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Isabelle Dumont

CMO

DeNexus

play_circle_outline AI's impact on CMO roles and operations

play_circle_outline Bridging Marketing Data Tools with Cybersecurity: The Human Element in Directing AI

play_circle_outline The balance between creating and solving market needs in marketing

play_circle_outline Digital twin concept for simulating marketing campaigns

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Isabelle Dumont, DeNexus

Isabelle Dumont

CMO DeNexus

Isabelle Dumont, chief marketing officer of DeNexus, joins the CMO Leaders Series Summit with theCUBE to discuss the impact of Artificial Intelligence on marketing. In this insightful conversation, hosted by John Furrier with contributions from experts at theCUBE, Dumont shares her unique perspective on the evolving role of AI in the marketing industry. With a background in computer science, Dumont explains the dual mindset marketers have towards embracing technology and what it means for the future of marketing leadership.

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What is the importance of embracing AI for CMOs and how can it help them stay competitive in the future? add

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What are some considerations when launching a product or service in a new market or segment? add

to exploring how we can use digital twins in marketing campaigns. add

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Isabelle Dumont, DeNexus

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>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here in our Palo Alto Studio for the CMO Leaders Series Summit with theCUBE and the NYC Wired community. We got Isabelle Dumont here, the CMO of DeNexus. Isabelle, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for coming in.

>> Thank you, John for having me.

>> So we are having a CMO Summit. It's a mix of industry participants, they're all pretty much CMOs. We had a few CEOs come in from startups, but they don't have a CMO and some technical people on the AI infrastructure side. But for the most part, it's been about how AI is impacting the role of the CMO, their operations, their teams, how they do business, and how they should be thinking about their job in the future. So it's been really kind of fun, but it's also at the beginning of what we're going to start opening up the conversation around what's the best mechanism, the best craft, the art and science of marketing with AI as it comes in to help people, reduces efficient cost, makes more people more efficient, more productive. So what's your view as a CMO and seeing what the waves of innovation have been and where it's going, what's your view on how AI could help CMO?

>> Yeah, I think you're going to find two different types of marketing people out there. You're going to find the ones that are very oriented towards technology. I'm one of those. I've graduated in computer science way back when, and they're going to naturally try to go pretty deep with the technology. And then you're going to have probably the majority of people looking at AI and questioning whether it's going to take over their job. And it's certainly that element of fear. What I try to advise CMO to, it's like you have to embrace AI. Company that do not start to use it, two, three years from now they're going to be so far behind in efficiency and the ability to be creative and do new things, that they're not going to be competitive anymore. So where do you start? The question is where do you start with people, with marketer who are a little bit pushing back on AI? I think there's really some basic things you can do. ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever, all the basic gen AI where you can start to have them help you generate content, automate some tasks. I've used it, I went to a conference and I wanted to download the list of people who are speaking at the conference and don't type that manually. Just ask gen AI to put it for you in the spreadsheet and they do that very, very well. So all these tasks that can be automated with AI, I think are quite way to start for marketing teams.

>> It's been a theme for the past two days. We're on our third day. We'll do a few more interviews this week, but we're going to look at the three days and compile the trends or the conversation similarities. One theme that's coming out is this idea that yes, the game is changing, but it's still the same game. You're marketing to a customer, a value proposition. They like it, they pay you, you service them, you keep them. And then the journey's just simple. I mean, it sounds so easy. It's like sports, just score a goal. It's so easy. It's not, but people get caught in things they fall in love with. The MarTech stack, my performance marketing techniques and then ROI dashboards. And sometimes you're looking at the bark of the tree, not the forest.

>> I'm so glad you mentioned that because of course we're all demanded to produce some results and do some produce metrics and measurements. However, I think when you're in marketing, you need to go back to the first principle, which is you need to know your audience. You need to know who's going to buy your company's product and how they go through that journey, including who's going to influence them, where they're going to get their information? And that's always where you need to start because you need to cross paths with them. And it could be online, it could be conferences, it could be a variety of things. But if you don't have that in place and you don't understand that, AI is not going to do anything that good for you. AI could help you actually get better at that.

>> So Isabelle, I want to ask you because you have technology degrees, you have a master's in computer science and artificial intelligence from France. We can tell you're French, congratulations. AI back in the day was now, it was not as much compute available to exercise some of the AI, but the concepts of neural networks, symbolic systems, these were things that were fun and relevant. Now, with all the compute, the first wave of leaders have been, "It's been around forever, but now we can actually do something with it." And now we're at the next level, which is just starting to see the new things come out of traditional AI. So I have to ask you as a technical person, as marketing becomes more data-driven or data-enabled or infused with data, it's not just data-driven, it's all data. But now you have different data structures, graph databases, neural networks, vector embeds, all these new things are feeding new capabilities. How do you look at this as someone who has seen that the technology now come full mainstream?

>> I think one of the advantage for marketing is as a function, we're probably not going to use the underlying technology related to AI directly. We'll use it through application that are built specifically for marketing. Yes, you look at gen AI and you can get quite sophisticated in asking the right question through prompts. But I think for other part of AI, analyzing data and helping creating effective campaigns, you're going to find that there's going to be two wrapped up around the neural networks or other technology that will give you a much better interface as a marketer to work with those AI tools.

>> You have a background in security. Your current CMO role is in cyber, cybersecurity, one word. We have a big argument about one word or two words, but that's always been very tactical. Blue team, red team, threats, managing endpoints, all the platform and the tools, a lot of things. It has a lot of the advanced tool sprawl, platform sprawl. A lot of data is involved, multiple tech vectors. There's a lot of similarities, at least from my standpoint, between security data interactions with in case the adversary, in this case, and protecting the jewels. With customers, I'm not saying the customers, the adversary in this case is flipped. I see marketing looking a lot like cybersecurity in the sense of plethora of tools, a lot more active data, except you're going after the customer. Okay. So do you agree? Do you like that metaphor? It's kind of weak maybe, but I'm seeing more stuff coming down the road in marketing that's less, build this super platform like a MarTech stack, but getting much more command and control, more market intelligence, more context. What do you think about that?

>> You have something in there. I think in terms of targeting and understanding how to be successful. So for cyber would be the threat actor being successful with a cyber attack. For marketing would be like how do we pique the interest of CISO or the audience we're going after? So I think from a starting point, it's a good analogy. I think it starts with, it stops with the long-term game. I think threat actors are going to want to do an attack, get what they want, and then they disappear.

>> It's transactional. It's as transactional as you can get.

>> Very transactional. While when you try to promote your product to specific audience, you're going to have to go after it again and again. I mean, there's the old statistic for marketers that you need to touch people at least seven times. It's probably 10 times nowadays before they start to engage with you. So it's a long-term game, which I think AI can help quite a bit, keep people on track in terms of, hey, it's not about preparing one campaign. It's about preparing two, three, five, 10 to go after a specific set of people.

>> One thing that's come up, we had an interview on the first day with Bruce Cleveland. He wrote a book called The Traction Gap, and he used to work back in the day, Oracle Siebel, he's kind of retired now. He's writing books and doing investing. But he has a concept called market engineering where you can actually engineer the market and as a marketer, that's a thing you should think about. And he says he's less about product market fit, more market product fit. And I'm like, "Well, that's interesting." So what's your reaction to that? Because now with AI you have all these slices of opportunities. You can slice things and dice things very narrowly, but yet still execute it, potentially with agents.

>> Yeah, it's a difference between there's a need in the market and you solve it versus let's create a need in the market. And I think it's a balance between the two. I've mostly been working on new technologies, new segment, and you have to drive the market in that case. You have to educate. They might not even be aware of the problem they have or they might be aware, but they don't know a solution exists. So you have to establish all those connection between the market and the needs. And AI can help you go through those various steps. If you ask gen AI right now, they're very good at actually giving you recipes on how to best do this campaign or what are the multiple steps to achieve a certain goal, like bringing people to conferences or so on. You can ask them, they give you really good recipe.

>> Then that's going to aid the human in the loop.

>> Exactly. It simplifies everything. It makes it faster. One of the thing a little bit on the fence is like does it trains us to use less and less of our brain power? That's an interesting question. And be less creative because it does it for us? I think there's still going to be plenty of room for people to be innovative.

>> We were using an example yesterday about car racing and the new engines come out in context of the MarTech stack. It's an engine, but it has to go into the car. The car needs new tires. You have a modern race car versus the old, say, the older cars, but the driver drives it. So the question is, what's the role of the human in the car? Formula One's super hot right now in tech. And computer simulation, digital twins are all used to prepare the car for it. So you're starting to see CMOs starting to think a little bit like, "Okay, I got to have an engine, but ultimately the team drives, we drive this."

>> Yeah, absolutely. I look at AI, at the end of the day, it's 011 out there in the machine, but you have to direct it to do what you want it to do. It can expand a little bit out of that, but at the end of the day, the human is pretty much setting the guardrails. I like what you mentioned about digital twin because you can pretty much take anything that we're doing right now as human or any system and replicate it with a virtual engine that works very well with AI, uses a lot of the real world data and then do simulation to see what happens. And I don't know, I've not seen that apply to marketing per se. I mean, this is one of the things that DeNexus does for industry or sites. We actually replicate the environment and run cyber simulation to see how an attack could be successful. So it's another type of use of AI, but I've not seen that, something similar done for marketing.

>> I mean, digital twin concepts started in manufacturing, but its goal was to what? Simulate the factory to make the efficiency, no defects on manufacturing. Okay, so do this to make that better. So can you create a digital twin on prepping campaigns?

>> Absolutely.

>> We had one CMO said she did that on testing her ICP.

>> Absolutely.

>> And messaging.

>> Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing more application doing that.

>> Talk about your role at DeNexus as CMO. You mentioned you're doing some digital twins, you're using data, first of all, explain what you guys do as a company and then what are you looking at? Because cyber is a very competitive market, very relevant. I mean, it's above the line now. It's boardroom, it's top visibility on all companies and no one wants a breach. But if things happen-

>> So things happen, and unfortunately things will continue to happen. So I've been in security for a decade, 12 years now, and it has been a very technical field. However, what I think what's missing right now is helping the C-level, the C-suite, understand how much their company is at risk because of cyber incidents. Out there, we see a lot of CISO that understand their company's going to be targeted, but they don't know whether they spend enough in cyber security, whether they spend too much and whether they spend in the right place. So that's exactly what DeNexus does for industrial environments like manufacturing, transportation. We also work a lot now with data center facilities that have a lot of connected equipment to make the data center function and we replicate their environment and evaluate how much the cyber attack could be successful and then runs a lot of simulation to tell them how much it could cost the company if the attack would be successful.

>> So you oversee global, the global program. So that's brand.

>> Yeah, that's brand.

>> I mean, you talk about marketing, sales always will fail if the customer doesn't know who you are.

>> I was talking, so yesterday-

>> Do you agree?

>> Exactly. If you sell, the first question to ask a salesperson is, "Who's the company? What do you do?" I think marketing fails. So I think to me, that's the number one thing that marketing needs to address. So awareness, whether it's thought leadership, getting your name out there is really, really important and doing what we're doing here, so I really appreciate that. If you don't do that, it's going to be very costly for you to do lead generation and sales

>> And the costs. Sales costs are worthless, because you're fighting a self-inflicted wound.

>> Yes. You're starting from the get-go, you're starting in a defensive position that your potential customer doesn't know who you are and doesn't have a positive opinion about you. Marketing is there to actually completely change the game.

>> Yeah. Talk about demand generation. What are some of the things you're seeing? I know you have a focus on and the way you're engineering things, high performance is probably something on your mind. Like, okay, you don't engineer something to be slower. No one engineers a slower system unless you need to. But in this case, real time is important. Speed, quality, the targeting, all that is now faster. How do you see demand generation and lead generation in your world with AI?

>> With AI, so I think it simplify and accelerate all the machinery that happens behind what a marketing and sales team needs to do. However, we need to keep in mind that people buy from people and we need to take the time to build relationships. And sometime this can happen really fast, sometime it's very slow. So I really see, if you think about a pyramid and a triangle, I see the sales and marketing interaction with the audience on top of it, but supported by a set of AI tools that automate and accelerate all the transactional work you need to do to get to a face-to-face discussion.

>> Final question for you. As you look at the horizon in your role as CMO, what are you excited about and what are you watching? Second part is what advice would you give other CMOs who are thinking about setting their agenda, their career, their teams for the future?

>> God, that's a big question. I think I'm personally really excited about AI becoming a reality. That's what I studied, and it was in lab work for years, it's been used. But I think now it's every time there's a disruption, I think it's exciting for marketing. It means we're going to have to, there's going to be new solutions to market. So I think by design makes it exciting. My advice to marketer out there, keep learning, never stop. Never, never stop. I've been in B2B software for close to 30 years, and every year I take classes, I learn from people. I seek items that I don't understand and learn from them or people who work differently for me. This is how you build a portfolio of knowledge that you can pretty much apply to a lot of different situations.

>> Yeah, and having that craft, and keep learning. Final question, I'll throw one more at you since it's just popped into my head. You mentioned the 30 year horizon. We're seeing AI now coming out of the lab and being used. What breakthroughs do you see potentially that could be possible now and maybe even in a few years that were almost impossible in the past because of budget, too big of a transformation project, time, energy, lack of skills on a team. You're starting to see things kind of break through. I'll give you an example to kind of kickstart this. Enterprise search was always a hard thing that companies couldn't get, A few companies tried, they were successful, but it was always such a slog, so hard, so difficult. And then now you've got Glean and others doing easy retrieval because now they can just abstract the databases away. That is now easier and it's out there. It's solved, pretty much solved, in my mind, only going to get better. As analogous to marketing, are there things you see that were just a wish list that would've cost more engineers, always got rejected on a project. What areas do you see, wow, if we could have done that now, what do you see?

>> So I'm going to mention three things. First, you talked about on enterprise search. I personally find that AI and gen AI right now is a lot much better at search than other search tools that have been in the market. So I think that's very positive outcome right now. But in terms of big things, healthcare has been revolutionized by AI and we are just getting started, the diagnostic and so on. But I think it has the opportunity to support doctor and the field whole of healthcare in much better ways. So that should be exciting for everybody. And then I'm going to go to the third one. I'm going to go to the cybersecurity side, which is what I think we're doing at DeNexus, which is the ability to create a digital twin of an environment and use that to really test how the attacks behave, the weakness, what needs to be done at much lower cost than doing it in the real environment is revolutionary for cyber. I think it has the opportunity to disrupt that field tremendously.

>> So much opportunity, moving the needle, the data is the key. And then efficiency and productivity.

>> Yeah, and cybersecurity is a place where there's a lot of data and it's produced by system. You just need to ingest it, normalize it, and make sense of it.

>> So the question that we always throw on Twitter pool is, does AI help the bad guys better or the good guys better? Or is the scales kind of coming together? How do you view that?

>> That's the nature of the cybersecurity field. You're always going to have that elevation of-

>> Asymmetrical.

>> Absolutely. I don't see that-

>> Well, I think we've been seeing that the good guys are getting leveled up a bit.

>> Yeah, right now. Yeah, right now with the new technology powered by AI.

>> The bad guys always get the advantage, because they can be wrong 1,000 times and right once.

>> Yeah, they just think-

>> The good guy's got to be wrong once.

>> Yeah.

>> I mean...

>> You're exactly right. The odds are not in favor of the good guys.

>> Scales are not in favor. Isabelle, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it's been quite a pleasure. Thanks for sharing.

>> Thank you, John.

>> Okay.

>> Pleasure meeting you.

>> This is the CMO Leaders Summit. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.