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Ami Badani

CMO

Arm

play_circle_outline Opportunities for breakthroughs in marketing with AI tools

play_circle_outline Intersection of CMO role with mission-critical functions like security

play_circle_outline AI Clusters and ARMs Revolutionizing Industries: Importance of Agile CMOs and Comms Evolution in Modern Marketing

play_circle_outline Excitement for strategic storytelling and impact as a CMO

play_circle_outline ARM's growth potential in AI-enabled devices and reinventing compute for AI

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Ami Badani, Arm

Ami Badani

CMO Arm

Ami Badani, chief marketing officer at ARM, joins theCUBE for an insightful discussion on the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in marketing. Interviewed by theCUBE's John Furrier, Badani shares her expertise on the intersection of strategy and storytelling in marketing, driven by the rapid advancements in AI. She delves into the unique position of ARM at the forefront of AI development, emphasizing its influence on various industry verticals from financial services to cybersecurity.

Key takeaways from the interview highlight the evol... Read more

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What potential benefits does AI offer for marketing organizations, particularly in terms of focusing on high value tasks and improving lower priority tasks? add

What are some ways in which the CMO role is intersecting with mission-critical business functions such as security and how is the brand narrative impacted by this shift? add

What is the sentiment analysis on the earnings from all the deep learning? add

What is the evolving role of the CMO in today's corporate environment? add

How many ARM devices do you expect to be AI enabled by 2025? add

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Ami Badani, Arm

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>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE here. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here, part of the CMO leaders, theCUBE, and NYSE, bringing down all the action. Ami is here, CMO of ARM, CUBE alumni. She's back. Great to see you. Love the leather jacket again. Good to see that look. Last time I think you were wearing a leather jacket here on theCUBE.

Ami Badani

>> Probably.

>> Thanks for coming on.

Ami Badani

>> Thanks.

>> I'm glad you came. I'm excited because we had last time you were on part of the AI infrastructure leader series. Now as the CMO, you're actually in the CMO role, so a bit more on point relative to what you do. But in general, you guys are really on the front end of all the action. You're seeing all the devices, processing, chip gains, software algorithms are all happening under the watch, and you guys are on that wave. CMO is a little bit different, and you do the day-to-day job. First question for you is, that as you look at the frame of the change that's going on, every vertical, so every job function, marketing, customer care, manufacturing. And every industry vertical, oil and gas, financial services, legal. Every single vertical, and then I would say persona, whatever you want to call it, job role. There's change where the domain expertise is there. That's a constant theme in the AI, besides all the horizontal scale, but domain expertise. Marketing, there's a lot of domain expertise in marketing. What do you see as the opportunities where disruptions and enablement in marketing? Because there's classic ways to do marketing, but now with the support accelerated of the change in computing, we now have faster ways to do things.

Ami Badani

>> Yeah. Like you mentioned, we've been blessed to have a front row seat into everything that's going on with AI and right in the middle of the action, which has been great. From an organizational perspective, specifically for marketing, I think one of the things that... Everyone in a company usually believes they can do marketing. I think what you really have to figure out is, what are the things that are going to move the needle? What are the low value tasks that basically take lower priority? And what are the activities you have to continue to stay in front of? I think what AI is going to do is really help us focus as a marketing organization on the high value added tasks that you can't automate away. And I think some of the lower priority tasks are going to be improved with AI. That's what I feel like the function of marketing will change quite dramatically. I talk a lot about how marketing is very much at the intersection of strategy and storytelling, and I think AI will really help drive a lot more of that and help the organization focus a lot on more of that, which is where we shine. Then all the other stuff will either be improved, automated away, or whatnot. It's really going to give the organization in general a lift. And we're excited from an ARM perspective, because of all the devices that we enable, which we believe eventually will have AI in the near term.

>> Plus the device is going to be doing inference on them.

Ami Badani

>> Right.

>> Doing all the data have to go there.

Ami Badani

>> Right.

>> Data has always been the value proposition for very obvious areas. Marketing, data-driven dashboards and analytics has been there.

Ami Badani

>> Right.

>> Cyber security is another vertical, but it's heavy tactical because breaches are happening. I'm starting to see, and I'd love to get your reaction on this, I'm starting to see the CMO role intersecting with this mission-critical business function. Like security. I'm not saying security directly, but what security is for a company has moved from below the line to board level conversation. Because if you get breached, it could be game over. It's an extinction event. Marketing, you're starting to see that move up to a peer role with stakeholders. Do you see structural alignment around how the brand narrative and what that impact is in the world? Because now you have accelerated discovery feeding other engines of data, so your narrative is now data too. What's your take on this? First of all, do you agree that structural change? And how would you do it?

Ami Badani

>> Yeah. No, no, no, absolutely. I think what folks don't realize is how data-driven marketing is. I come from an investment banking background turn marketer, and so I love data, I use it. I try to figure out, what are the ways that we can influence business? What are the drivers of success? But it's not about impressions. It's about, how does it actually drive either your market valuation, increased visibility leads to market valuation? Or does it help with top line, bottom line? We probably have the... As a marketing function in an organization, we probably have the breadth to really look at data in a different way than what we used to in the past. And generative AI is only going to get better. Then you look at peer class. And when we look at marketing, it's a lot more about the futures. And how are we going to market the future of where the company is going, so where is the puck going? And then, how are we going to measure success based on the futures? That's where I really believe that marketing has evolved and changed a lot over the years. It's a lot more of a strategic function than a tactical one as once probably used to be.

>> Would you see the CMO pairing... Compare programming, if you will. Align with the CFO or more CISO/CIO? What areas do you see the coalitions forming? Because I do see similar impact of brand narrative and future value of narrative.

Ami Badani

>> Yeah. I spend a lot of time with our CFO talking a little bit about, what's our story? How does that resonate with investors? And how is the street going to measure us in correlation to that? We spend a lot of time together from that lens. And then I feel like I spent a lot of time with our lines of business. Because, at the end of day, we are a technology company, so you have to understand the product pretty deeply. And then understand, how do you actually tell a story about the products or the technology that's surfacing? And then, obviously making sure that our CEO can... Helping our CEO connect the dots across all the different programs, initiatives that are going on across the company to really tell that story in a more powerful way, whether it's to investors, whether it's to media, whether it's to customers, partners. Kind of all of that. I don't necessarily see it as you're cozying up with one group or another, you have to have a broad view of the entire organization and the company at large. And have to really understand where the company is going to go, how we're positioning for the future.

>> So thought leadership is important, education.

Ami Badani

>> Awareness.

>> It's very hard. It's nuanced technology. You got to go deeper. A lot of product marketing.

Ami Badani

>> Yep, exactly.

>> So being an investment banker turn marketer, you must love the idea of high frequency insights. High frequency trading changed the market in terms of getting that information fast. Everyone's got a hot take these days in the media, and so there's a lot of also user fatigue of what's vanilla or fake or real, hot take, just another selfie, some people getting attention. People want to know where the real data is, whether it's news, opinion, and commentary. There's a lot of noise out there.

Ami Badani

>> There is a lot of noise. And I think you have to be... And actually, that's the reason why I'm so excited about generative AI, is because what it really helps you do is parse through that noise. I was telling you right before this, deep research was obviously rolled out last week with OpenAI as one of their agent tools that allow you to do deep research analysis. And we had earnings last week and I was going in and saying, what is the sentiment analysis of what the street and the media and some of the news commentary on our stock post earnings, or just earnings just in general, and how that message resonated? And it was just fabulous. Instead of me having to parse out that noise, you can now use deep research to really go into some of that market analysis. You could just imagine that. That is just one small use case, but imagine that applied to many, many parts of the organization. I think these AI tools will get better over time, and they will actually help you parse through the noise and filter out the garbage versus what's actually going to be valuable.

>> We had a previous guest on, Bruce Cleveland, who was talking about you can go to school and get trained and have all this knowledge, book knowledge. He called it book knowledge, very, very clear, very straight up and to the point. Versus street skills. Street smarts, some people say. So you've got street smarts and you've got book smarts.

Ami Badani

>> Right.

>> The book smarts is your knowledge, that's the AI assistance. Your street experience takes time too. If you got to fly a plane, you got to get your miles in the air-

Ami Badani

>> Yeah, exactly....

>> before you can master that. There's mastery with all the mundane work that's getting automated away for the benefit of the human. The driver of the car, if you will. Skills become important.

Ami Badani

>> Right.

>> How do you look at that? Because a lot of people are like, okay, I can do a lot of things faster. People used to do that in jobs. But then the opportunities for that person or the staff is to get higher end opportunities.

Ami Badani

>> Yeah. In terms of skills, I think AI tools are really going to upskill the workforce. I look at it as more of us being more productive with our time. With marketing there's a lot of context switching, and so you have to be really good at... The folks that I've seen be great marketers are folks that are great at context switching. And moving quickly.

>> Gie an example.

Ami Badani

>> Moving at the pace of the business.

>> Give an example of context switching.

Ami Badani

>> Context switching, today I was spending time with the team in the morning figuring out what is our message for any event that we're doing later on in a couple months. Then I was also dipping into some of the geopolitical tariffs that are happening. What is the impact on our business? Should we think about that differently? And so-

>> And now you're .

Ami Badani

>> Exactly, now I'm here in theCUBE. Exactly. You have to be able to context switch as opposed to being very deep in linear in your thinking. I think AI will really help you with that, get you better with upskilling and the context switching.

>> On team formation, does that put a premium on versatility and adaptability, situational awareness?

Ami Badani

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think all of that. I think adaptability, being agile. I'm a big believer in experimentation and figuring out how you can experiment with all these tools. I encourage experimentation on my team, for sure. Because I think those are the people that are going to succeed and really embrace new technologies and really help upskill the workforce just generally within my team and broadly within the company.

>> Put your personal hat on. Take off your ARM CMO hat and put on your investment banker, CMO. Just general cognition in the industry. There's always things that are happening right now that are solvable that weren't solvable five years ago. And I used the example of enterprise search, that was a hard nut to crack. And if you got all the way down and you actually did it, it was changed before you started. Now things like Glean are out there, you start to see really clever ways to abstract complexity out of legacy stovepipe systems. And IOT, again, your ARM, that area. There are opportunities in marketing to change how it was done, the mechanism. Not change say lead gen, email marketing was inbound, you go outbound with sales. Things like that are systematic legacy things, mechanisms. What mechanisms do you see that are going to be huge breakthroughs that other CMOs could focus on because they're now gettable? There's a graveyard of enterprise search because that at that time wasn't ready.

Ami Badani

>> Right

>> Now it's ready. What's ready for prime time, or at least starting to get into with AI's assisting that? What do you see as areas where you can move the needle?

Ami Badani

>> Yeah. There are really easy ways that I think just today that you can use a lot of these AI tools. One is around anything copy assisted. I look at things like message testing. The legacy way to do this is get a bunch of people in a room from external outside sources and message test with that audience. I think you now have the entire internet where you can message test. That's a fundamental change to the way things were, and it will help us move faster in terms of message testing. Creating press releases, what's the headline? How is it going to resonate? Before it was you're in a vacuum trying to test these things.

>> Email around, what do you guys think? Mark it up, give feedback.

Ami Badani

>> Exactly. Exactly. And now, I think the way that you think about even a press release in general, is that system going to go away? Is that an antiquated way to think about things? Is there other forms of content that you can now create much more quickly at a lower cost than you were before? I think those are opportunities for us to explore that are available now. And what I fundamentally believe is we're at the very early point of AI agents and inference as we know with these foundation models that are being built. I think the tools that we have today are obviously great for what we have today. But I think going forward with the amount of agents and the investment going into AI and inference, I think we'll have many other applicabilities of what AI could potentially do in a marketing world. And that's what really excites me. It's the intersection of ARM where we're driving a bunch of this compute to drive inference for the future, and then also how we can use it internally to help make our organizations more productive.

>> I was saying on theCUBE Pod the past two weeks, certainly DeepSeek got everyone's attention with the cleverness of how they manage the constraints that they had. And I think that was the big takeaway that I was trying to tell people is look beyond. I call it DeepSeek style, which is innovative software and algorithms, it wasn't really anything hardware that they did, it just kind of-

Ami Badani

>> Optimized the software.

>> Optimized what they can get their hands on. Reminds me of the PC days when someone said, "Hey, we only deal with these chips." That brings up, if this continues at that pace in the work that you guys are doing, there's going to be a Cambrian explosion of applications.

Ami Badani

>> Right. Exactly.

>> And so, that's going to happen. I could feel it busting out almost right now.

Ami Badani

>> Right.

>> It's coming.

Ami Badani

>> Exactly.

>> Like, super fast.

Ami Badani

>> Right.

>> What's your take on that? Because that's going to give new ways to hire resource or build apps for marketers. A new way to move super fast. Like you mentioned with AI, you want a focus group, "Hey, give me 20 different people to do that." That would've taken a month to even organize that. You can do it in one query and then do follow on prompts and iterate through and get a result.

Ami Badani

>> Right.

>> Now, you can build apps.

Ami Badani

>> Right. Yeah.

>> That's coming. The CMO's like, they're not used to doing this.

Ami Badani

>> Yeah, yeah. I think DeepSeek, to your point, there was obviously a market overreaction to DeepSeek. From my vantage point, the way I think about it is that it drives innovation, and then innovation drives more AI agents or more inference, which will all require more compute. From my vantage point, it actually was a good thing. You have these continuous innovation cycles that happen, which this is how you invent new types of solutions for existing problems or for new problems. I believe that it's actually going to help with the new world of what AI will look like, which will be more consumable for folks like myself and other people who aren't necessarily an engineer but want to use the tools and the agents that will exist. I think that's what 2025 is, it's the year of AI agents.

>> And the reason why I like... First of all, I love what you said, because it reminds me of why I like this. I think the timing's good. Is that it reminds me of why we're in a good spot. What ARM has done, and again, Dave Vellante is proud to say this. But go back 10 years, we were the ones who predicted the ARM growth almost to the number. But not to pat ourselves in the back. But if the startups are coming, if you look at what the cloud did to perpetual licenses, so you had perpetual license was the standard pricing, how economics were on software. Old school load, some stuff on an enterprise. Cloud came, that was subscription SaaS. Okay, good job, move on. That's cloud growth. Now we're moving into usage-based pricing on a different computer architecture. Each one of those economic models of perpetual license software, enterprise, computer industry, cloud, hybrid, SaaS. Now we're in an AI era where companies are born in the AI, born in the cloud. Was no names like Dropbox, Airbnb that no one's ever heard of. Now they're hugely successful companies. A new batch of startups are coming born in the AI. Call it AI, cloud AI. Doesn't matter, edge. They're everywhere, AI everywhere. Those are going to be new brands. Plus, enterprise AI is going to be exploding in growth.

Ami Badani

>> Right.

>> That architecture is different. Each one of those things had different computes. How do you guys at ARM, and you personally look at that innovation because that will tell you that if you're seeing usage-based stuff, that's going to change valuations, how you do deals, but that's what people want. It takes advantage of the compute architecture, which is distributed computing.

Ami Badani

>> Right. It's about more efficient, I think more efficient computing. That's what we're seeing, whether it's in the data center, whether it's in the automobile, whether it's in connected devices in your home or internet of things, whether it's in your mobile phone. What you're seeing across all of those is you need more power-efficient computing that's still higher performance and more power efficient. And we talked last time about power efficiency being really the gatekeeper in terms of AI scaling. And I think we'll see that, and we'll continue to see that. That's why having a power efficient architecture, power efficient compute platform like ARM is really going to drive all of the AI tailwinds that we're going to continue to see as these applications continue to grow and explode.

>> If that business model, which I think will happen, you guys will be obviously enabling that. Are you seeing applications and business models starting to take advantage of that usage? They might be pure play usage deals. What are you seeing in the ecosystem around? Because I think this is going to be the tell sign for what's going to happen for the next 10, 20 years.

Ami Badani

>> Yeah, yeah. I think we have the largest developer ecosystem, we have 20 million developers. I think we have the largest developer ecosystem of probably any tech company. What we're really seeing is developers developing much more quickly and taking advantage of the accelerations that we have in our compute platform to really drive some of that usage. I think we're seeing software really driving the hardware, and we'll continue to see that. I think there's going to be new usage models, to your point. If you even look at advertising, as an example. As a CMO, a lot of times what you do is you bid for ads. And with AI tools, how does the advertising change? You're not going and ranking algorithms to place ads based on placement and paying for bidding spots. The whole world of how you do advertisement in the world of marketing is going to be completely changed based on all of these AI agents or AI use cases coming to market. And so, I think we'll see that paradigm shift. The great thing is ARM's empowering a lot of that. We're going to be right front and center in terms of thinking about how that usage is shifting and really enabling developers to think differently about these usage models.

>> And I think the exciting thing about having a super computing like these big AI clusters in a data center or in the cloud is it's going to enable the edge to be an intelligent piece of the network. Low power, high performance.

Ami Badani

>> Exactly.

>> You're starting to see cost efficiencies drop, high performance increase. That's a flywheel we're seeing-

Ami Badani

>> More compute....

>> in the model. So the compute architectures changing. That's exciting. That brings the next question, is what software runs on all this? It's like, at the end of the day are the AI infrastructures being solved right now, and agents are about to roll in and be the steady state? What software runs on all these big AI systems? That's the question that we're seeing out there. What do you see out there as being the state-of-the-art software to run on these things? Is it Linux? Is it new stacks, or are people building their own, bringing their own? What do you see in terms of the developer action?

Ami Badani

>> Yeah. I think it's too early in terms of what that software framework's going to look like. But you're obviously seeing new software models pop up every day. I think similar to Linux being the defining layer, there's probably going to be some standardization that's going to happen over time. Ourselves with ARM, we use a lot of open source, and so I think there's going to probably a drive towards open source. We're already seeing that. We have something called Clyde that we introduced to the market last year, which is basically trying to standardize the developers so that they can take advantage of the hardware accelerations in our compute platform. And we're really trying to standardize that regardless of platform. And then we work really closely with all the operating systems to make sure that we are part and parcel, working very closely with all the OS layers to really create standardization. Because I think that's what you'll need. Instead of fragmentation, you want standardization, which you've seen from Linux. And that's clear of how you always see compute evolve over time.

>> You got a super exciting job. On the CMO, just touch back and come circle back to the CMO. There's concern that CMOs are losing relevance. On one hand, I hear people say, "CMOs have a short shelf life and they're not as relevant." On the other hand, no, they're the most irrelevant piece. Again, hypothetical scenarios, they are relevant. We're seeing value in that. So for people out there who want to modernize their role, because we see CMOs, especially with communications, knowledge of the market as a very strategic important business driver where the customers are getting sales. At the end of the day, you're doing the same things, but now the mechanisms are changing. What should a CMO who's watching think about to get the skills they need? They're at a big company. Startups, they're going to be guerrilla, they're going to do their thing. But if I'm at a big company, I want to do some business transformation, not just lean on my old MarTech stack and do my email marketing. I'm doing the same old rinse and repeat every year. What can I do differently?

Ami Badani

>> Yeah, I think it's a combination of understanding the market dynamics. The market's changing. With AI, you saw what a new agent by OpenAI be introduced, I think it was 01 last December, and then now you have 03 a month later. The market's going to shift, continue to shift. Being on top of those industry trends is super critical to our role. And then, also understanding how it relates to the technology that you're introducing and being able to connect those dots, and thinking about it from a strategic perspective. That's what I think is going to be super important. And then also, to your point, modernizing. You can't just do the same antiquated things that you were used to. As I mentioned with this ad shift, you're going to see a whole new paradigm shift around how ads are being driven out to market. How do you evolve and change? And that's where I keep talking about being agile, experimenting, encouraging your teams to experiment. Because that obviously gives you the knowledge and the trust to be able to figure out, how do you modernize the organization just generally? I think those are the, to me, keys to success for anyone that's exploring marketing.

>> That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. I do have to ask a question, since you mentioned earlier, what was the sentiment analysis on the earnings from all the deep learning? What came out of the data?

Ami Badani

>> Yeah. No, it was actually... It was positive. We had a great record-breaking earnings quarter, and so it was positive actually all the way around. It was actually fairly accurate to what we felt in the room. Outside of the room, I'd been following the media and some of the investor feedback. So it was fairly accurate in terms of the sentiment, but it was positive all the way around.

>> Do you think you'll rely less on analyst research reports or more on AI? How are you looking at engaging traditional mechanisms? We all know the earn media, paid media, owned media was the old thinking around marketing. Earned media was get articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal. But there's still a cost to earn. You have to earn it.

Ami Badani

>> Right.

>> Analyst relations, they had a role going under NDA, provide some research. Now some are just doing hot takes. And is there really advisory there? Is there getting real research? And then obviously investor relations, that's a financial thing. They get those three areas of comms, because comms seems to be strategic.

Ami Badani

>> Yeah. I say this all the time, I think comms is super strategic, and it's been fascinating how it's evolved over the years. But I don't think any of these roles will go away. I think, if anything, you need humans in the loop to put that opinion together that you don't get from an AI tool. Even though deep research was great on the surface, ultimately there's opinion and thought that goes into an analyst report that you don't necessarily get with an AI tool. I think complementing what you already have with your analyst reports with some of the AI research is probably the better way to think about these things. But I don't think it's going to eliminate completely, whether it's financial analysts or industry analysts, or earned media, or however way you think about your comms team. But-

>> It's just the game is still the same, but the mechanisms change.

Ami Badani

>> Yes.

>> If you're an analyst, you got to be faster. If you're in comms, you got to get into the organic flow.

Ami Badani

>> Right.

>> You know what I'm saying? It's still the same kind of game.

Ami Badani

>> Right. Yeah.

>> Different mechanisms.

Ami Badani

>> Right, exactly. You have more knowledge, so you're able to react and you're able to predict. And I think that's what's going to be really important.

>> Okay, final question. What are you most excited about, both on the marketing side as a CMO? As you look out the 25-mile stare in the marketplace, you got to go out there, skate to where the puck is going to be, as you said. And then, on the ARM side, what are you most excited about in the trends? As CMO, what are you excited about in your mission and where's that puck going to be? And then ARM, what are you excited about with ARM?

Ami Badani

>> Yeah. From a CMO perspective, to your point, I think the role of the CMO is really shifting. And I mentioned it before, it's that combination of strategy and storytelling. And being close... At least, I have the privilege of being close to our CEO in the way he's telling the story and really working with him around how we tell the story and position ARM in the context. I think CMO has become a lot more of a strategic function than it probably ever was in the context of an executive team. To me, that's the most exciting, that's why I do what I do every day. And I truly believe we have the impact to really make the strides because of where we sit in the executive team and alignment with the CEO. From an ARM perspective, I will say I couldn't be more excited about the future growth of the company. Like I said, we're right there where everything is evolving from an AI perspective. And the amount of AI that we believe will happen in the future, we said last year, by 2025 we will have 100 billion ARM devices that will be AI enabled. And just to give you perspective, that's a third of the amount of devices. We have 300 billion devices shipping. ARM enabled devices shipping.

>> How much?

Ami Badani

>> 300 billion.

>> Billion with a B.

Ami Badani

>> 300 billion. Yeah, pretty much-

>> It's only going to get bigger....

Ami Badani

>> this room you probably have a ton of ARM. Probably 80% of the connected devices or 90% of the connected devices are on ARM. I believe that AI is really here to stay.

>> And multimodal AI, computer vision, you name it. You're everything.

Ami Badani

>> We are in everything. The opportunity for us at ARM in front of us to really take advantage of everything that's going to reinvent the way we think about pretty much every organization, that's what I'm most excited about. And I think ARM's right there in the front and center of reinventing compute for the future of AI.

>> And how do you keep up with it all every day? You're on the big wave here.

Ami Badani

>> Yeah. How do we keep up with everything? Yep.

>> Keep your sanity.

Ami Badani

>> Exactly.

>> Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you again. And thanks for sharing. I know you're super busy.

Ami Badani

>> Thanks for having me.

>> Congratulations on the record earnings. Love the company, love what you guys do. And again, the edge is just... Retail week was just... And our rep just happened. We did three days in New York on that. Man, it's all retails, all devices too. Healthcare, every vertical.

Ami Badani

>> Right, right.

>> Thanks for coming on.

Ami Badani

>> Thank you so much.

>> All right. We got the CMO leaders are here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, with Brian Baumann for NYC Wired. Thanks for watching.