Eric Porres

Large enterprise CMOs are facing a critical challenge: Drive AI transformation while doing right by the teams that built your organization. The C-suite wants AI transformation yesterday. Their teams—many with decades of institutional knowledge—are skeptical, exhausted, or both. Here's what I keep hearing: "I know we need to move fast. But I can't just blow up my team in the process." These leaders aren't stuck because they don't understand AI. They're stuck because they understand people. They need a plan for that first and foremost when the org gets to a certain size. They know that legacy expertise is still valuable and long-tenured employees deserve honesty about what's coming, not false promises. Transformation that breaks trust isn't really transformation—it's just chaos with better tech. This is the real leadership challenge of AI transformation - navigating the human complexity of change in organizations where relationships, tenure, and culture run deep.

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TrueTrends from Sila's consumer insights unit is a semantic consumer intelligence platform that allows market researchers and marketers to detect trends before they happen. Keyword search is a thing of the past - with multi-category AI, computer vision (image+video - audio coming soon) and semantic understanding powered by LARA, you get an unparalleled vision of what consumers actually want, desire, who they are and their motivations. More importantly, it actively solves challenges and directs R&D. It understands your intent as much as theirs. I think we've all been burned by social listening tools driven by keywords and having to construct boolean operators, and as a result just making outcomes full of biases and frankly untrustworthy with the amount of junk. That's why we've re-written the script on what different data sources, including social, can bring to market research in any language (not just 22 dialects of Arabic). The difference? 118% better content discovery because we understand meaning, not just mentions. More than a marketing tool, this is a way to replace costly trend agencies, test concepts with real behavioral data (not panels of 20 people), and predict outcomes that researchers and marketers can actually trust. Real-time intelligence instead of quarterly reports. A groundbreaking piece of kit the Sila | صلة market research and tech team has worked on tirelessly to cut through the noise, and I've got to say as a completely biased observer, an amazing tool that's already replacing traditional research methods at enterprise level across MENA. More details: https://lnkd.in/d8RFGdfp Reach out if you'd like a demo - I'll show you true trend semantic intelligence vs keyword bingo.

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As The Wall Street Journal highlights, the AI boom is driving massive infrastructure demands—and rising bills. But for most enterprises, the biggest risk isn’t energy—it’s hidden inefficiencies. Idle GPU clusters. Unused dev workspaces. Redundant datasets. Left unchecked, they drain budgets and stall progress. Leaders are embedding FinOps into their MLOps stack, linking cost KPIs to business outcomes and automating cost governance. The result? Predictability, compliance, and scale without surprise invoices. Read the WSJ article: https://gag.gl/BONzxn #EnterpriseAI #AIFinOps #HybridCloud #AIGovernance

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B2B marketers think they know the market.... but most are just talking to sales. Was great to have Chris Gaebler - longtime CMO at NETSCOUT, Kaspersky, Guardicore, and Protegrity - on the pod. He lands a point that shouldn’t be controversial, but somehow is. Consumer companies obsess over market research. B2B marketing teams? Too often, they skip it entirely. Loved this take and genuinely found myself head nodding to over the course of our 45 minutes together. Listen to the full episode here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gq9QMZgQ

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62% of U.S. adults didn't buy anything online until 2020. That stat from Forrester still blows my mind. Not because it was surprising at the time. But because of what it tells us about adoption curves. Nick Paladino and I re-released our most downloaded episode of the past year on The Frictionless Experience this week. It's a conversation with Jean-Louis Hé from YSL Beauty that we originally published in April 2024. We were talking about crypto and NFTs as "emerging tech" back then. Now AI has completely taken over that conversation. Jean-Louis made a point that aged really well. The friction to buy crypto is brutal. Wallets, seed phrases, scam airdrops, obscure coins on websites you're not sure are real. Meanwhile, our banking system removed all that friction over decades. AI doesn't have the same problem. It's accessible. You can use it today without creating a wallet or converting dollars to something else. That proximity to adoption might be the whole ballgame. Listening back, I'm struck by how fast this industry moves. Two years ago we were asking "will blockchain change everything?"  Now we're asking the same question about AI. What will we be asking two years from now?

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Just read a piece on The Wall Street Journal by Katie Deighton on how companies are desperately seeking “storytellers”, and it tracks with what I’m seeing everywhere. As earned media shrinks and trust gets harder to win (especially with all that AI slop), brands are hiring people who can shape a narrative across channels. At Digital Brew, we’ve learned something simple: 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿. The brands that break through usually have: - a real human POV - a conflict worth solving - proof (not hype) - a consistent message across every touchpoint What’s the best brand story you’ve seen this year? #Storytelling #BrandStrategy #ContentMarketing #VideoMarketing #DigitalBrew #B2BMarketing

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Nobody is telling the truth about how disruptive this is going to be. Maybe since I’m ‘unaffiliated’ for now, I can. 👀 AI isn’t just coming for workflows. It’s coming for the foundations of knowledge work — and for the identities built on it. For CMOs and marketing leaders, this hits hard. For years, we’ve found meaning in our playbooks and how we execute. Now, much of that is being automated, flattened, or redefined in real time. And here’s the part we’re not talking about enough: This isn’t just a professional disruption. It’s a personal one. To survive it — let alone lead through it and flourish — we can’t keep pushing at the same velocity, hoping to outrun the change. We need to slow down. Reground. Rebuild. That means investing differently: Mind – Slowing down to build emotional resilience in a time of accelerated everything. Learning to lead from clarity, not reaction. Body – Remembering we’re not brains on a stick. Stewarding our embodied experience through sleep, movement, and nourishment — so we can actually sustain the work. Soul – Recognizing that our sense of identity is often wrapped up in our work — and that AI will inevitably challenge how we define purpose and value. This season demands we examine those foundations, and do so in community, not isolation. This is the real work of leadership in the Intelligence Age. Not just learning to prompt better. But learning to stay human — when everything else is speeding up.

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Achieving seamless connection across brand storytelling, data, and business outcomes remains more aspiration than achievement. Marketers face: - Complex buyers that don't take linear journeys - Disconnected data that stops short of insight - Pressures for instant ROI that conflict with long-term brand equity This is a moving target that shifts with changes in technology, privacy and buyer behavior. However, the pursuit of this goal holds value. It challenges us. Even if we never fully achieve it, the journey itself underscores that #marketing is a discipline that blends both science and art. Check out this FastCompany article: https://lnkd.in/e6Cn8-xn

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The best CMOs are efficient and bold. “If we drive efficiency in the attributable, we earn the right to experiment in the un-attributable.” SCREAM IT FROM THE BACK. I had the opportunity to listen in on a panel discussion between Ray Rike, 🌱 Allison Munro, and Jon Miller, who discussed research from 323 companies around budgeting and spend at Pavilion's CMO Summit. And if you are in a room with Allison and Jon, you listen. And the data was loud and clear: Marketing budgets are up. Not down. Not flat but up by 1% of revenue on average and almost 10% in absolute dollars. Yes, even in this “do more with less” era. Growth = Budget >>> The faster you grow, the more budget you get. Companies growing over 30%? Median marketing budget is 15% of revenue. (That’s double the average.) People vs Programs vs AI >>> Budgets are shifting from people to programs. And AI is doubling its share of spend, from 4% to 8% YOY. AI isn’t a line item. It’s a headcount replacement. Events are making a comeback. As ACV increases, event spend also rises. Demand gen spend goes down. Why? Because no one attributes brand until it's lost. Want to protect brand? Get headcount? Increase programs? Then model your budget, benchmark it, and tell the story before the CFO asks.

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Thanks TechRadar Pro for spotlighting Benjamin Barrier's insights on navigating the AI-powered web. His core message is clear and powerful: organizations must move beyond identity-based detection and lean into intent-based cybersecurity. In a world where traffic is made up of human and bot identities, knowing WHY traffic interacts with your platform is paramount. He outlined that: 🤯 DataDome saw nearly one billion requests from OpenAI-identified crawlers per month last quarter 💡 To succeed, teams must: ⏩ Reaudit and reframe how they think about non-browser traffic. ⏩ Replace static rules with dynamic, context-aware defenses. ⏩ Define consistent access policies for AI agents—which roles are welcome, under what conditions. https://lnkd.in/gfWmV-k6

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One of the boldest product launches in tech started with a fake protest. February 22, 2000. Protestors marched outside the Siebel User Conference in San Francisco, chanting for the "End of Software." Cameras from Channel 22 rushed in to cover the chaos. Except none of it was real. The protestors were actors. The news crew was fake. And the message? Completely intentional. It was guerrilla marketing pulled off by a then-little-known startup called Salesforce. Their idea: CRM should live on the internet, not in bulky on-prem installs. Back then, it was radical. The market was ruled by legacy giants with complex, expensive systems. Salesforce didn't have deep features or broad credibility. But they had clarity. They knew people weren't just buying software. They were buying simplicity. Speed. Freedom from the mess of enterprise sprawl. The protest worked. It cut through noise. It told a story people instantly understood. That's the power of brand storytelling in B2B. When the product is abstract and the value is invisible, the story is the bridge. Is your brand just explaining a product? Or is it showing customers the future they actually want?

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