and sharing what’s coming next (not just what shipped). Marketing often sits at the intersection of product, sales, and brand, so we’re in a unique position to spot patterns that help inform broader company strategy. This also helps shift marketing’s internal brand from a service team to a strategic partner.
What’s the most game-changing piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
Follow people, not titles. I’ve grown most by choosing managers I can learn from over shinier roles, including my current manager at OpenAI who is a masterful storyteller and negotiator. I always note when a team is willing to follow a leader as it’s a strong signal of the growth opportunities and career acceleration you will have under their leadership.
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.
