On this episode of How to Grow a CMO, host Alastair Hussain is joined by Anthony Pappas, Chief Marketing Officer at DXC Technology.
Anthony’s route to marketing leadership was shaped as much by growing up around New York’s creative industries as it was by his professional career. In their conversation, he reflects on the lessons he learned from playing baseball, how a childhood surrounded by film, art and music influenced his creative outlook, and the extraordinary story of how his father nearly became the guitarist in KISS. He also shares how his perspective has shifted from believing hard work leads to success, to placing greater importance on purpose, presence and enjoying the journey.
They also discuss Anthony’s journey from graphic design into marketing during the early days of the internet, and why he sees striking similarities between that period and today’s AI revolution. Anthony explains how he is reshaping marketing at DXC to operate as a more connected global team, why marketers need to actively experiment with AI rather than simply talk about it, and how the technology can amplify rather than replace human expertise. Along the way, he shares why listening, communication and understanding what people truly need remain some of the most important skills in both marketing and leadership.
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Ali
Hello and welcome to season 6 of How to Grow a CMO, the podcast that helps you become a better marketing leader. I'm your host, Ali Hussain, Chief Strategy Officer of TMP, the world's most referred B2B agency. And this week I sat down with Anthony Pappas, Chief Marketing Officer of DXC. In this episode, you'll hear which very famous band Anthony's dad was very nearly a guitarist in, what it was like growing up in a family who worked in the film industry in New York in the '80s, how Anthony reorganised DXC's marketing function in just a few months, where marketing needs to play a role in transforming the wider business, and why you should think of AI not as a thing, but as an era. From TMP, this is How to Grow a CMO. Anthony, hello and welcome to How to Grow a CMO.
Anthony
Thank you for having me, and hello to you as well. I'm really excited to be here.
Ali
Thank you. Well, I'm excited for the conversation too, and I want to start at the place we always do, which is getting to understand how you became the person you are today. So to help us understand that, could you start with a story from your childhood that has influenced who you are today?
Anthony
Sure. I don't know if there's actually just one story, but I grew up playing a sport, baseball, at a very early age. Actually, I had to lie to be able to play that sport at the age of 4 years old. It was something that I just wanted to do. My dad made sure that I was a part of it. And that experience of being a part of baseball— when I say I was a part of it was an everyday, 10 months out of the year for many years of my life, all the way through college. It was a very impactful moment because I was pretty much dedicated. It taught me a lot of discipline. It taught me teamwork. It taught me to think about a future of what I was doing, even at just a young childhood age. That influence really shaped me pretty significantly through my high school years, through my college years. And the idea of being a part of a team was kind of ingrained in me from the very beginning.
Ali
Nice. That seems to be a theme actually that's coming up this series around people who play team sports versus people who play individual sports. I feel maybe we should organise a dinner at some point and get everyone, play team sports on one side, nobody played individual sports on the other and see what happens. But you said obviously that started to help you think about your future. So as well as teaching you some of those life lessons that a lot of people, you know, do get from playing sports, being part of a team, what were you thinking in terms of what your future might look like back then?
Anthony
What it did is it taught me to listen really well. And listening was a skill that I would say at a young age, you typically don't grow up doing, right? You could just start acting. But the idea of listening really started to make me ask questions to individuals. And when I would ask those questions, I was learning very different facets. So my dad was in the film business, my uncle was in the film business, all of their friends were in the film business. And it was this idea of learning how things were created. When we say the film business, this is commercials, this is movies. I was always interested in art. I always had some creative background. I listened to music. But there were all of these avenues in front of me. And one of the real things about it was they were all individualised. And when I actually became part of a team, I wondered how I can be creative but yet be in a team atmosphere. I actually stopped playing sports at— in college. You know, it was one of those things where I had a passion to be a professional.
But the minute I did that, I kind of looked for something of interest and I fell back on what I was been listening to my entire life, which was a very creative way of working. The difference was, is that I don't think I was a self-made artist. I really wanted to work with a group of individuals who were creative thinkers, because that's kind of the conversation that I grew up with. And literally it was, you know, oil and water, sports and art. It's really, they don't really mix. But it was a very unique place that I saw the beauty in both. And I really wanted to be a part of that. And I didn't know actually where that was, but that was something that I intrinsically knew right out of the gate.
Narrator
Wow.
Ali
And can I ask, what did your family do? What were the various roles they had in the film industry?
Anthony
Yeah, so my father was a creative director, art director, and prop master. My uncle was a set dresser and designer, prop master, and all of the other folks around there, we had a cinematographer, We had several directors, we had producers. So I literally grew up in an environment in New York City where in college I actually was a part of the unions. At the time it was called IATSE to make and build commercials. I think my dad didn't know what I was going to do, so he got me in early days. But I was very much a part of watching, building, crafting, both on the movie side, the commercial side. And I always saw the what was the advertising agency in the corner. And I always wondered, why are they sitting down? Why are they directing all the shots? I could see everybody, the producers, the director. And it was my learning of that the agency was really the ones that were crafting the message, coming up with the ideas. And I pretty much said, I don't want to be doing set dressing anymore. I want to be the agency side. I want to be the ones creating the ideas and coming up with the vision.
So it was a really interesting place on how this kind of worked its way out.
Ali
That's amazing. And you mentioned that this was in New York City. I originally spoke to Joe Tajano, he's the CMO at RSM, and he said he grew up in New York City and he was talking about how sometimes the aesthetics, the culture of growing up in New York City, and he was talking about the '80s, '90s, how that influenced him. Do you think that was a big part of who you were and who you became?
Anthony
100%. I had '70s, '80s, '90s, but the reality was, is that the cultural mecca that New York City is, both from a culinary standpoint, from a, we'll call it fashion and beauty standpoint. I mean, you are pretty much aware and involved and see every aspect. I have uncles who are actual artists. They were painters. My dad was a musician as well. My mother was actually the opposite of my father and the family, but my family actually has been in New York City since 1900. And the roots that were there, the culture that was sort of born out of New York City, it just puts you in an environment where being connected, having family roots, which is very different than DC, not being so much focused on politics and business, but really about expressing yourself. My heritage is a very vocal heritage, so we tend to like to talk very loudly. And enjoy food and culture. But New York City is very much that way as well. You kind of know where you stand, where you are in New York City, and it's a great melting pot, but you're exposed to so much. I could honestly say that I was fortunate to grow up in that environment and see a lot of transformation that occurred, especially in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, which is all coming back.
My kids are wishing they were in the '70s and the '80s, and I kind of laugh when we go through those types of things. It's pretty funny.
Ali
Yeah, I mean, what's old is new again. Do you have any artefacts from that time? Any art that the family produced or music or any copies of the commercials or anything like that?
Anthony
Yeah, I do have those artefacts and funny enough, we have them on VHS tape. They're sitting in a box. My kids, they're older now, but they're like, wow, these are great VHS. Look, this is, you know, I'm kind of looking at it saying, That was relatively new when I had beta. But we do, we have some of those artefacts. There's actually some stuff you can find on the internet as well. It's a really eclectic time. And it was, I would say that, you know, now we know where we are today with all the technology, being and having your foot in both worlds and being such at the precipice of technology right now in my current role and always been in part of that. It's really been, I would say, an interesting life to see through each decade how it's really transformed pretty aggressively and being a part of it, being an early game child and picking up computers when they were mostly line-based, going to visuals, then being a designer itself and just watching and evolving with the technological trend is, has been pretty amazing actually.
Ali
Yeah, I completely agree that it makes me think of that idea. Now, I dunno if I'm gonna phrase this exactly right, but the first 20 years of your life, any technology you encounter, you assume has always existed. For the next 40 years, any technology that comes out is really exciting. And then anytime after that, you think it's an absolutely terrible idea. So I feel like it's quite interesting being in those different phases of life. And were there any particular musicians? I'm personally fascinated obviously by how music has shaped people and who they are. And I remember speaking to Brandon, this very quiet CMO at Criteo, very quietly spoken, very measured. And it turns out he loved metal and hard rock music. What is the music that you would choose to listen to if you could listen to anything?
Anthony
You know, this is a really interesting question. I'm going to tell you that I listen to every type of music and I'm going to tell you why. My dad was a heavy musician. When I say a heavy musician, he was actually going to be in one of those rock bands, the heavy metal. At an early age, I came along and he had to go a different route. And there's a band that's very popular, they put a lot of makeup on their face at the time. He was going to be the guitarist at the moment. From that day on, he then had to explore being a father, but he had an amazing record collection. Everything from the Led Zeppelin of the time to the Stevie Ray Vaughan to George Winston to every eclectic piece of music you can imagine. He had probably thousands of records. Because it was a part of who he was. he would play it all day long, every day. Now, as a young age and through the years of still being with my parents, I didn't really understand that. I just knew that he was up late at night playing and we had music playing.
And so I never really, felt the need that I had to gravitate towards music as an identifier for me. It was always there. And everybody else, all those artistic individuals I mentioned earlier, it was just a part of my life. So I kind of took that for granted because when I decided to start to listen to music, I almost became a musical critic. I was able to listen to the different— the hair bands, the Led Zeppelins, as we moved into other types of music, I would be able to pinpoint this out listening to it like a musician, although I was never able to play. Music in that way, I think I would be a great producer, was the way that I looked at it. So to me, music was just a mood that it would put me in rather than something that I had to actually connect to. And that actually translated when I started to do graphic design and design from my own nature. That's what I graduated with, was a design degree. I actually used music to help me articulate the output that I needed to do for a customer or a project or a different thing.
So whether it was hard rock, it tended to be more of an exciting brand that was out and needed to be more vivacious versus a more fashion-oriented brand where it needed to have emotion and deepness. I would listen to something completely different. So I use music as a tool rather than a way of identifying, you know, who I was.
Ali
That's interesting. I feel very much the same way about music, actually. And one of the obvious examples of that is when I'm working, trying to get into a kind of a flow state, I nearly always listen to the type of music I'd never listen to otherwise. You know, John Hopkins' Immunity is actually my album of choice at the moment for that. But can I just rewind briefly? Because just to clarify something you said, you said your dad was nearly a guitarist in a band that was quite famous that wore quite a lot of makeup. Was your dad nearly the guitarist in KISS?
Anthony
he was, yes.
Ali
That's amazing.
Anthony
That is incredible.
Ali
Yeah. And you wore that very lightly in the early part of that story.
Anthony
Yes. That actually came to fruition. My dad is a character. He's a, he's a New York City, born and raised, and they tend to elaborate on their storys. And so, you know, early on there's a lot of storys that he would give, but there was one moment in time that we're in the film business and, you know, he had woken me up early at an early age of around 11. 12, I believe, and he invented some smoke machines, early smoke machines that you would see in those videos early on. And there was a band playing in New York City in the middle of the night. He woke me up, he said, "Let's go." We got in a car, we drove to New York City, and the next thing you know, we're going to this trailer. There's this person with a lot of dark hair. And I kind of was looking at a 12-year-old where the person who turned around was Gene Simmons.
And actually my dad went to school with, and his name was Gene Klein. And actually Gene Klein had an idea of a band. He wasn't necessarily sure in the '70s. You can imagine that timeframe. Everybody was in Music was very heavy in New York. There are lots of stars. There's Hendrix and others, and there was a small kind of eclectic group if you played really well. So my dad realised at an early age that I've got maybe a kid on the way, I'm not really sure, this seems like a big bet. And unfortunately, I think he's hanging his head a little heavy at the moment. They had a great conversation. I really didn't believe it. I was looking up at these two gentlemen. Bantering back and forth talking about old high school days. And I said, "Okay, at that moment, I now believe my dad's story." That was a real scenario. But he's very gifted. He's a very gifted musician. And actually, he's in his mid-70s right now. He's still on stage. He still plays all night long. So it was one of those things that I think also shaped me because passion was something that he lived by.
My mom also had a passion. She had a passion for work, and that's one of my biggest things. I kind of, in a career, for passion, not necessarily for stature or success. So we might get to that later, but that's one of the things. Again, this kind of very different way of looking at the world hit me early. I didn't realise it until now being a parent and seeing my kids and what they have to actually go through and how they put things together.
Ali
I love that. I think that might actually be my favourite bit of trivia that we've ever uncovered on the podcast. And I can see how this extraordinary cocktail of culture and interesting people that you grew up with, all the things that they left you and the things, some of the values that you still hold today from both growing up with them, but also from playing the team sports like you mentioned. Is there anything that you've really changed your mind about that you, something you held to be true when you were younger or looked at in a certain way that you now feel very differently about?
Anthony
That's a really good question because I think it, a lot of things change over time. You know, playing sports, one of the things that you do a lot is you work really hard, you practise a lot, especially in the sport of baseball. I know it's not that popular now because it takes a long time, but one of the things that it was really instrumental for was you put in the hard work, your practise, you're always prepared, you're always ready, you always, if you get the ball, how do you actually respond and react? And doing that over and over and over again, really meant that you put in the hard work and it equates to success. But that's not necessarily how I view it anymore. I do believe that's an aspect of it. I do feel that purpose is a more important way to look at it. And hard work is an output of having purpose, meaning you'll work really hard because you really enjoy it and there's a passion to it. But the passion comes because you intrinsically have this feeling of purpose and whatever it might be, it doesn't even have to be anything of consequence.
It's just being purposeful about what you're doing and being present in it. The classic story, as a kid, I think I always wanted to get to the end. And obviously as we grow, we learn that it's more about the journey, not the end. So I'm finding I'm doing a lot more of that these days than I, and I kind of figured that out a little bit halfway through my career, but not early on. Early on it was go. Let's be as aggressive as we can and get to that final output. Hard work, hard work dramatically changed.
Ali
Interesting. I'm always interested in how the power of retrospection and the perspective you have given where you are now changes. How you see what's gone previously. So that point around you enjoying the journey, understanding that it is as much about the journey as the destination feels like something that maybe is a very healthy place to be in life. I also wish I knew more about baseball, by the way. I think there was also another CMO talking about baseball and I'm fascinated by it because it feels like the US version of cricket. Someone wants to try to explain the complexity and the nuances of it.
Anthony
It's a great team sport and it's one of those sports where it's not as active as you would normally think, probably just like cricket, right? You're in the field and you're waiting for the ball to come to you. It's a weird dichotomy where if you actually get the ball, you have to almost be perfect. And I say perfect in a sense that you have to make the play, you have to respond in a quick way. So it's a constant state of preparation, which is an interesting— as I get older, I actually have to unwind that mode of thinking of always trying to be prepared because it also puts you in a state that you might always not want to be so attentive and anxious all the time, right? So it's definitely aligned to cricket. Although cricket's a lot longer than baseball.
Ali
It is. Yeah. I mean, that takes a biscuit, doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Do you still watch baseball? Do you still interested in it?
Anthony
Occasionally. You know, I grew up playing sports at such a high level that all sports became an interest to me. And I was always, you know, I'm always fascinated in watching it and especially the big games. But I always was longing to want to be able to play it. And through my years, my many years, I've evolved from baseball to, you know, many things like swimming and golf and tennis and continued to just play as many different sports, but never overly competitive. It was more about, again, back to that personal journey of, you know, curious about the sport and wanted to do it to such a level of what it would take to play in national tennis tournaments or play in golf tournaments. I tried football for a while, but I didn't have the size to actually play football. But really, the idea of sport really became a fun aspect, not necessarily an overly competitive pursuit. Here in the States, you can tend to be overly competitive. I never actually got that far, so it's always been good.
Ali
Tennis is actually the sport that I was pretty competitive about, along with cricket. When I was younger and played in a lot of those sorts of tournaments you were talking about. But now I play the village 85-year-olds on a Sunday morning, and that's about as competitive as it gets. And I'm still very happy when I win. Just finally, to round off this first part of the conversation, if you sat down with your younger self, and you can choose which age, but a younger self, is there something you would love to say to that person? About advice about how their life is gonna go? Anything they would've benefited from back then that they never got to hear?
Anthony
Yeah, so I think this is a really interesting question. Where I am now, I think my questions would evolve with the decades and as my career has progressed. But where I am now, you don't have to have everything figured out. I, at an early age, always wanted to know what was next, where I was going, what was going on, how to And to be honest, you actually don't need to have any of that under control. Life actually takes you where you need to be. And it's amazing in how it all unfolds. It unfolds exactly the way it should be. So I would, you know, I kind of say, you know, kind of get out of the way of yourself. Just let it, let it happen the way it should be. The more you control it, the more I would say you disrupt it a little bit. So you're going to go off in the bumpy roads and come back. If you actually just let it happen, as you look back, you know, the grass is always greener, or the term that when you look back, it's sort of a beautiful way when you look back.
If you actually just let it happen, I actually think it all works out in your advantage. That would be my two cents. It's a really interesting spot, and we can talk about this at another time. Maybe I had a moment in my life where I ended up getting an illness that sidelined me for a little bit. And that sideline made me really contemplate a lot of things. I had a lot of introspection and it's just interesting on how you can live in both sides and you really find out once you have a very different outlook, life is a lot different. It's a lot more enjoyable. Perspective is everything.
Ali
Yeah, absolutely. That was another, unfortunately, another theme that seems to have come up this series as well is people who suffered serious illnesses and how that's impacted them. But often the feeling I get or they explicitly say is that actually that, Erin from IBM, for example, said that it doesn't define who she is today.
Anthony
I actually think it's a blessing. It's actually fortuitous. If you can't see the signs yourself, the universe will say, "Hey, you have to pay attention." but it's actually a good wake-up call.
Narrator
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Ali
So when you were relatively young, you were interested in finding essentially kind of a team sport for creativity. how did you first get into marketing then?
Anthony
So I graduated with a design degree. I really found that love because art was a part of what I was doing. And, you know, one of the early on stages of being a designer, you try different agencies, you work with different groups. And I think one of the things that became very apparent is that when you really engage with a client and a customer, there was, depending on where you are in the team and the kind of agency that you're working for, you're either being told what to do or you can help craft the idea. Around what's, what's the real goal. And I just found myself in a place that I was able to articulate my creative thoughts well to customers. And I found myself more and more leaning towards a strategy discussion about what we could do, about what was out there, how are things put together, what's really trending, which is a little bit different than what a classic designer would essentially do because a designer would be a little bit more focused and fixated on the actual executional components of it. And so I started to straddle both spaces, I guess, between actually being able to craft the strategy or ideate around the strategy with customers as well as doing the work.
And then as I started to work with various agencies and freelance with various agencies, I was very fortuitous at a relatively early age to get involved with design in the internet, the beginning of the internet. So I worked for some classical ad agencies and some branding agencies outta New York, and then I had moved down to DC and we joined a company that really was on the forefront of building websites. And at the time, these websites were the grey websites, the grey background sites where things like the browser and Netscape and, you know, all of those, earlier technologies, was still forming. It was a bit of the Wild West. And I actually thought that this was amazing place to be because it was a, it was a real intersection, which is very attuned to where we are today, to be honest. But it was at an intersection of that brands needed to explore an entirely new channel. They needed to find a way to message to the outside world in a completely new way. They needed to market themselves, brand themselves, create a level of commerce, you know, over in the, in the internet days.
So I quickly became involved with this idea of marketing at a technology level and this idea of driving traffic, building brands in a very unique way, communicating in a unique way. Which was very different from the traditional forms that I had been doing, which was typical outdoor broadcast. It was very one-directional. Now I was in a very bidirectional way of communication, not only with the customers, with the clients and the messaging and getting a response. So that was at a relatively early age, that was one way to kind of dive in pretty aggressively. And being fortunate to work with some very large brands, some Fortune 100, 500, 1, 10, but doing things that were really unprecedented was an amazing moment that really kind of propelled me into marketing in a very big way.
Ali
So in the spirit of history rhymes, never repeats, but often rhymes, what are then the parallels you see between that moment, that moment of significant change, and obviously where we are today with AI?
Anthony
I can tell you it is almost identical. And I'm not talking about from a pure technology standpoint. It is the feeling that, this might sound a little bit broad, but humanity is having with this unsure, untested, new evolutionary moment in time that will actually propel us. My career started in the internet, and in that moment, that was really the first time where people could be connected on a global basis in a way that had never existed. And when I say that, I mean AOL Instant Messenger at the time was all the rage, and it was really because people were communicating with people that they either didn't know about or they could make connections in a really unique way. They could get information that was happening on the other side of the And so, it was a really mind-boggling type of a scenario. But I remember people saying, "Oh, what's this e-commerce? I'm never going to put my credit card on the internet. That is never going to happen." And it's based out of fear because it's fear of the unknown. I saw it, and a lot of us saw it as really the Wild West.
It's a really opportunistic time. Where could this go? It's the future. And it felt very positive. It felt about we're going to move into something pretty dramatic. That moment is actually happening right now. It's such a speed and a pace that is— I've never experienced this before. And part of my other big transition was in the mobile era, obviously, when we first got that connectivity. We connect the world, then we connected every individual, right? And it's kind of like the next step. Now we have every connected individual who's around the world can have every answer that they need at the moment that they need it, which again, it's not a manual process. It's almost an intrinsic process. And where I see this going is how will that evolve humanity? And when you think about what we've just done, we've had to build all of the infrastructure over these years, these last 20, 30 years of being able to have this level of connectivity. We now can have technology actually work for us. And I think people are really starting to see that. It's not becoming hard. It's really funny. I'd say about 4 years ago, I was like, technology is just still hard.
It was still the same as what it was 20 years ago. And it's interesting how AI is now coming in and rapidly evolving that where hard isn't necessarily the word I would use today. It's now about how do we do the things that the technology was always in the way of us doing? And it's a really interesting question that people are facing is that now when I have every answer at my fingertips, whether it's a hallucination or not, but it'll get better over time. How do I actually proceed? Where is my value? Because some of my value has been based on just building and making and doing and collecting, where as we look forward, which is very much in the internet days, how is this going to change? And it's a little bit of the unknown. It's where everybody is in a fear state. I actually am very optimistic having done this a few times. I think this is a big moment for us just to evolve some of the things that we haven't been able to do— medicine, other and future technology. You know, we need to propel beyond what our know-how is, and we could use a very advanced tool.
I see AI as a tool, not as taking over, just like I saw the internet, just as you see mobile apps. Being a part of all of these, you tend to have a relationship with the technology to see how it can better what you're doing, not take over. And it's funny, the internet was a question back then is, oh, the internet's going to take over what we do. It's going to get rid of all of our jobs. And the reality is that it just evolves what we do.
Ali
Yeah, absolutely. Those sorts of conversations tend to seem fixed states of every other variable, which obviously is very rarely the case. And I agree. I think the world needs more optimists at the moment. And so I'm glad to hear that you are one of those optimists. Something I heard that I felt maybe isn't articulated regularly enough at the moment was something Mira Murati said, the ex-CTO of OpenAI, also now founder of Thinking Machines. And she said, she talked about agency, saying, you know, it's very easy if you paint this kind of dystopian or these utopian futures. One of the implicit problems with that is that people feel like it is predetermined. Rather than recognising exactly what you were saying. They have real agency over what happens next. It is in our hands to do what it is that we want to do with these technologies as they come along. So I think that for me is something that is sometimes missing from the debate, this sense of an abstract thing happening in a predetermined manner versus we have this opportunity in front of us to use this technology, this tool, as you said, in the way that we see to be most exciting.
Anthony
And I couldn't put a finer point on that. I would say that there is one difference from the early days of that monumental internet change to now. Back then, everybody could say they didn't know what was gonna happen and they all jumped on board. It's funny with the AI era, we have a lot of markets and the street and, you know, maybe some folks saying they already know what's gonna happen and it's setting the tone for how expectations are set for organisations and brands. But then You see them walking back a couple of months later saying, "Well, I'm actually not sure exactly where this is going to go." And I find that really interesting. I think because people have gone through this evolutionary state with some of these other moments in time, they feel as though they understand where it's going to happen. And I'm actually really excited that we don't know where it's going to go. And to your point of agency, we do have that method to craft it, to control what's actually there. To build what's next. What do we actually need? If we ask the question of what do we need versus what is somebody telling us we should be doing, I really think that we'd get to a very different outcome.
And, you know, we're starting to see that within our own organisation, working with customers, not only inside our organisation, but working with customers, that AI is going to evolve how we progress through corporate America, right? And it's going to provide a very different output than I think what people naturally think. And we're starting to uncover where that's really going to start to go. And we just announced a partnership with Anthropic, and their view of where the technology is going is very different. So it's really interesting to see how even the models and the owners and the leaders are bifurcating into slightly different directions and how it's going to evolve. So I actually think that's great because I think that shows us a broader view than everybody going in the same direction and it being dictated.
Ali
Absolutely. And actually, that brings us on to your current organisation, obviously DXC. So just could you tell me briefly a little bit about DXC and then also the role of marketing at DXC?
Anthony
Yeah, so DXC is what was classically called the IT services organisation, which today we've really evolved it to more of an enterprise technology and innovation partner, more specifically for the AI era. So it's a dramatic change for us. When we talk about, you know, enterprise technology, we're really talking about building, crafting, innovating around all aspects of the enterprise, as well as running and maintaining and operating whatever has been built, whatever has been crafted, the systems, the security workforce, the infrastructure for enterprises. DXC really sits at a really interesting spot. We actually cover every aspect of technology. I say that even outside of the enterprise. We've been doing it for over 50, 60 years right now because of our heritage. Our heritage is really built off of merging several different organisations that were taking care of very instrumental parts of technology. And actually, we've been a part of the mainframe, we've been a part of the internet and building it. We've been a part of mobile, we've been a part of large transformations in cloud. I mean, the companies that we've come from really were at the forefront of building a lot of those. So for us, we love this moment in time.
We're, we're very good at the complex challenges that we're, that we're faced in technology. And this moment is very complex. We're a global organisation. We're in 70 countries around the world. Our competitors are who you would classically think they would be at the IT services landscape, the Accentures, the Wipro, the Cognizant, and some of the other large technology organisations. One thing I would say about DXC, and everybody actually probably utilises some of the work that we do, we help organisations like United and American Airlines and their flight systems. We have the customer experience in getting tickets and flying abroad and going through airports. We really have and deal with mission-critical technologies that just cannot fail for a lot of global organisations around the world. So we're the largest company you've never heard of is the way that we like to talk about ourselves.
Ali
Yeah, very good. And you mentioned earlier the behaviour of the street. I'm not putting words into your mouth here. This is more my opinion. But I think their attitude towards AI and what's going has been somewhat immature, at least a little bit skittish. And I happen to know that DXC Marketing plays perhaps more of a role in investor relations than might happen at some other businesses. So tell me a little bit about how marketing came to play a role like that and what it means for how you show up.
Anthony
Yeah, so I think this is, like I said, this is the interesting moment in time for technology. Our space is just dramatically changing and it's one of those that I've been a part of for several iterations now as technology evolves. And our CEO and I worked together in the early days, especially in the internet days. That internet company I was mentioning was a company that he had started. And I recently joined the organisation and became the CMO. And really the reason why was because of that heritage. I had my own agency. I was a part of building brands, being in an unknown state. Having to look at building a marketing organisation as well as a communications organisation in a very unique time in technology where a lot is unplanned. It's not what we would call cookie cutter. It is about constantly evolving, finding the positioning of the company. Where does it sit in this uncertain time? How does the culture of the company evolve and change? How do we move an organisation from one view and perspective that it's had for many years into an unknown, untested, and forward-looking? So my background is very entrepreneurial.
It has been very much about building teams to move in a direction that can embrace that moment and look at it in an opportunistic way. And so where marketing now plays, marketing and communication plays a role is we are at the centre of everything that DXC is doing and helping transform everything about the company: culture, offerings, go-to-market strategies, demand generation, AI story. Our communications team, who's extremely talented, actually is helping craft the message around where we're really going. What is the narrative around AI? And we've been really fortunate in developing that message where we don't look at AI as a thing. We don't look at AI as a technology or something that you buy and you kind of bolt on. This is about an era. It's an ever-evolving era. You have to be fluid with it. You have to have a way of working. We're developing blueprints and frameworks for the organisation so that they can put it into their daily lives and then implement this for our customers. So when we look at things like Investor Day, which is really kind of integrating DXC into one organisation globally, then as we start to look at our new messaging, our new go-to-market strategy, we're redeploying and reimagining everything that we do in a more AI-forward and AI-first approach.
That is a lot of work in a small period of time. And actually, just to kind of put that finer point on that, we've relaunched a brand. We've developed a brand index that measures our brand over time in various channels. And we are developing this new message, this new story and positioning. And we've done this over the last 8 months. If I could tell you that, you know, in our organisation is about 200+ strong in a global way across every aspect of DXC. To move an organisation to do that from scratch over 8 months, that's kind of an unheard of moving at speed, and AI is allowing us to do that. And I can tell you more about how the organisation is really embracing that. But we are at the centre. Now, that doesn't mean that the previous marketing organisations were different or weren't embracing it. It's just a very different time. I just happen to have that experience that the CEO really thought that this was a good moment that I can come in and start to move this in a very different direction. It just happened to line up with all the things that I've been doing over my career.
Ali
What I'd love to hear then is maybe just one or two specific examples perhaps of how the team is embracing AI or how it's changing how you're thinking about setting up the team or something that the kind of people can get their teeth into, if that's okay.
Anthony
I think one of the things that— a significant change for us in, M&C, as we call ourselves, Marketing Communications, was that we had to operate on a full scale of both marketing and communications working and facilitating an end goal, which would be revenue. And when you think about that's the classic, well, of course that's marketing, let's do demand gen. However, to move at pace and at speed now, working and having dependencies external within the organisation really doesn't allow you to move at the pace and speed. So we had to find a very different type of organisation. And so I aligned the organisation up like you would think of an agency and we are now servicing all the lines of business and all the constituents in the company with 5 different vertical groups, right? Demand gen, strategy, communications, brand and experience sponsorship. And then we have a physical creative studio in-house. We took everybody and we sort of aligned it in a way that I can have those 5 verticals work horizontally as one team throughout our entire global organisation. Now, why is that so significantly different? Well, that is how most agencies work for customers that can deliver upon many clients simultaneously.
And we're really focused on delivering project-based and external. Now, our organisation wasn't traditionally working in that facet. They would rather work with an outside organisation heavily in one of those verticals versus others. The second part was now, which is where we're at, is once we've got that working as one cohesive team, right? So I'm bringing global team to global projects, very different before siloed. We are now layering it in AI. So each one of those verticals, are utilising AI to not only build skills, agents, workflows, processes for what they do to move faster, but we're actually producing outputs through AI horizontally across those teams. So the systems that each of those 5 verticals have to develop in order for us to work together as one team globally so that we're consistent on a global basis. We're plugging in and utilising. We do, we have a lot of different levels of AI within our organisation. We've rolled out things like Amazon Q on a global basis. We have our cloud partnerships. We are using many different platforms for generative AI activities where we almost use every GenAI model possible. We have our own platforms that we've built internally.
And essentially, we have a completely different way of working. And we're actually inside our organisation, we are our IT department. So, you know, one of the things that I feel very fortuitous in doing when we talk about where marketing sits is I work with two very distinct organisations. I work with our IT organisation who is managing all of our AI infrastructure and is very forward thinking about that. But I also work with our other organisation called LabX, and LabX is our, what we would consider our AI native incubator, where we're building platforms not only for our customers, but really on the forefront of where we think AI is headed. And what I mean by that is we're building platforms where how you engage with AI, how you work with it, how you make it more productive for cross-functional teams so you can get an output in what your function is, so culture and people, finance, sales, marketing, how do you actually build those systems? What we're finding and what we're really seeing is very new ways of interaction, very new ways in which you engage with AI. And we're actually part of building that, right?
So I'm now experiencing what our customers are looking for, crafting it for us, helping our teams are our customer zero for that as well, but then we're actually utilising it and using it in-house. So it's very much part of our lives. And I can tell you that when you think about teams are producing GenAI, let's just use the classical where I started making videos, making movies, making commercials. I would be a part of a team of 100. You would be working over months and years. Now I'm working with a team that's a large team of 3 crafting the same type of execution, that same 30-minute videos, 30-minute content-generated type capabilities at such a high executional level that even as when I owned my own agency would still require many different in many different facets. Does that mean that I believe AI is the future? What it's actually doing is taking skilled individuals and allowing them to produce at such a fidelity that we've never had before. I don't think it's replacing, but it is changing what it is. You still need experience, you still need the know-how. And for myself, being a part of that in the early ages and actually being a part of this now, I can inject my own knowledge into it where Working in that way is a very different way of working.
So we are doing that all in-house. Now, that's not typical for most organisations in IT, but I thought it was extremely important for us to not only embed ourselves with what technology our customers are doing, but if we didn't learn, and our CEO is very much a big proponent of this as well, this is why we actually work together. You have to utilise the technology You have to understand it. You have to embrace it. You have to get into the details of it. I'm writing my own agents. I'm involved with developing some of the generative AI work and developing my own messaging. And I'm a part of it. And unless you actually experience it, you can't actually develop a good position for it or a good message for it or know how to actually work for it. So it's a part of our daily routine in our daily lives. And like I said, In eight months, that none of what we've just actually delivered as an organisation could have been possible without us embracing it that way.
Ali
And I love that answer, and I could speak to you about it for hours more as well. But just briefly, one of the things I loved about it was it touched on some, I think, the themes that are just so important. So the interface with technology, interface between different things, different parts of the business. Context, obviously the importance of context is not something we're going to stop hearing about for the next 5 years. Is probably the word of the year. Coordination, again, I think, which is just so utterly critical in making, capturing the most possible value from this. But also you touched on something else, which is the underlying challenge here. As I often say, you know, the big challenge and the thing that CMOs almost need to think about that isn't just AI, it's AI is part of this move from operating in a chaotic environment to creating something that is coherent. And AI is obviously a massive part of that, is impacting the nature of the environment, is impacting what you can do to create coherence. But actually, that is kind of the overall goal rather than just AI as a goal in itself.
So I love that answer. And I could happily speak to you about it for another 5 hours, maybe. I hope we get the chance to do it at some point. But now, I know we've only got a couple of minutes left. So if it's okay, I'd love to push you to the quickfire round, if that's all right. So hard questions, short answers. So the first is complete the sentence: The qualities I look for in my next exceptional hire are—
Anthony
Yeah, this is easy. Curiosity, a good listener, somebody who can flourish with change, which is constant, and somebody who is brave. And brave— what I mean by brave is somebody who understands that change is a constant in what we do as a business, and they will embrace that, not be afraid of it, not be unsure, just try. You have to be able to try in what we're doing. It's a really important quality right now. Now I'm actually telling that to my son who graduated and said, this is exactly what I'm gonna be doing. And I said, well, if you don't have an open mind and think this way, because nobody has the real answers at the present moment, you're gonna need to think a little differently in this scenario.
Ali
I completely agree. And I love how often curiosity comes up at the moment in the answer to that. So I often say the problems that worry me, the only ones that really worry me are the ones I can't see. So I try to be open with my team about any challenges I have, to create a space where they're comfortable doing the same. In the spirit of that psychological safety, what's the mistake that you've made in the past couple of weeks?
Anthony
The one thing that I think, because we move at such a speed and such a pace and we want to make sure that we capture everything, to me, the thing that I have to rely upon more is that my team has it. There's times where I'm involved in trying to make sure that I'm involved in a lot, And honestly, the mistake is not delegating more to my team. My team is pretty awesome. And at the moment, when you're involved, it's sort of like what I was saying earlier on. If you're trying to control the situation and not let it happen, it tends to be a bit bumpy. And the more I keep to myself or I try to run, do all these things without bringing in the team, and It's kind of a really interesting dichotomy right now. In order to move at pace, you need more people than less. You can't actually do it yourself. There's too much. And so that would be one thing that I would immediately do. And it's really funny. I chat with my team often and regularly. We're on calls all day long. And as open as we can be is the success that we're going to have.
The more people work independently and not kind of ask for help, the more stuff becomes really bottled up. And right now you have to be just open.
Ali
I agree. Thank you. And thank you for sharing so generously. Thirdly, so what is something that most people get wrong about you?
Anthony
So my upbringing is a lot about listening. And I think because I'm in the position that I'm in, I think people think I prefer to be the one presenting out in front, directing and guiding, but I actually like to observe. I like to listen. I think one of the qualities of success in not only a position I'm in, but in marketing as a whole, is being able to communicate. And you really can't communicate effectively unless you truly understand. And understanding requires listening. And listening isn't just the words, it really is the underlying components to what's actually being said. So I'm very much a listener, and I'm— and as a young kid, I was very quiet. But I think in my role, I'm propelled into this position where sometimes you have to be out in front and being up there. I enjoy that, but I love it being listening.
Ali
And I love that answer and I wholeheartedly agree as well. Okay, then in 3 words, what are the 3 technologies you're most excited about over the next 10 years?
Anthony
Well, clearly there's the one that's AI. I think quantum is gonna be an interesting one. Interesting one where you really apply a level of speed. And then I think the only other piece I'm most excited about— we talked about it already— is how we engage with technology is going to radically change. And that engagement, that technology, I believe we're just going to get down to a much more vocal way of communicating, and things will start to happen rather than what we've been What are you doing? I think that's gonna be the significant change that the world is gonna embrace or maybe have difficulty with.
Ali
Excellent answer again. And finally, what's one piece of advice or one idea either about marketing or about life in general that you keep coming back to?
Anthony
Yeah, it's that communication. I've used it my entire life where I've seen most challenges that you have in relationships or in business or just in what you do day in and day out is being able to communicate well. And communicating well doesn't mean that you talk a lot. It just means that you're hearing what's actually being said and you're setting expectations properly with people. And a lot of that happens in relationships, right? But a lot of things can be cleared up. Look at what's going on in the world right now. A lot of things can be cleared up with just a proper talk. Sometimes a talk is probably the best thing to do. So that has not served me wrong in my life. I just happen to be in the communications business. But ultimately though, I think that's also been part of my success is listening to what people want and then being able to give them what they believe they see, what they need, and understanding what an audience wants and needs. And that's That's just not necessarily the same thing.
Ali
That is a great place to leave it. Thank you, Anthony. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Anthony
Ali, thank you very much. This has been a fantastic moment. Thank you.
