Jean English | The AI Marketing Battle: A View from the Front Lines

0:00The CMO Confidential podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com.

0:22Jean English:Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions, and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five-time CMO Mike Linton. Typeface has completely changed the process of large campaign executions. Everyone knows AI can help with images and headlines, but the real impact is making the leap from a creative brief to a live multi-channel large campaign at speed. Typeface just announced its marketing orchestration Engine, the first platform built to automate campaign workflows. You can roll out campaigns that used to take months in just a few hours.

1:04Typeface uses agentic AI to orchestrate the entire process, taking one campaign and instantly orchestrating it into thousands of personalized experiences across ads, email, and video. Major brands like ASICS and Post Holdings are already transforming their marketing with Typeface. See how to move from brief to personalized campaigns in hours, not months at typeface.ai slash CMO. Welcome marketers, advertisers, and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions, and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite.

1:53I'm Mike Linton, the former chief marketing officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest, Jean English. Today's topic, the AI marketing battle of you from the front lines. Now, Jean is currently the CMO of CoreWeave, a company that provides specialized AI cloud infrastructure, which we will talk about in a little bit. Previously, she served as the CMO of Jupyter Networks, Armis, Palo Alto Networks, and NetApp, and also spent over 10 years in marketing at IBM, including Asia and the cloud business. She's also been at companies that have been acquired and ones that have done the acquiring.

2:35In short, if you're looking for directions at the intersection of B2B, AI, and infrastructure. Jean is your person. This is her second time on the show. Welcome back, Jean. Thank you, Mike. Glad to be here. All right, let's start. Like, let's ground everybody in what CoreWeave actually does, because we're like, let's bring everybody up to speed. Yeah, so CoreWeave is a cloud built just for AI, so AI workloads. It's very different from a general purpose cloud, which was mainly built for doing web applications many years ago. And so we built this cloud. It's based on how you think about a full stack of infrastructure, tools, to be able to build models, applications, and even more so now, different types of use cases, such as robotics and different types of physical AI.

3:27Hey, can you help me and our listeners, the difference between what was a normal workload and an AI workload, what does that mean to someone that's not in the center of it? Sure. So if you think of AI as needing to be trained, so models that are being built, and we call our customers the pioneers, but they're the model makers. So these are labs that are creating models that everyone uses today. And whether that's OpenAI and using chat GPT. I'm assuming you have used chat GPT, Mike. Yeah. Oh, I'm a heavy user. I use, I teach college. I'm using it like crazy. If you're using it, most likely it's being run on CoreWeave.

4:11Most people don't know that. But then there's also AI, which is called inference, which is really more about agentic AI. So how people use AI in applications and how they use it in different types of use cases and all types of enterprises around the world. Okay. That was super helpful. Now that we've kind of grounded everybody in where you are in this game, you are in, in my mind, the catbird seat because you can see just about everything going on and you have the background to actually understand all of it. Tell our listeners in your mind what's happening on the AI front writ large. We got frontier models.

4:51We got circular investing, the SaaSpocalypse. We got companies fighting on the Super Bowl ads. what's your take on AI and where is it? Give us your view. Well, AI is real. It is in the beginning. There's definitely, I think, debates in the market and the industry and the world. Is AI real? AI is real. People are seeing return. It is not a bubble. But the reality is that there are so many industries and companies that are using AI and they're using it to see impact. And that goes across the board. We work with so many companies today and so many different use cases of what we're seeing AI to be used for.

5:33And, yes, there are a lot of fun-term models that are massive, and there's so much infrastructure that is needed to train these models. And it's really something that most people have not seen before, but just the massive amount of needs of infrastructure of compute to have these models actually work. And they need it really fast. And so they need like the pace of companies that are going to move this the fastest to get things built out and the infrastructure built out. They need the performance. And so especially with like GPUs, they're sensitive. And so you don't want to have a lot of like layers of extraction between the model and the compute.

6:13And so you have to really simplify how you build up this infrastructure, which is what an AI cloud really does. and the ability for companies to now shift from just training to inference was really the big highlight of the show we just were at last week, which is NVIDIA's GTC conference. Yeah. So when you look at this, and I think everyone agrees, it's going to be, this is what one of our guests called this the biggest prize in the history of capitalism. them um and and everyone like one of you know this that uh ai will be like electricity in a couple of years but how how should and we also had a venture capitalist on who agreed with all that but also said there's so much change that's going to happen a huge shakeout and there's probably a bubble in here and here's how it might pop but it will it will recover and then you see brands already fighting on the Super Bowl for consumer attention.

7:11Tell us, write the consumer and the B2B players into this story. People are fighting for consumers and they're fighting for B2B, why they're spending all this money at the same time. Can you give us your perspective on all of that? Well, I think creating a category is hard. And a lot of time it's defining first principles And the categories that you're playing in right now in the AI space is ones that haven't been done before. And so, yeah, there was a lot of attention for people using models, for using applications, and whether that's, you know, the labs themselves and what they're producing.

7:48And, yes, there was a lot of attention in the Super Bowl. And there was a lot of areas where, you know, there was some picking happening going, wait a minute, some things are changing. And we're going to highlight it here. And we're going to make sure people know about it, which was fascinating. But I do think that creating a category is, you know, right now, we are creating categories. We are making markets. It is not something that has been before. And every time that you think about a model being refreshed, getting to the next version, it's getting new features and functionality, it is leapfrogging what you think is best now.

8:22And next thing you know, it's not like a year from now that something is better. It's like months, days, weeks. But yeah, it is changing the way people are perceiving what the applications are using today and how AI is going to shift that. And then the consumer in this story, because there's all the B2B and then there's the actual who has the power and who has the product. But then there's almost like a little food fight that starts at the Super Bowl between, you know, Anthropic and chat. How are the consumers playing in this story? And in a category where there's almost no switching costs for consumers, why are they so important?

9:00Or are they, really? They are important. I mean, we created an ad, and we actually aired it during the Olympics. We debated Super Bowl, Olympics, which one? And we said, I think we wanted to do something more pervasive at the Olympics than to do something just for the Super Bowl itself. But we made the ad more consumer-facing. Right now, where is AI going? You know, is it prototypes? Is it into production? Are you seeing the return? Like, what are the use cases? And so we wanted to create an ad that actually that most people could understand. They could talk about all the ways in which you can use AI.

9:38And we said, you know, ready for anything, ready for AI. And so that was the premise of the ad. But yeah, I think the consumer, everyone's a consumer, whether you're a B2B or not. Everyone's a consumer. I want to tear apart that B2B to B2C thing and talk about how much brands matter now and how that plays out depending on how the products come like and how you make the choices you make to say, all right, we're going to do a consumer ad on the Olympics versus, you know, you may be doing all of this, powering up, you know, 100 B2B conventions as well. like how do you decide where to go build the brand in a category like this we're very targeted we're very precise i mean we are you know i was asked this question before about you know why broadcast you know why do something during the olympics and we wanted to have a cultural moment we wanted to get the attention we knew we wanted to break through but we did it based on markets and we looked at like where our customers are you know who cares who will need us the most where should we show these ads.

10:43We are super targeted by city. When we look at a full surround of what that means, we went heavy in airport advertising in San Francisco. Why? Because 25 % of our base is in San Francisco and the Bay Area. So we said, let's go big there. We are targeted in how we think about spending marketing dollars. And we're seeing the return on investment based on that. And so we are continuing to refine and refine. But we do want to have bursts of cultural moments where we get the attention of people because there's so many different people who are making decisions in this AI space because the buying power is so big, but the type of compute needs are so large that it can go all the way up to a boardroom conversation, a CEO conversation.

11:23Of course, the CFO cares when you start talking large deals and massive sizes of compute needed. You've got the CIO who cares about where's the data going? How expensive is it to move? The CISO cares because is the cloud secure? So there's just a broad range. And then you've got the developers and the researchers and the platform engineers. So there's so many people now that are starting to think about AI and are looking at how they're going to use it inside their company and use it in their products. And if I am an unknown brand in this space, especially now that it's been a couple of years under our marketing belts, does that really hurt me now?

12:01Or because there's so much brand things, and then I want to talk about how you measure marketing progress. So take that as like three questions I rolled into two not very well phrased sentences. They're great. I think now I've been so focused on, with so much demand in the market, the clarity when I first got to CoreWeave was who we are and what we do. So are we clear about who we are? And we're an AI cloud. We're the number one AI cloud. And that's been proven out with different types of analysts who've gone through and done test, the only platinum rating twice from semi-analysis when they go through and do a full benchmarking against all the clouds of AI and AI workloads.

12:42We are number one. So it was amazing to be able to declare that, you know, right out of the gate. I was here for a month. I was like, amazing. This is good. Wow. Look what you did in a month. I have. Oh, I didn't do it. Oh, I'm giving you all the credit, Jean. And now I have a question though. Like how do they measure like I'm number one in the cloud by, by what are the variables they actually measure? Oh, gosh, there's so many variables. It's a very, very technical analysis, which I really love. It's not a surface-level analysis. It goes deep into workloads, into processing power, into performance, the performance of models.

13:17It's performance of systems, performance of compute. It's every layer that's inside of a cloud. And they went through and did all that analysis. They look at the actual security dimensions of it. they're looking at what is the the compute as well as the powering process behind that it is a very deep deep deep analysis and so and I love I love great products so I love like the more technical the product and the more technical the analysis like the more I feel like it proves out like what's this so what what you're telling me and I and that makes a lot of sense is the cloud is actually a measured thing based on performance and as the performance gets better the measures of what the cloud has to do also have to get better.

14:00Is that a fair way to think about it? Absolutely. It has to have an outcome in terms of what it means for model performance, application performance. But that goes back to if you want to make sure that your infrastructure is working and if something happens during like a run of like a model and you're doing a training run and something stops, like you don't want to have to go redo the run. So you want to know if something's happening, especially if it's in the infrastructure layer. And like, that's one of the things that CoreWeave does so well is like give you really full visibility of exactly what's happening in the infrastructure so you can fix it really, really fast.

14:33So I always like to work for companies that have great technology. I'm like, that's my sweet spot. That's why I say the stake and the sizzle. And I love doing the big sizzle and how we actually bring companies to life and become more human. But it has to have really good stake, which is the great technology. We are taking a short break from this show for a word from our sponsor, Typeface.

14:59To orchestrate workflows across channels, meet Arc Agents, your AI teammates handling complexity, so you can focus on what matters. All within a reimagined workspace where you and AI create as one. Spaces works the way you do. Create anything, from documents to videos to entire campaigns, at scale. Our agents help you craft campaign storyboards powered by your brand hub, giving you the perfect starting point. Transform one asset into countless variations for every audience and market.

15:40Join industry leaders already reimagining their content lifecycle with Typeface. Welcome to marketing's next chapter, where every story finds its voice.

15:53now back to our discussion i get if i'm a cso or a cio or on the board how the cloud measures matter if i'm a consumer how do i evaluate the brand because my guess is most people listening to the show have not looked at a cloud they look at number one cloud ranking but they haven't looked at the variables. I mean, I surely haven't. How do consumers look at it? And how is that different versus the B2B players? Yeah, well, I would say again, I think every B2B player is a consumer. Everyone is a consumer inside of a company that they're making massive decisions. Consumers tend to make those decisions in smaller groups, their families.

16:38But in B2B, you're making decisions in groups that are buying groups. And so everyone has to have some type of an appeal to the company. I think their brand is one of the most important things right now. I think building out a brand and being known in the market. I think having positive sentiment and having a share of voice in this market is critical. I think if you're not known and you're not being talked about, well, then the relevancy is going to be really small. But again, I don't think it can only be the brand by itself. I think this like who we are, we defined ourselves as this essential cloud for AI.

17:10And at the same time, I want people to see the technology and the innovation that we're driving. Not every consumer will care about that. They won't necessarily care. But I do want people to say, oh, I've heard of CoreWeave. And really, I think CoreWeave right now is known for being an interesting stock or CoreWeave, like I want to get a job. So when we look at our search results, CoreWeave stock, CoreWeave jobs tend to like top the charts. It really was when we put this brand campaign into market that we started to see CoreWeave and CoreWeave Cloud start to take more dominance in our search results and become the top search results for us.

17:48Hey, now you guys have been in the news a huge amount. Yes. As has the whole category. You know, and you went public, what was it, one year ago? And then there's the NVIDIA collaboration. There has been some stock movements. There's a lot of stuff going on. How do you manage the brand through all that and manage the business through all that? And what are some lessons you can share with others? Because it's a roller coaster of excitement. It is. And so what's fascinating is that my one-year anniversary was last week. I started, my first day was at the NVIDIA GTC conference, which, you know, there couldn't have been a better way to start.

18:33Like I met everybody. I got to meet Jensen. I got to meet our whole team, customers, partners. It was fascinating. And then two weeks after that, we IPO'd. And so when I think about like a year from now, I actually was probably one of the most interesting marketing starts in the history of marketing. It was so fun. I met with the founder like three weeks before I joined. He is. Look, we got a 28 day challenge. We're going to IPO. And I was like on it. Sounds good. Let's do this. And so challenge accepted. And so we needed to put a campaign into market. We needed to be clear and succinct in our roadshow.

19:09We wanted to make sure that we could make a big splash coming out because after your IPO, you know, you can't really have a lot of promotion in the market. And so you go through a quiet period. And so, yeah, so we went through and started analyzing, you know, what were the key messages? How are we iterating those through the IPO roadshow itself? There wasn't really any content. And so we said, oh, what is this IPO roadshow? Let's break it into five pieces of content. One of those pieces happened to be Sam Altman from OpenAI that was speaking about the work he's been doing with CoreWeave and the value and benefit he's been working with us as a company.

19:41I was like, great. It's our first customer reference. So here we go. It's a pretty good one to start with. It's a great one to start with. I thought if you had to have one, this is the one. So it was good. And then we went big at the conference with NVIDIA. Then we, yes, we IPO two weeks later, and it has been a whirlwind ever since. And I think in this industry, we made an acquisition of Weights and Biases, which is really around how do you build models and applications and make AI iterate faster and faster. And so that was a big opportunity for us to build out a full tool and tech stack around the cloud for that.

20:17Then we started doing other company acquisitions, whether it was for physical AI or if it was for notebook LLMs or if it was for reinforcement learning. So how do you continue to fill out capabilities in the cloud? But that was, you know, it's been a year of just amazing speed and everything. It's like my focus has been like accomplish something every week. And like, how do we make accomplishment every step of the way? So you look at the Super Bowl and you look at all this stuff that you just talked about. And tech does not always have or has not always had the greatest reputation for marketing.

20:52Is marketing becoming a much bigger thing now? and is AI helping drive that marketing thing? Well, you know, I think AI, I think marketing is a great function and use case for AI. You know, if you look at, and when I started at CoreWeep, we had a team of 12 people. You know, usually my teams are hundreds and hundreds of people. And like, you know, going to a team of 12, the only way for us to scale was to use AI. You know, as companies start to think about how they're going to infuse AI into their own workflows and practices, There really is no way to do that other than to think about, you know, the uses of AI on the teams.

21:31You know, when I look at, you know, what is happening to change either the reputation of marketing or what can marketing do, I think that marketing always has to be one step ahead and to always be thinking about what's happening in the market with their clients, you know, what are we hearing in terms of trends? And the ability for us to be a bigger impact on the business is for us to always stay with that type of speed. Can you give us a really good example of one of the first use cases you applied when you came in to the company? Yeah. So we did not have personas. And so we looked at, you know, what are all the interactions we had with all of our prospects and customers?

22:13We had tens of thousands of records and we popped them into ChatGPT, did deep reasoning, starting to understand like who are our buyers in different segments whether they were labs or enterprises you know were they you know certain types of industries have we won the deal have we lost the deal and then we did all that synthesis of all that data came out with five personas and I happened to be on a panel after someone at an ANA conference and he was from Evidenza which is and synthetic AI research company. And I said, I want a partner. So like, how do we partner? I have these five personas. I don't know enough about them.

22:53We want to build them out with the team. And so we started to work with them to build out full-fledged, full personas. We ended up having 10 personas in totality across the full AI cloud business we have. And we used synthetic AI to help us to accomplish that. And when I went back into our product management teams and to our sales teams, I was like, it's 80 % right. I was like, there's 20 % not right. 80 % is a lot better than zero. And how did we get started? And everyone just was so embracing of like being able to take something that could get us 80 % there and then to work through the rest of the 20 at the speed of which our business moves was incredible.

23:29So that was like one of the very first things we did. Got it. Thank you. Hey, we just recently, we just, you are also, you're fabulous at your talking points. I just must say that. We just aired a show with Richard Sanderson of Spencer Stewart, where he was sharing a lot of their research on CMOs and AI. And one of the things he said is in the big Fortune 500 companies, the belief is that AI has to show real traction by the end of 2026. And he also said that respondents called progress messy. ah um like they were having like some of us going well some of us going are lumpy um when you look across your client base and their application of this what's your take on that and you know we also had the venture capital say yeah and people are going to start wanting roi eventually here and so how do you look at the balance of 2026 with with and parse those statements from your seat?

24:41Yeah, well, I mean, AI infrastructure has been such a critical part of how many of these companies have been able to build scale at AI at the speed of where they want to be. And the competition is fierce. You said before, like, you know, people fighting and going back and forth in the Super Bowl is how you see it come to life. But, you know, the real battle of like, who's got like the best AI for different applications and special use cases, and even in broad use are the ones that are seeing it actually come to life. And if you're looking at infrastructure as a strategic priority and how people are actually, when they're doing fundraising or they're prioritizing capital investment, they know they have to have the access to infrastructure and the access to these GPUs in order for AI to go at the speed of where they want to be.

25:27And so it is such a tremendous opportunity to see companies who do prioritize and make it as part of a strategic investment as the ones who are getting ahead. And we see this, you know, time after time, the ones who think about it as like, oh, we may just, you know, we don't want to spend like, you know, the money or, oh, we're worried about like, you know, what's going to be, they're not focused on more of like the TCO of what they need. Then those are the ones that end up coming back to us and saying, hey, we went somewhere else. You know, we didn't get the performance we needed and we're back because that performance is key.

26:01I mean, we just see it time and time again. And so what you're saying, a TCO, I think it's total cost of ownership. Yes. And I think what you're probably saying is, if you're not investing now, you might regret it later. But given the scale of the investment and the absence of a really great roadmap for what I should be doing, how do I know when I'm investing enough versus too much? Well, there's different ways to get started. I mean, we just introduced some new consumption models for people that want to start to do things more on demand. And some companies, they know right now that they need a certain amount of compute.