CMO Wins and Fails - Transforming a Cyber Marketing org with AI

2:55 pm
-
3:20 pm
CT

As a CMO in an AI-forward cybersecurity software company, we unleashed the AI floodgates early, mandating our teams learn the tools and ramp adoption to accelerate projects and improve outcomes.

What is uninteresting is that we’re using AI: what marketer isn’t these days?

What’s perhaps more interesting is we were adopting AI while we rebranded the company, moved to a new tech stack, and accelerated our transformation from product to platform. Along the way we had some spectacular failures, as well as some meaningful contributions we could not have achieved without AI. Join the session to gain a CMO’s perspective on AI for cyber marketing across all critical marketing functions.

Session Agenda

  • Key Takeaways:
  • 1. Marketing success with AI starts with MITL (Marketer-in-the-loop). Most every time someone put their brain aside and let AI go it alone, we had issues.
  • 2. Context is King (or Queen). This relates to #1 but is bigger. Everyone at every level of the org needs more business and market context than ever because they can 10x their output in a meaningless direction if they don’t have the right context. So marketing leaders at all levels need to put time aside for skip-levels and rich context discussions.
  • 3. LEEF - Lead by example - leaders need to be using AI and show the way, Education is key, Experimentation is even more key, and the Freedom to try things and Fail Fast is a must (OK that’s 3 Fs).
  • We’ll share case studies across most marketing functions (at a minimum, brand/creative, PR, web, content marketing, product marketing, and growth marketing) with specific examples of wins and fails.

Speakers

John Knightly

CMO

Netwrix Corporation

John Knightly

CMO

Netwrix Corporation

John Knightly is a seasoned marketing leader with 20+ years of experience in cybersecurity, AI, infrastructure software, and more. Before joining Netwrix, he served as Zscaler’s SVP Portfolio Marketing, leading their transformation from a product-centric organization to a leader in Zero Trust platform solutions and helping more than double ARR from $1B to $2.5B. He’s also held CMO and executive roles at BlueJeans, HPE, Adobe, and BEA. With roots in sales and product management, John blends marketing strategy with technical insight. He holds a bachelor’s in statistics from Princeton University and an MBA from UCLA. He’s worked all over the world, including the US, Europe, and Asia, but now calls San Francisco home.

About this Session's Track

Demand Gen & Digital, GTM Engineering & MOPs

Dive into the latest demand gen, digital tactics, and marketing operations frameworks that drive pipeline growth, from innovative and automated campaigns to AI-driven GTM engineering.

CyberCMO Summit

An exclusive, closed-door, CMO-only day of peer strategy discussions and roundtables where CMOs and heads of marketing exchange insights on leadership, strategy, and topics that resonate with the top of the marketing organization.