On this episode of How to Grow a CMO, host Alastair Hussain is joined by Michael Atalla, Chief Marketing Officer at UiPath.
Michael reflects on how his father’s career in engineering sparked an early fascination with technology, from creating stories on a Macintosh computer to teaching himself to code. He discusses how competitive swimming helped him manage ADHD, the work ethic he learned from his family, and why senior leaders have a responsibility to speak openly about neurodiversity and different working styles.
They also explore Michael’s unconventional journey from engineer to marketer, the importance of translating complex technology into compelling customer stories, and how AI is transforming both automation and the audiences marketers need to reach.
How to Grow a CMO is brought to you by tmp - the global marketing agency for B2B technology brands. To find out more, visit https://www.tmpb2b.com
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AliMichael, hello and thank you so much for joining us today.MichaelHello, Ali. Glad to be here.AliThank you. And I’d love to kick off the conversation to get to know youa little bit better. What’s shaped the person you are today? So to startwith, could you tell me a story from your childhood that has shaped whoyou are today?MichaelYeah, you know, I actually feel quite fortunate having, you know, had acareer in tech. I know you said start with childhood, but having had acareer in tech, I, I feel quite fortunate to have started with a fatherthat was in tech. Different generation, different era, but my father isan engineer a couple of times over, and so in my early days, there werecomputers in rooms that most of my friends didn’t have computers in. Iremember particularly having this Mac 512 that dates me a little bit, Isuppose. For those of you that don’t know, a Mac 512 had about a5.5-inch black and white screen on it, and it took several minutes toboot up. It was quite noisy. But I, I remember this app calledHyperCard, which was an Apple app that ran on a Mac that basically waslike, it was kind of like an early PowerPoint almost, but it was alittle more nuanced than that. Um, it allowed you to create, uh, cardsand navigate them and create links in each of the cards that took you todifferent cards. And I would, as a kid, spend hours designing theselittle storys in HyperCard.MichaelAnd I just, I had this great passion for the creation aspect of it all.The fact that I could do something on a computer and it resulted insomething I could show someone, it was like, it was, I was delivering aproduct in a way, but I’m, you know, early ages and early days in mycareer, I suppose. But that really connected me to technology at an agethat was far earlier than I think a lot of my contemporaries did andcertainly influenced my direction from there.AliI love that so much. I had a similar experience actually that my dadworked in tech and I will definitely ask you which companies your fathermight have worked at, but I remember having it like very early. It wasan Intel 286, I think was one of the earliest that I remember. And asimilar kind of sense of, magic around it. And that was a Spectrum ZX aswell, that I first learned how to programme on. And exactly like yousaid, actually, that joy of being able to create a thing. I remembervery vividly programming a train going across a screen, and some smokecoming out of it. And I thought, that is, you know, how do I make thescreen do that? It felt like magic at the time. I don’t think I’ve everquite lost that sense of magic when it comes to tech as well.MichaelYeah, I think that is a great sort of metaphor, if that’s the right wayto put it, for the technology space. I, I actually think as long as youcan continue to be wowed by it in that way, you can, especially I thinkin marketing, you can get energised by it in that way. Um, you’re just abetter storyteller around it and that’s the heart of the job at the endof the day.AliSo, absolutely. Absolutely. And, and can I ask who, who, whichbusinesses did your dad work for? Were they still around today?MichaelThey all, mostly you’d remember things like Northrop Grumman and there’sa company called TRW and, um, largely my father worked on projects. Iused to joke that my father does real engineering and I, I did thissoftware thing. Um, and, um, so he worked on projects like the F-18 andthe space station. And I was, you know, making web pages refresh oncomputers. And so at the time, I mean, I had plots of engineeringprojects that my father would bring home from work that I pinned on mywall as a kid. So these big, you know, full-width plotter outputs ofdiagrams and hardware infrastructure. He worked on submarine technology,used to get to get on submarines and ride them out of Bremerton up inthe Washington state area in the US. And so I, I was a pretty cool job.AliThat is unbelievably cool. I think it’s definitely one of the coolestdad job storys I think we’ve ever had on the podcast. I mean, my dadhelped to design the space station is right up there, isn’t it? That’s atough one to top. Um, and did a lot of that obviously, you know,influence who you were when you were a kid? We kind of, we, did you getquite kind of geeky and techy and interested in all that stuff that hewas doing?MichaelYeah, I did. I mean, my father dropped programming manuals on the deskand suggested I look at them. So, you know, my first paying job, I spentone holiday season folding jeans at The Gap, and then my next paying jobwas writing TCL script for a defence contractor that my fatherintroduced me to over the summer because I had taught myself how towrite TCL script, which was still quite early days. TCL, you know,predates sort of Ruby, TCL, MTK, and I learned it by reading through amanual. I taught myself how to write it in sort of Vi, just in a plaintext editor, and, uh, got paid pretty good money that summer to, to helpa defence contractor write this training application for US Naval, um,seamen who needed to learn the hardware that they were building. And,um, and so yeah, I, from the very beginning, I was into tech. I wastaking hardware apart. I was learning how to write code. Um, I wasbuilding webpages, you know, back when that was still novel and kind ofhard to do and you had to write HTML directly. So it’s always been.MichaelMy life. And it extends into my personal life. And, you know, I’m thehelp desk for my family, as many of us are. So there’s many ways inwhich tech permeates everything about me from the very beginning.AliYeah, that makes a lot of sense. I don’t know if you find this as well,but if you ever say you work in tech, then somehow most of yourneighbours end up hearing about it at some point, and you end up beingcalled to fix the email. It used to be the printer back in the day. Iremember doing quite a lot of that. Even fax machine, actually, way backwhen.MichaelI align with that entirely. Resonates from external. Extends to homethings like the camera at the front door, the Ring doorbell, or whateverit is. Um, if it’s—Aliyeah, anything with a battery, it turns out.MichaelYeah, technology, you must know how to fix it. You probably work on it,maybe you built it. That’s sort of— yeah, it goes to the neighbour’shouse. It’s very hard when you’ve been working in B2B infrastructuretechnology your entire life to explain it’s not exactly the work that Ido. And then when you get asked, what kind of work do you do, you haveto sort of, you know, it might be easier if I just fix that Ringdoorbell for you and we just get on with our day.AliI’m actually I’m gonna make a note that when we come to talk a littlebit more about what you do now, I should ask you how you describe yourjob to your neighbours, or how do you describe what your company does toyour neighbours? ’Cause I feel like that would be quite a good question.So obviously that was a big part of your life, being interested in allthings tech, and what sounds like a pretty deep programming language.I’ll admit, I’d not heard of TCL, and I do know a few things aboutprogramming languages, so I find that very interesting. What else didyou enjoy when you were growing up? What kind of shape too you were as achild?MichaelUh, I was always fairly athletic and so that was the mix that I thinkbalanced me out. Um, you asked if I sort of like geeked out a little bitover technology and I did, and my friends kind of knew that about me,but I was also a highly competitive swimmer, baseball most of mychildhood into secondary school. And that sort of has always beensomething that draws me back away from technology. My physical fitnessis something that I’ve been proud of my entire life. And so as I’vegotten older and physical fitness becomes a thing that is morechallenging to maintain, it’s given me something to fall back to, to thefact that I can still jump in a pool and swim for fitness, certainly notcompeting with anybody these days, that I can run, that I could get on abike. It’s led me to triathlon and marathons and long bike rides thatare good, I think probably good for the balance in my life. And intruth, probably will help me live a longer, more happy life as a result.So I’m very grateful for having had that balance early on and Icertainly credit it to the type of person I am today.AliSo I remember speaking to, I think it was, might have been Jenifer, CMOof JFrog, or possibly JJ of CrowdStrike. But on one of theconversations, this idea of team sport and individual sports came up,and we proposed an experiment that a study might actually have beencompleted at some point between what happens to children who tend tomajor in individual sports versus those that tend to major in teamsports to see if there’s any difference there. But did you spend a fairamount of time learning your own kind of discipline and focus doingthese individual activities you did? I mean, I imagine running, forexample, it gives you a lot of time to spend training your own brain asyou’re kind of running along.MichaelYeah, that’s a great question. I love that. I have often creditedswimming, not running as much, swimming for that kind of space. I talk alot publicly about my own neurodiversity. I was diagnosed with ADHDquite early in life. I often say before it was cool because therereally, when I was a child, wasn’t a lot of information out there aboutit. And it turns out swimming is one of the quietest spaces for ahyperactive brain. The distractions kind of are eliminated. There’salmost no way. I mean, it’s, you have to work overtime to even see aperson swimming in the lane next to you. And so I find that, found thatswimming, cause I would get up in the morning before my parents did whenI was in secondary school and go to a pool that I was in the water by5:30 in the morning. And, and, you know, swimming long distances. Ifound that to be quite quieting and calming, and I still to this dayfind swimming to be quite quieting and calming. It’s just one of thoseplaces I toyed with because I’m a geek. I had to toy with boneconducting headphones that would allow me to listen to things while Iwas in the pool, and I felt that was actually worse.MichaelThat was more distracting. I was losing my quiet space, and so I gave upon that one technology trend.AliThat’s amazing. And it’s difficult, obviously, kind of looking back, butDo you feel like that impacted you in different ways as well growing up?Michael100%. It shaped a tonne of who I am. I mean, it’s shaped both choicesI’ve made and places I’ve wanted to emphasise and spend my time as avolunteer in technology. I worked in education technology for a while Iwas still at Microsoft specifically to get after the passion for howtechnology can help kids facing neurodiverse challenges or opportunitiesas you might say. But it’s also shaped the choices I make, my workingstyle, the way I engage with people, the kinds of spaces I choose, Youknow, I will tell people readily, don’t bring me to a crowded, noisyrestaurant for dinner and expect me to have a productive businessconversation. I will happily go to a crowded, noisy restaurant fordinner, and you’re more than welcome to hand me the wine list when weget there to participate. However, that is not a business and workingenvironment for me. So, and I’ve said that very openly to people, like,it’s, I think it’s an important part of the role that I now play. And Idon’t mean my job, and I don’t mean my title, but I mean, To somedegree, my seniority and experience and what I am accountable toincludes being accountable to those around me who haven’t found theirvoice on that front yet, because it certainly gets to be safer the moresenior you are in organisations, or at least feels safer to be open andout in front about things like that.MichaelAnd so I think it’s part of what I’m accountable to be now is a voicefor that kind of reality for folks that face neurodiverse challenges.And mine are insignificant relative to others. And so I do think I dothink it’s an important thing.AliYeah. Fascinating. Thank you for sharing. Were there any other threadsor people that were kind of big influences on your life when you wereyounger?MichaelMy grandfather, my maternal grandfather was a big part of my life intomy teens before he passed away. Both my father and my grandfather had awork ethic that I think, and I should credit my grandmother’s and bothmy grandfathers as well, to be honest, and my mother all had workethics, but I watched my grandfather work physically after a career inthe phone company when there was one in the United States. And then inretirement, grow oranges in Florida. And then in retirement again,volunteer to take care of the plants at his condominium complex with hiswife, my late grandmother, because he simply needed to have his handsbusy and needed to be physically at work. And he dragged me around topull weeds in the condominium complex while I was visiting summers andsuch, and just showed me early on the importance of caring about thework you do and doing a good job, even in an environment where it wasclearly unnecessary. Like, he had no— there was no need for him tovolunteer to do that job. And even once doing it, the bar was notexactly high. It wasn’t as if he was going to lose his job or get firedor kicked out of his condo.MichaelHe just He just had a high bar for himself and he maintained it to thevery end. And I think that’s a good example to have in front of you whenyou’re a 12, 13, or 14-year-old boy to just watch somebody have aquality bar like that in front of you all the time.AliYeah, absolutely. And I believe, you know, I very much believe thatevery moment we experience shapes us in some way. I think there areprobably some of those memories, some of those moments that stick withus and we reflect on more consciously for longer periods of time. So asan example, things that we’re proud to have achieved, are there anythings that you kind of reflect on from your childhood and you’re like,I’m really proud to have achieved that?MichaelThat’s an interesting question. I think, you know, most of the time whenI talk about childhood achievements, I tend to fall back to athletics.And I hate to use swimming again as my example, but I was quite proud ofmy accomplishments as a swimmer. Like I could have gone to the Olympics.Like I was good enough to know that I could have been competitive atthat level. I wouldn’t have been a medalist. I would have never been ontelevision in the modern era, I was close and far away because I was asprinter. And if you’ve ever watched Olympic sprinting, you know thatthe races are, the person who comes in last is often just a couplehundredths of a second behind the person who comes in first. And I wasnot a couple hundredths behind, I would have been measured in thetenths, but still the tenths. And that is a— I knew I was good and itfelt good to be good at something like that. And I knew what it lookedlike to be great at something, I knew what it— I knew what it took. Iknew waking up before my parents and being in the pool at 5:30 in themorning, 6 days a week, every week, all year, school year, summer, allthe time was what it took to be that good.MichaelAnd I knew that even working that hard and even being as committed as Iwas to the practice, the work, the eating habits, all of that stillmeant that I couldn’t be the best, that it was going to take that muchwork to even have a shot at it. I think that was both something I wasproud of, but also incredibly informative to, I think, the truths aboutlife that we all face every day now as adults.AliYou mentioned something there about how swimming gave you kind of thesofter skills, you know, the kind of always the self-confidence perhaps.I think that’s interesting too. I was speaking to Mark from DataIQearlier, and he was talking too about his kind of early career in his—that he was an auditor. And actually what that did was give himconfidence when it came to speaking to finance later on in life. And Ithink that’s one of the things that’s really interesting to me is notnecessarily the hard or the specific skills directly associated with theactivity, but doing swimming gave you that which will always beapplicable and transferable to so many other areas of your life, which Ithink is one of the most important parts of activities like that. Evenif you hadn’t been as good as you were, I think that’s something to takewith you. Is there also a kind of a, if we play a kind of paralleluniverse game, if you hadn’t gone into marketing, it sounds like youobviously had some quite interesting options. Would you today be aswimmer? Would you be, what would you be doing?MichaelYeah, the, the Olympic swimmer path was, um, was fleeting, but it was,um, it was definitely one that I had, I had high hopes for at one point.I think that the line between being a software engineer or productleader and marketer is probably the one I was closest to crossing. And Ieven, I crossed it a couple of times in my career. Like I, I didn’t, Iwasn’t born a marketer, you know, I, as I said, my first real paying jobwas writing code. I did IT infrastructure consulting work in the earlydays of data centre and cloud infrastructure at I thought myselfcertainly to be an engineer, you know, Advanced Placement ComputerScience in secondary school, thinking that’s— I’m setting myself up forthe engineering career. So I think that line between the two or thething I was closest to there, I don’t know that there’s really a wildlydifferent career path that could have been for me. Tech was so early forme. It was so obviously the thing I wanted to do that I never really waslike, gosh, or I could be, you know, this, or I could be an architect,or I could be a painter.MichaelIt was not, it was, it was always this. I mean, if, if anything, I’d sayI could have taught in some aspect, whether it was computer science orwhether it was marketing. And still something that I, I think translatesinto who I am professionally. Like I could have taught, I could havebeen a teacher of some sort. I coached my childhood swim team afterageing out of being able to compete on it for a little bit. And I reallydid enjoy that. Transfer of skills and transfer of experience. And Ithink it translates to who I am today as well. But no, this is— tech isit. Maybe I could have been a product manager instead of a productmarketer, but tech is it. Chaos in B2B marketing is not justfrustrating, it’s expensive. TMP’s latest research shows it could becosting organisations up to 15% 15% of potential revenue and extendingsales cycles by 30%. Want to see what chaos is really costing your team?Visit tmpb2b.com/cost-of-chaos.AliSo then shifting more towards, towards your career as it now stands andyou were an engineer in the early days of the cloud Hyperscalerbuild-out. And at that point you thought, I know what would be far morelucrative than this. Let’s move into marketing. So can you explain to mehow that happened? How did you first get into marketing?MichaelYeah, I mean, I’ve said before that I stumbled into it a bit, which ishalf true, half not true, I suppose. I was at Microsoft. I joinedMicrosoft from sort of a more technical career path where I wasimagining you know, myself heading into a product leadership role. And Iwas hired into an engineering team. Uh, I was given a job titledtechnical evangelist, and it was in fact to be a developer relations guyis the best way to put it in modern terms. Like I was responsible fordriving the, you know, the adoption of technology with a group of bigcommercial, um, software companies. I spent time selling to themessentially our vision. And at some point, uh, soon after joiningMicrosoft, we went through a reorg as companies like Microsoft do, and Iwas told that my job was actually a business development job. I waslike, same job, same job, but now it’s business development. Yep. So Iget to do the same work, but you just call me business development guy.Okay, fine. And then in pretty short order after that, we went throughyet another reorg. And when I say short order, I mean all of thishappened in about 18 months and, uh, it’s very short order.MichaelUh, and then I, they said, hey, so now you’re in marketing. We decidedbusiness development’s part of marketing., and I was like, same jobstill? Uh, yep. Okay. Then I’m fine, I suppose. Um, and so from there Iwas sitting in this role responsible for developer relations, which, um,people less informed about the work had decided somehow it was not atechnical role, but more like a relationship and, and business andcontract-driven role. But it gave me, uh, open door to a marketingorganisation. Um, and so my tendency towards being quite technical andmy understanding of, I, I’ve said in the past how information flows onthe internet, like having been part of the technology industry as it wastaking shape in a data centre buildout time, pre-cloud. I had afundamental understanding of how technology worked and it enabled me tolearn new technology quite quickly, which was a darn good match forproduct marketing, it turns out. And the ability to tell storys withtechnology, explain it in very, um, uh, plain English terms, or at leastaudience-appropriate terms, and my comfort with being sort of out infront, on stages, in rooms, talking about it, made me a good fit forthat kind of a role.MichaelAnd I bridged to product marketing quite quickly after that. And for therest is history.AliIt’s amazing. So funnily enough, when you were talking earlier, the wayyou were talking about things, it felt like you were an evangelist abouttechnology. And I was going to draw that into a parallel with marketing.But there was, I think it was at Microsoft, or it might’ve been IBM,there was one of the kind of the first evangelists, I think, you know,kind of role of technical evangelist, wrote this fantastic pamphlet, andI will try and dig it out actually and share it with you. But it isbrilliant. I’ve read it and you just think there are so many sensibleprinciples in there that are so healthy and so relevant and applicableto marketing as well. But I don’t know, it must have been a relativelynascent function when you were there because it’s not a role that’s beenaround for a long time, is it?MichaelNo, it wasn’t. And they limit— the title got thrown out at some point.We can’t call you that anymore, which was helpful because I had at thetime tried to explain to my grandparents that I was not in fact anevangelist in the way It took me a moment to actually explain what I wasdoing, even though it seemed pretty straightforward to me.AliIt was, it was a ninja of its day, presumably.MichaelYes, totally.AliYeah.MichaelI think it’s a great title. I think it is exactly the right way todescribe the role of product marketing. Uh, we call it product marketingnow. So, okay. That’s fine too. But the, um, yeah, it’s a product we’remarketing it. I guess that’s right. But technical evangelism sort ofconnotes storytelling. It, it can evangelism while, while it’s got itsIt’s got some negative connotations in some circles. Like the reality isthat it’s, um, exactly right. It sort of signals that you’re actuallyresponsible for inspiring people, for energising them. There’s somethingin it, in that word that I think is really relevant to marketing. Um, soI love the title. I, I loved putting it on my business card. And, uh, Ithink today we have teams like developer relations teams, you know,DevRel is, is a pretty well-developed discipline in spaces. I, I have adeveloper relations team, team in my organisation that I built here thatdidn’t exist when I joined. Because I think it’s a really importantfunction, but it really goes beyond that. It’s the thing that is makingpeople believe in the technology, get inspired by it and energised byit.MichaelAnd I think we could call the whole marketing work technical evangelism.It would be accurate.AliWhich leads us quite nicely actually to where you are today. So you arenow at UiPath and you’re obviously Chief Marketing Officer at UiPath.Tell me a little bit about UiPath and actually referring to the earlierpart of our conversation, if you’re to describe to your neighbours overa barbecue, what it is that UiPath does. Would you mind describing it inthose kinds of tones?MichaelYeah, I mean, we automate things at the simplest level, like in thesimplest way, we automate things, some things that businesses have todo, whether that’s automating the way you receive the payment for aproduct, or it’s automating the way you sort of process documentationthat people fill out by hand, or whether it’s automating the handoffsbetween organisations by taking a whole bunch of data here and making itmake sense to people over here. Like, we’re, we’re automating all ofthat. And, and in more sophisticated terms, we orchestrate all of thatautomation across an entire business, making it easier for people to dotheir jobs. That’s the simplest way to put it. The specific examplesthat are easiest for people to usually process are things like, well,imagine, you know, you go to a doctor’s office, you fill out a bunch ofpaper forms, somebody’s got to read all those forms, process them all,You know, everybody knows they get digitised in some way. You don’tmaybe know the system very well, but at some point all that informationgets put in a computer system somewhere. We can automate that process.We can, we can understand what’s on those documents and we can helpcomputers understand what’s on them.MichaelAnd that’s a, that’s an example that usually connects with folks. Um,but pretty much anything in business has an opportunity for automationand orchestration.AliSo obviously that’s, you know, UiPath has been around for a little whileand a very successful business for quite some time now. How have recenttechnological developments affected, obviously, LLMs and othertechnologies which can support and aid automation. What has that meantfor the company?MichaelI think that most of automation for automation’s been, got a long, longhistory, goes well, well predates the tech industry, right? Theautomation’s always been this way of improving performance andproductivity. And most of it has been what we would refer to asdeterministic, meaning that this is a pattern we’re going to repeat overand over again. Right now, a person is maybe repeating it over and overagain. Can we get a machine? We go assembly line, right? Or goIndustrial Revolution era. Could we get a machine to repeat that taskover and over again? That’s deterministic. We know what the thing is andwe know what it looks like to do it, and it’s always going to be thesame. What the current AI revolution that is happening is doing is it’sproducing the opportunity to automate non-deterministic things wherecomputer system actually has to make a decision based on anon-deterministic pattern. This could look different. It might go adifferent direction. The example I gave about intaking medical Forms isa great example. Like, I have no idea what a person is going to write onthat document. It’s not deterministic. And if somebody scrawls a note inthe right-hand margin of a page, like, the form doesn’t say, “Put a notehere.” Some person decided to scrawl a note there.MichaelWhat’s that note? How— what is it in context to what’s on the form?Like, that is a non-deterministic situation that we have to somehowinterpret, make a decision about. And that’s a very powerful thing. It’svery powerful to be able to automate non-deterministic things becausemost of the time humans have to be involved in— well, most of— throughmost of history, humans had to be involved in non-deterministic things.And being able to include a human for the high-risk, high-concern, or inthe moment where a decision has to be made, but not until then, is anincredibly powerful way to improve productivity of that human. And invery practical, like, real high-impact terms, the example I just gavecomputer simply can intake and process more information faster, whichmeans that we can get more data into the hands of medical professionalsin that scenario more quickly. That helps them make a smarter decisionabout life-saving care. So there’s very real, yet human impact to this,but it’s also just a very powerful change in what automation is.AliSo understanding then the fact that was a brilliantly lucid explanation.Uh, I appreciate that. Understanding that shift then and thatdevelopment, that evolution, revolution, whatever you want to call itwithin the space that you guys play, how has that impacted the role ofmarketing? What is it like to be a marketer in the middle of all ofthis?MichaelWell, the role of marketing is being impacted by all of this and I haveto be a marketer in the context of all of this. It’s actually quite afascinating time, Ali. It’s a fascinating time. Yes. I would say, Thething that’s happening most directly is that we’re having to reconsiderour entire buying group, our entire audience, right? Because theaccessibility of very sophisticated technology, technological things, ischanging. Like, not long ago, just a handful of months ago from whenwe’re recording this, Anthropic released Claude code and the whole worldseemed to shift overnight. We suddenly made something that seemed veryhard and out of reach very accessible and in reach for a lot of people.Um, and that is the generation of, of, of compiled code. Uh, and forthose people that already understood how to compile code, they suddenlywere 10 times, 100 times more powerful. Uh, and so because of thataccessibility change, because the audience is changing for very hardtechnological things, we are now marketing to a much wider array ofpeople about those very hard technological things. Like we used to knowour audience quite well and we got to know IT people.MichaelYou know, we had IT decision makers. Developers, business decisionmakers. Like at one point it was that straightforward. And now we’re inmarketing into line of business owners and business owners and buyingcommittees that are quite vast and complex. And that’s changing the verytactical way we execute. It’s also changing the messaging and thenarrative that we have to develop. And that, and it’s also happening atsuch a rapid pace that we’re doing that like every day, right now, everyday. That’s, that’s maybe the most concrete thing that is happening tous. I don’t think it’s unique to UiPath, but it’s certainly happening atUiPath.AliThat makes a lot of sense. And it’s absolutely, you know, the— when wesometimes describe it as the chaotic environment that marketing isoperating in at the moment. And that chaos is not by any stretchentirely negative. It is simply a lot of big, important things kind ofcrashing into each other all at the same time, which obviously creates asense of entropy, a sense of chaos. One of the patterns I see and I finduseful is understanding how some of the plumbing of what is going on nowimpacts the potential products that then become available 3 months, 6months down the line. So for example, you know, if you’re aware of MCPservers, you realise that, hold on a second, LLMs might be able to startusing a lot more tools at some point when these things start to takeoff. Obviously you have quite a technical background. Do you find ituseful to understand some of that? And I’m also thinking, you know,there’s probably a little bit of history rhyming here with yourexperience of hyperscalers or, you know, kind of infrastructure justpre-cloud and during cloud. So is that something you see as very useful,a real asset having that technical understanding?MichaelYeah, I mean, I would advise any marketer that is developing in theircareer to stay as close to the product as is possible. And it iscertainly easier to do so when you have built a product in your life.And like, I would never pretend to have the sophistication of a modernsoftware engineer, but I do again, understand how information flows onthe internet. Like I can I can understand generally how this technologyworks. And if I don’t and I sit down with an engineer who explains it tome, I will process that quickly. That’s an asset without question, butit also is a challenge. The distinction that in fact is really importantfor marketing leaders versus product leaders is you actually have to beable to extract yourself from that product narrative and bridge to acustomer storytelling there. That’s, and that’s, that sometimes can behard when you get caught up in the excitement about, wow, look atexactly how this model is ingesting data. And let me explain howinference works. It’s so exciting because it really doesn’t matter inmany cases to the customer.AliThere’s one thing I wanted to pick up as well in your previous answerthat I think bears revisiting, which is I love the fact that when Iasked you, how does it change the role of marketing? The first thing youdid was start talking about the buyer and market orientation. And Ithought it was just worth picking that up because a lot of people stilldon’t, they look at actually what is changing in the tech or what ischanging in the last thing they saw on social media or, you know, Theylose track of the ultimate determinant of all change for anyone tryingto sell something, which is what is changing in the buyer’s world. So Idid just want to call that out as a note of appreciation for the factthat’s where you started that answer, I think incredibly important. Oneof the things we talked about, obviously, this kind of the chaoticoperating environment that we all live in at the moment, are therethings that you do or that you have done or you’ve seen done that helpto bring things together to create a sense of coherence, coherencewithin the team perhaps, or coherence in the way that you go to marketas a business?MichaelYeah. I mean, I think that there is a real value in shared taxonomy.That sounds kind of boring, but there, in moments of chaos, I thinkhaving a shared taxonomy about how to refer to the chaos is critical.And I think that one Bringing your organisation as a marketing leader,bring your organisation along in the journey of the need for the sharedtaxonomy and then building the shared taxonomy and then rigorouslyapplying it is in fact part of how you bring order to that chaos. And inthis moment in time, that is for me a language about how we talk aboutthe impact of AI on our functions at an individual function level. So I,I need a shared taxonomy for talking about that. But where is AI useful,where is it not useful, where is it required, where is it a must-do,where is it something that cannot replace something we are doing today.And this is relevant to the way we talk about UiPath technology tocustomers as well, but internally for the team. And there’s a need for ataxonomy for that. And there also, I think, is a need for a taxonomyaround what the adoption of this technology looks like over time, thestages of adoption.MichaelAnd so I, I have worked I think maybe a little bit, a tad longer thanaverage simply because we’re kind of in it at UiPath. And so well beforethe Claude Code revolution that happened in the early part of this year,we were already living this sort of AI transformation. It’s wild howfast it’s happened. So I have developed a taxonomy for both with myteam. I have shared it. We have talked about it and we are working,working to, it’s a work in progress, working to rigorously apply it sothat we all feel comfortable explaining, hey, this is when we’re goingto use AI. Here’s where we are on the adoption curve. Um, here’s placeswhere we’re less mature. Here’s places where we’re full on, uh, youknow, agentic automation opportunities. And here’s places where we’rejust sort of in the productivity phase and learning how to apply it toincrease personal productivity. Like having that language helps a ton.Uh, and people who don’t see that are, are generally speaking in the wayof your ability to, to drive, uh, order. In your organisation. So it’ssomething you’ve got to work overtime as a leader to bring people alongthe journey out.AliI genuinely absolutely love that. So I studied linguistics for a fewyears, and it’s the third time today, speaking to a CEO and two CMOs,that linguistics and language and the importance of language andunderstanding has come up. I’m a big believer in serendipity, so I feellike it is a thing. I’m delighted that you mentioned it. But if there’sone big marketing challenge that you’d love to change or overcome at theat the moment, what would it be?MichaelOof. One big marketing challenge. I think everybody’s data is terrible.I don’t know. Maybe, maybe somebody out there has like this incredibledata backend that is like perfectly clean. All the taxonomy is right.All it’s always up to date. Sellers always update their Salesforcerecords. Like somebody. I doubt it though, based on my experience.AliWell, I haven’t met them and we work across a lot of clients. Uh, we’vecertainly never met one that has exemplary data.MichaelSo much would be easier, Ali, if our data was clean. Like it’s just,it’s the one thing I feel like every, everywhere I’ve been and at everypoint over the course of my career, we’ve talked about how if we justhad, if the data was just better or why can’t you deliver this? We just,the data’s not there. It’s the biggest challenge to execution, tostrategy and planning, to the way customers experience our marketing,to, it’s just the one thing that’s in the way all the time. I hope thatI have the opportunity to actually— this is probably— maybe I’m too faralong in my career to have this opportunity now, but I hope I have theopportunity to build a data infrastructure from scratch at a businessthat isn’t moving at 1,000 miles an hour because I think it would befun. I think it would be fun to get it right. I don’t know if I’ll everhave that opportunity. I don’t know if the opportunity even reallyexists because of the speed that we have to operate these days inbusiness. But I think it would be really fun to be able to operate amarketing team against a really clean data backend.MichaelIt sounds so geeky to say that, but gosh, wouldn’t that be fun, Ali?AliAgain, I’m totally on board with that. So, you know, for the past, youknow, 3, 4 years, I’ve been advising marketing leaders, CMOs, on how tonavigate and get the most value from some of the new technologiesavailable, like AI and such. And the first thing I say is, well, sorry,one of the things I say is, look, you’re not going to do this, but thebest way you could spend the next 2 years to get the maximum value wouldbe sort your data out and do all the boring stuff. And basically thebest way to get value out of it would be to just spend as much timedoing data entry as possible. Um, and obviously no one ever does spendthe amount of time necessary to do that because it is a thankless task.Like, I completely agree. Do you have any, um, marketing heroes? Who arethe people who have influenced how you approach marketing, whether it’speople you’ve worked with or people you’ve read?MichaelI think I’m in a minority of them. I’m not a big read the marketingbooks guy. I appreciate some of them, and I appreciate the people whowrite them, but I don’t— that’s not the place I draw my inspiration. Idraw most of my inspiration from the work day to day. And I will saythat, yeah, I certainly have leaders that I have reported into that havesort of taught me things, inspired me. I continue to look to some ofthem, but I am more often inspired and by new marketers in myorganisation that come to the table with some knowledge and experiencethat I didn’t have. Because, you know, no matter what I do, I can digback into areas of my team, but I run a full-stack marketingorganisation. I can’t live in one functional area for a week, 2 weeks, amonth, a quarter, which means that a bunch of the way marketing is donetoday is something that I didn’t get to do when I was closer to theground floor of the organisation. And so when somebody new comes in tomy organisation who has that firsthand experience in modern marketing,at the ground floor, I love— I get inspired by digging into that part ofthe business and that function of marketing with them.MichaelAnd so I tend to like— it’s And, you know, you use the word hero, that’sa big word, I think. But that is where I draw— I think, you know, heroesinspire you. They, they, it’s how you sort of gain sort of inspirationand energy often for the day, for the week, for the month. I, um, uh,that’s where I find that inspiration. I have a woman on my team whoreplaced our entire digital paid media reporting infrastructure with a5-agent fully autonomous process that she built herself that offsetshundreds of thousands of dollars of external reporting agency costs.That’s inspiring. That’s— she’s my hero this month. Like, that’samazing. And just having her walk me through the process and how shetrained the agents and how she built the guardrails, which was, youknow, energising for her, but also for me. Like, that’s kind of where Ifind my daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly heroes.AliCan I ask one thing I’ve seen is that you are relatively proactive onsocial media.— doing some really great videos and I’ve enjoyed watchingthem. I’d recommend anybody who’s listening to this to follow you onLinkedIn. Was that intentional? Was that a very intentional step on yourpart or was it just something that started to happen organically?MichaelIt was intentional. I don’t want to misrepresent it. It was anintentional effort to sort of be out in front and get out there with myvoice. I think it’s an important part of the job. It shapes my presencein the world because it is a place that people consume information. And,and, um, I, I didn’t grow up in the social media era, right? I, I, it,it landed on me in the mid-career, and I navigate some of it with skilland some of it horribly poorly. But I do think it’s an important waythat we have to participate in the world if we want to be takenseriously by all of our audiences. And in this case, as an executive ata company that cares about the number of eyeballs paying attention towho we have to recognise that when we’re ready to say something to theworld, it is important that the eyeballs already be there and thatpeople already be listening. And you have to build that presence overtime. You can’t just show up one morning, got a product to launch today.I got an important role I got to hire for today.MichaelLike, let me post about it. Like, if that’s, if that’s your approach,then you’re going to fail. I think you’ve got to be willing to put inthe time and effort to build that audience over time. And mine isimmature at best compared to some others. I have folks that I follow onLinkedIn and other places that are quite robust. But I’m, you know, it’sa work in progress.AliYeah. I thought it’s very good. I have to mention a couple of the CMOsthat I notice, I think working very well on social media yourself andChris as well. Chris from Twilio, Chris Kula. But yeah, I think it issomething we’re seeing a bit more often and it does seem to be a verysensible thing. Something we certainly talk to clients about. If it’sokay, I could talk to you for another 5 hours or probably 5 years, butwe’re going for a quickfire round if that’s all right. So these arequestions that probably merit a long round answers, but we ask you tokeep them as short as possible, if that’s okay. So 5 questions. So thefirst is complete this sentence: The qualities I look for in my nextexceptional hire are—Michaeltheir humanity.AliLovely. What a lovely answer. I often say the only problems that worryme are the ones I can’t see. So try to be open with my team about thechallenges I have or the mistakes that I make so that they’recomfortable doing the same. In the spirit of psychological safety,what’s a mistake you’ve made in the past couple of weeks?MichaelMistake I’ve made in the past couple of weeks? I think that I, this isfresh for me. I think that I very often get caught up in being, inthinking that my calendar is the most complex calendar and my team andthose around me suffer the consequences of my calendar. And I think thatI owe them better.AliOh my God. That absolutely, that speaks to me as well. Yeah. What issomething most people get wrong about you?MichaelI still, I think they might, hmm, that’s a good question. I think theyI, people really close to me know this, but I, I still geek out aboutthe technology. I still live in it every day. Like I built a homeautomation app for fun with Quantum, wanted to, like, I still geek outevery day. I’m, I’m deep in it.AliThat, that in a sense is technology that I feel is still, still afraction of the way to where it could be. What are the 3 technologiesyou’re most excited about over the next 10 years?MichaelWell, okay, so there you go. One of them’s home automation technologybecause exactly what you just said is we’re barely there. It’s still acomplex mess., and I had to build a home automation app to normalise itfor my family. So one, home automation, 100%. I think we’ve got a lot offun. That’s just exciting for me. But, but I would say that moreinteresting to me is, um, and, and more important is educationtechnology and medical technology. So edtech, medtech, those spaces aremired in legacy garbage infrastructure applications. There’s so muchpotential for transformative impact. Impact. Uh, there’s not always alot of money in it and that’s unfortunate, but it is in fact those two,edtech, medtech, and I have high hopes that AI will help us advancethose rapidly in this moment.AliYeah. Lovely. And finally then, um, what’s one piece of advice or oneidea either about marketing or about life in general that you keepcoming back to?MichaelI don’t know. I guess I’ll go life in general. Um, I think that a lot ofpeople spend a lot of their mental energy on whether or not they lovetheir job, or they love their career, whether they’re satisfied withtheir career. And that, that is a very big thing. And I would encouragepeople to work with smaller things. Like, what is it today that I can bemotivated by? Like, what is today the thing that is going to motivate metoday? And, you know, like this morning, I was motivated because I knewI was coming in to talk to you on this podcast. And that was a great wayto start the day. And if it. You know, I have— it’s early for me. I haveseveral meetings to go throughout the day, but that was a good way tokick it off. And I would encourage people to focus. Sometimes it’ll be,you know, a huge project that you’re working on for months. Sometimesit’ll be something very small. But if you can just find that motivationon a daily basis, I think it’s a lot less mental energy than trying tobe satisfied with your career.MichaelBrilliant.AliMichael, thank you so much. Absolutely invaluable. I love thatconversation. Like I said, I’d have happily spoken to you for a lotlonger, longer. But again, just thank you so much for being with ustoday.MichaelYeah, thank you, Eli. I really enjoyed the conversation as well, and Ireally appreciate you having me on.
