Canva CMO Meghan Gendelman on brand as infrastructure: stop policing brand, start arguing throughput


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In this episode

Meghan Gendelman, Chief Marketing Officer of B2B at Canva, explains why brand governance has to scale in lockstep with AI investment — and why the two drift apart so easily inside enterprises. Her argument: AI investment is measured in output volume, cycle time and cost per asset, while brand investment is measured in share of voice, share of wallet and unaided awareness over quarters and years, so the two are never on the same clock in front of a board. The fix isn’t a bigger brand police force. It’s treating brand as infrastructure — a brand system layered on top of the usual foundations of colors, logos and fonts, covering tone of voice, operations and sub-brands, so anyone in any country on any team can create content inside a framework instead of outside one. Gendelman, who spent nearly 13 years at Salesforce and led growth marketing at Docusign before joining Canva, also covers where inconsistency surfaces first, which behavioral signals tell you it’s happening, and the internal case that actually lands with a CFO.

Key takeaways

  • AI and brand investment drift apart because they’re measured on different clocks. AI investment is judged on output volume, cycle times, cost per asset and productivity gains; brand investment shows up in share of voice, share of wallet and unaided awareness scores that move a percent at a time over quarters and years.
  • Most enterprise AI content work today is assisted drafting, not autonomous shipping. People arrive with an idea, generate a first pass with layouts, then edit — the human stays the author. What actually changed is the time from intent to output.
  • Brand foundations and a brand system are not the same thing. Colors, logos and fonts are foundations, and they’re easy to teach an LLM. The infrastructure is the layer above: tone of voice, operations, and sub-brands within a brand — at Canva, knowing whether you’re speaking as Canva or as Affinity.
  • Inconsistency shows up first in sales decks and regional teams. The first thing a seller does with a beautiful new deck is change it; the goal is to let them customize for their customer and stay on brand while doing it.
  • The closer you are to the customer, the more authority you should have over the message — but that only works if the guardrails are handed over with the authority.
  • The reliable consistency signals are behavioral, not aesthetic. Whether sellers use the new first-call deck or revert to the old one, and how fast they move with it, is the leading indicator. Stray logos and three-year-old messaging in the wild are laggard signals — still worth reading, but late.
  • Your community is an early-warning system. Canva listens closely to a community full of customer feedback; even a customer advisory board will tell a marketer when things are going astray, and that feedback is invaluable.
  • Stop making the argument about brand and start making it about throughput. Salespeople, regional managers and real estate agents all want to move faster; a system that lets them go faster and still look and feel like the company is something CFOs are genuinely into. Nobody has ever asked to go slower.
  • Marketing should keep judgment, positioning, messaging, the overarching narrative, the visual system and tone of voice — and be glad to give up the last-minute output asks: the board deck cleanup, the tear sheet in 55 languages, the same image resized 55 times.

Chapters

  • 1:04 — When anyone can make on-brand-looking content, who owns the brand?
  • 2:59 — Meghan’s path: 13 years at Salesforce, growth marketing at Docusign, now Canva B2B
  • 4:20 — How Canva enters an enterprise: bottom-up adoption meets brand controls and compliance
  • 6:05 — Where enterprise AI content activity actually sits: first-draft assist, not autonomous shipping
  • 7:19 — Why AI and brand investment drift apart: the measurement mismatch
  • 9:16 — Where inconsistency shows up first: sales decks, regional teams, and the un-findable style guide
  • 11:18 — Brand as infrastructure: foundations vs. the brand system on top
  • 14:14 — What moves out to the org, and what marketing must hold onto
  • 17:13 — Measuring consistency: behavioral signals and community feedback
  • 18:36 — The internal case: throughput, not brand policing
  • 20:22 — One year out: brand system engineers and AI ethicists
  • 21:01 — Staying agile: vulnerability as a superpower

Why AI and brand investment drift apart inside the same company

They drift because of how they’re measured. Gendelman points out that every CMO she knows is asked in board meetings what their AI investment is right now — and AI investment is scored on output volume, cycle times, cost per asset and productivity gains. Brand investment is scored over quarters and years, in share of voice, share of wallet and unaided awareness moving a percent at a time. Those percentage points cost a lot of money to earn, which is exactly why she wants to protect them on the AI side rather than let scale erode them quietly.

What “brand as infrastructure” actually means

Every company that has ever existed has brand foundations: colors, logos, fonts. Historically they lived in a style guide or a PDF that got passed around. Those are also easy to teach an LLM. Infrastructure is the layer that sits on top — what Canva calls a brand system: tone of voice, operations, and sub-brands within a brand. Gendelman’s own example is Canva, which is fun, approachable, light and energetic, next to Affinity, part of the same family but built for creators — more immersive, edgier, a black background. In a world where anybody in any country on any team can create content, the brand system is the framework they work inside.

Where brand inconsistency shows up first

Greg cites the stat that 94% of marketers are concerned about brand consistency; the harder question is where to look. Gendelman’s answer is that the gap opens when the brand team makes something genuinely beautiful and then parks it somewhere too hard to find — so people reach for the asset they already used and know works. Customers see the result in sales decks and in regional teams’ output. She’s a marketer who has always worked closely with sales, and she knows the first thing a seller does with a handsome new deck is change it. The drift lives in the small moments where someone needs something out fast and doesn’t have the right tool to do it fast and on brand.

How to know whether consistency is holding

The signals are behavioral. After Gendelman joined Canva, her team rebuilt the first-call deck and handed it to sellers; the real question was whether they’d use it or revert to what they had before. Adoption and speed answered it — the template let sellers swap in and customize their own content easily, so it stuck. The stray logo and the three-year-old messaging you spot in the wild are laggard signals: important, but late. Community is the other channel, and she treats it as a live feedback loop — even a customer advisory board will tell you when something has gone astray.

The argument that actually works internally

Stop arguing about brand and start arguing about throughput. Every salesperson, regional manager and real estate agent wants to move faster and get customers in faster. A system that lets them do that while still looking and feeling like the company is a CFO-friendly proposition, and it reframes the ask away from “these people are off-brand and I want to keep them on brand” toward protecting the investment already made in share of wallet and top of funnel. As Gendelman puts it, she has yet to meet anyone who says they want to go slower.

What marketing gives up — and what it keeps

Marketing holds the judgment: positioning, messaging, the overarching narrative, the visual identity and the tone of voice. What it should be delighted to hand over is last-minute output work — making the board deck pretty, the same image resized 55 times, the tear sheet in 55 languages. Localization is the clearest case: how something reads in English is not how it reads in German, and moving that work closer to the customer is both faster and more authentic to the customer experience. The nervousness about what marketers will do instead resolves once the infrastructure exists — with brand systems in place, the handoff is freeing rather than threatening.


FAQ

Why do AI investment and brand investment fall out of sync? Because they’re measured on incompatible timescales. AI investment is reported in output volume, cycle time, cost per asset and productivity gains; brand investment shows up over quarters and years in share of voice, share of wallet and unaided awareness. Boards ask about the first every meeting, so it compounds faster than the governance around it.

What is a “brand system” as opposed to brand guidelines? Brand guidelines are foundations — colors, logos, fonts — and an LLM can learn them easily. A brand system is the infrastructure above them: tone of voice, operations, and the sub-brands within a brand, so a creator knows which brand they’re even speaking as before they start.

Where does brand inconsistency appear first in a large organization? In sales decks and in regional teams’ output. Sellers customize any deck they’re given, and teams closest to the customer need to move fast; without an easy on-brand way to do that, they fall back on whatever asset already worked.

How do you measure brand consistency at scale? Through behavioral signals rather than audits: whether people adopt the new asset or revert to the old one, and how quickly they can use it. Off-brand logos and outdated messaging spotted in the wild are lagging indicators, and an engaged customer community will flag drift early.

How do you make the internal case for brand guardrails when everyone else is measuring AI on efficiency? Argue throughput, not brand. Frame guardrails as a system that lets sales, regional teams and partners move faster while still looking like the company — that protects the existing investment in share of wallet and top of funnel, and it’s an argument CFOs respond to.

What should marketing keep doing itself once content creation is democratized? Judgment work: positioning, messaging, the overarching narrative, the visual system and tone of voice. The last-minute production asks — resizing, translation, deck cleanup — are the parts marketing should be glad to distribute.

About Meghan Gendelman

Meghan Gendelman is Chief Marketing Officer, B2B at Canva, where she leads global B2B marketing to help organizations turn visual communication into essential infrastructure for modern work.

Meghan’s previously led cross-functional teams across Marketing, Enablement, Customer Success, and Sales. Most recently, she served as GVP of Growth Marketing at Docusign, where she worked on category building and positioning the company to win the enterprise. Prior, Meghan spent nearly 13 years at Salesforce, where she held senior roles including CMO of Financial Services, SVP and Head of Marketing for the Americas, and SVP of Global Strategic Marketing.

A champion of inclusion, Meghan pioneered the first Women’s Summit at Dreamforce and is passionate about developing diverse, values-driven leaders. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two daughters.

Meghan Gendelman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgendelman/

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Transcript

[00:01:04] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of the Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. When every employee can produce polished, on-brand looking content in seconds, who actually owns the brand anymore? Agility requires guardrails, not just accelerators. Moving fast is only an advantage if the organization is still moving as one recognizable company. Today we’re going to talk about the gap that opens up between how fast AI lets an organization produce and how well its brand actually holds together as that output scales. We’re going to explore what really gets diluted when content creation is democratized and how quickly that compounds, treating brand as infrastructure, building systems that guide AI-generated work rather than teams that police it after the fact, and why  investment in brand governance has to scale in lockstep with investment in AI tools. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Meghan Gendelman, CMO of B2B at Canva. Meghan, welcome to the show.

[00:02:44] Meghan Gendelman: Hey Greg, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:02:47] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely a timely topic for, for I would say all at this point, so looking forward to diving in. But before we do, why don’t you, give a little background on yourself and your role at Canva?

[00:02:59] Meghan Gendelman: I would love to. So I have spent my career helping companies grow by being obsessed with putting the customer first. Before joining Canva, I’ve had 15 years of marketing at enterprise companies that you all know Salesforce and DocuSign. So at Salesforce I was there for 12 years, and I was really, like, part of the shift as they became ubiquitous with enterprise. And at DocuSign I was there when we launched their AI product and really expanded and blew up their PLG business, and so I think that really primed me for being able to step over to Canva. as the CMO of B2B, my team covers marketing, the full range, from solo professional creatives to, you know, small businesses to enterprises, and they do it globally. and they have everything from product marketing and content to data to MarTech to demand generation to un- public relations. We’ve got it all, and, we’re

[00:03:55] Meghan Gendelman: just helping enterprises know more about Canva.

[00:03:59] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, love it. And, and to that, to that point, I know, probably a lot of people are familiar with Canva from, you know, from the start and, and been following the, the trajectory, but, you know, a lot of our audience is, is in the enterprise space. I wonder if you could just touch on a little bit about, you know, what, what Canva is doing from that, from that enterprise, perspective.

[00:04:20] Meghan Gendelman: I love this question because every single person I talk to, all of my friends and peers are like, “Oh, I love Canva. I use it all the time.” And I’m like, “Do you use it for work?”

[00:04:28] Greg Kihlström: [laughs]

[00:04:28] Meghan Gendelman: I mean, Canva really started by solving a very human problem. How do you help somebody who has a need to communicate something that has no design training?

[00:04:37] Greg Kihlström: Mm.

[00:04:38] Meghan Gendelman: and it’s still… that’s still the foundation of what we’re doing. We’re just doing it at a much broader scale. And so, you know, it… in businesses it often starts bottoms up. It’s marketing part- pr- people or HR people who wanna build something fast, they wanna do it easy, and they bring in Canva for themselves just because it is something that they like doing. And what we’re doing now is we’re helping those companies and those teams take all of that, but also, like, meet the organization properly. So what are your brand controls? What are your approval workflows? What are the integrations that you have set up and the security and compliance that you might need as a bigger enterprise or business?

[00:05:18] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.

[00:05:18] Meghan Gendelman: It’s really the magic that people feel with Canva and the scale that you need in a corporation.

[00:05:23] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah, love it. And I think that’s a great segue to jump in here, and you know, I wanna, I wanna start with, just kind of talking about what’s, what’s happening in the enterprise, and so certainly AI content creation, it- it’s a pretty broad, label of things, right? So it could be anything from a tool or automation that speeds up a draft that someone maybe was gonna write anyway, but speeds it along, to a system that generates and even ships work without anyone technically in that authoring seat. And so, you know, when you look at how Canva’s enterprise customers are using AI today, where does most of that activity actually sit?

[00:06:05] Meghan Gendelman: Yeah, I, I would see really the former.

[00:06:08] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.

[00:06:08] Meghan Gendelman: Most people come in with an idea of what they need, right? They have this, this thing that they wanna answer or tell or share, and so they typically, like, generate the first pass with layouts. They, they want to get in and edit, and, like, that’s where Canva really shines, is being able to edit and stay within your brand and do it in a collaborative way also. but it also helps you do things that a lot of companies need, which is, like, things at bulk. Like, how do you take one image and resize it for all your different performance marketing ads? Or how do you t- how do you get a, you know, back to- it’s back to school almost in the United States. How do you get a back to school campaign out there fast for everybody? And so whether it’s taking something and, like, getting you from idea to finished or letting you do something at

[00:06:53] Meghan Gendelman: scale, those are really the ways that Canva’s helping, and it… But they still require the human as the author. And I think, it’s that what’s really making the difference right now is shrinking the time from, like, intent to output.

[00:07:08] Greg Kihlström: Hmm.

[00:07:08] Meghan Gendelman: And that’s, that’s what’s exciting. I mean, 95% of the Fortune 500 are using Canva in one way or another, and it’s… Part of that is bringing that fast and that creativity to all of their current work.

[00:07:19] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, and to that scale, component, you know, you’ve, you’ve talked about how in addition to that AI investment and that, you know, that ability to scale, brands also, or companies need to also invest in their brand to the, to the same degree, you know, to kind of match those things up. Why do those two things drift apart so easily within an organization and, you know, what does that gap actually cost before anyone notices it?

[00:07:47] Meghan Gendelman: I mean, it’s such an interesting question, right? Because brand as an infrastructure isn’t something that people have been talking about.

[00:07:54] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.

[00:07:54] Meghan Gendelman: I really feel like they drift because of how they’re measured. Every board meeting, everybody I know who goes to their boards, they’re literally asked, “What do you, what is your AI investment right now?” And, and AI investments are measured in output volume, in cycle times, in cost per asset, and just productivity gains, right?

[00:08:12] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.

[00:08:12] Meghan Gendelman: But brand investments are measured over quarters, over years, right?

[00:08:17] Greg Kihlström: Right.

[00:08:17] Meghan Gendelman: And they show up in share of voice, they show up in share of wallet. They show up in unaided awareness scores moving percent after percent after percent. But they cost-

[00:08:25] Greg Kihlström: Yeah

[00:08:25] Meghan Gendelman: … a lot of money to do, to make those small shifts. And so when I think about your AI investment and your brand investment, like, as a CMO, I spent a lot of money moving that percent up, and I wanna help protect that on the other side.

[00:08:42] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, to the, to that point about, you know, brand as infrastructure, you know, there’s a stat, 94% of marketers are concerned about brand consistency, but, you know, as we know, it’s, it’s one thing to be worried about something, it’s, it’s another to know where that, where they should be concerned, I guess, for, for lack of a better term. So, you know, in your experience, where does inconsistency actually show up first inside a company, and how does that, kinda tie to where a customer sees it first?

[00:09:16] Meghan Gendelman: Oh, gosh. You know, I think the gap happens when the brand team thinks they made something really, really beautiful, and they put it into this, like, PDF or static thing, and then either it’s too hard to find, or it’s too, like, I already have this asset that I’ve used before that works and I wanna use it again. and so you-

[00:09:37] Greg Kihlström: Yeah

[00:09:37] Meghan Gendelman: … where customers see it is in, like, sales decks. I’m a, I’m a marketer-

[00:09:41] Greg Kihlström: Yeah

[00:09:41] Meghan Gendelman: … who’s always been very, very close to my sales team, and I know that the first thing they do when I hand them a beautiful deck is they instantly go and change it. And so, like, how do I help them customize it for their customer? Which I want them to do-

[00:09:53] Greg Kihlström: Yeah

[00:09:53] Meghan Gendelman: … but I want them to do it on brand. it also shows up in regional teams, right? I have, I, I have worked in headquarters, I’ve worked not in headquarters, and I’m a big believer that the closer you are to the customer, the more authority you should have over what that message is for that customer.

[00:10:09] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.

[00:10:10] Meghan Gendelman: But you gotta give them the gu- guardrails to do that. And, so it, it drifts, I think, in the, like, little places where people need to get something out fast, and they don’t always have the right tools to help them do it fast.

[00:10:22] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, and, and to that, to that point, get it, keeping it from drifting means you’re documenting a lot of things that, you know, they may exist in somebody’s head, they may exist in some deck on, in V5 of 20 somewhere that someone really, really liked, but then, you know, is kind of lost to, to time. So, you know, how do you-

[00:10:46] Meghan Gendelman: I mean, Greg, I’ve never, never had final, final V5.

[00:10:48] Greg Kihlström: [laughs] Right. Right. Totally. Totally.

[00:10:50] Meghan Gendelman: Really mean it this time. [laughs]

[00:10:52] Greg Kihlström: Right. Exactly. What’s, what’s the word after final, you know?

[00:10:56] Greg Kihlström: We, I think we need to figure that one out. but yeah, you know, how do you, you know, how do you get past this idea that, you know, a, a, a… Because in order to scale as well, like, the, these things have to be codified and, and centralized and, and all of these things. So, you know, how, how do we best solve for this with that, with that concept of brand as infrastructure?

[00:11:18] Meghan Gendelman: I think when I say brand of in- infrastructure, I think it also sounds, like, a little, like, sure, but, like, but what does that mean? So, like-

[00:11:25] Greg Kihlström: Yeah

[00:11:25] Meghan Gendelman: … I like to think of it this way. You, every company that has ever existed has brown, brand foundations, right? This is your colors, your logos, your fonts. It’s really easy to teach an LLM those things, too, right? It is-

[00:11:36] Greg Kihlström: Yeah

[00:11:36] Meghan Gendelman: … historically showed up in a style guide or that PDF that I, like, passed over, and it, like, lived like this. The infrastructure is the layer that lives on top of that, and at Canva we call that your brand system. It’s, like, your tone of voice. It’s your operations. It’s literally, like, sub-brands within a brand. So-

[00:11:55] Greg Kihlström: Mm

[00:11:55] Meghan Gendelman: … for example, at Canva, we have Canva, which is very fun and approachable and light and energetic, and then we have Affinity as a company that is part of our family that is- For creators, it’s a little submersive, it’s a little edgy. It’s, it’s like a black background.

[00:12:11] Greg Kihlström: Mm.

[00:12:11] Meghan Gendelman: And I want you within your brand system to be able to know which brand even you’re talking about.

[00:12:17] Greg Kihlström: Mm.

[00:12:17] Meghan Gendelman: That’s brand infrastructure. Because in a world where anybody in any country on any team can create content, you wanna give them that, that framework for them to work within. [gentle music]

[00:14:14] Greg Kihlström: Another concept here of just, you know, creating tools that enable– To, to your, to the beginning of the conversation when, you know, talking about enabling people to design things without being designers, right?

[00:14:28] Greg Kihlström: So we’re democratizing that, that design, process. That also kinda shifts the role of, of marketers, right? You know, marketing, is not the sole creators of all of this stuff. They’re, they’re often enablers of, of, creation of these things with the brand guardrails, the infrastructure, all that stuff in place. So, you know, practically speaking, what, what decisions kinda move out to the rest of the organization in a shift like that, and, and what should marketing still hold onto?

[00:15:00] Meghan Gendelman: Yeah. First of all, thank goodness.

[00:15:02] Greg Kihlström: [chuckles]

[00:15:02] Meghan Gendelman: I’ve never worked with a single creator who was like, “Can I please take the same image and resize it 55 times?”

[00:15:07] Greg Kihlström: Right. Right.

[00:15:08] Meghan Gendelman: Right? a-and another example is, like, localization. We, we literally, you know, how I write something in English looks very different in how I write it in German.

[00:15:19] Greg Kihlström: Right.

[00:15:19] Meghan Gendelman: And that has taken a lot of time. And so being able to do that, closer to the customer, first of all, is really beneficial and authentic to your customer experience.

And I really stand by that. Like, I started by saying, like, I was obsessed with, you know, putting the customer first. I think that’s a big part of it.  I think the other thing about, like, what does marketing hold onto and what don’t, don’t we hold onto? I think marketing should hold onto the judgment, the, the positioning, the messaging, the n- overarching narrative that you’re telling, and the visual system. Like, what is the visual identity of your brand and, and the tone of voice? I think what marketing actually would be delighted to give up is the last minute asks in output. “Oh, I have this last minute sales pitch. I’ve gotta go make the board deck pretty. I’ve, you know, I need to have this same tear sheet made in 55 different languages.” I, I think actually marketing is ready to give that up as long as, and, like, where people get nervous is like, but what are they gonna do?

[00:16:22] Meghan Gendelman: And so where you have that infrastructure and the brand systems that allows people to work within that, it can be really freeing.

[00:16:29] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Of course, you know, consistency at scale also, you know, just by its nature, kinda the point, the point of doing all this stuff at scale is that it’s more than a human or a, even a, a, a reasonably sized design or marketing team can really create, right? So it’s, it’s creating things at scale. So, you know, that consistency is, is hard to measure. So, you know, h-how does, how does a brand kind of balance that, you know, we want to scale, we want to, we want to put the guardrails in place with having peace of mind, I guess, for lack of a better term, of knowing that things are going to be consistent and giving, yet giving flexibili- it’s a lot, right? [chuckles] It’s-

[00:17:13] Meghan Gendelman: It’s a lot. It is a lot

[00:17:13] Greg Kihlström: … it’s a lot of considerations.

[00:17:15] Meghan Gendelman: I think it’s a couple things. So, like, first of all, I would say signals are behavioral. And so, like, the first thing I see is, like, how often it… I’ll tell you a great example. So when I joined, we re- you know, naturally we [chuckles] we rebuilt the first call deck and we handed it over to sellers, and the question is, are they using it or are they not, right? Like, are they going back to the thing they did before, or are they able to take what we have today? And the reason why I think they’re using it more is, A, we’ve created this template where they can still go and customize all the content that goes into it really easily and then put it right in there. And so, like, the signal is, is the use and the speed. When people, when you see out there in the world the things that you’re like, “How did that logo show up?” Or, “How did…” Like, “Where did… That’s, like, three-year-old messaging. Where is that coming from?” Those are, like, blatant l- you know, laggard signals, but they’re important signals.

[00:18:12] Meghan Gendelman: Another signal is, I think, your community We at Canva have a community that is just filled with customer love, and we listen to it so closely. I would say if you as a, as a marketer who’s listening to this has a community, even if it’s just your cab, you have a community who will tell you when they see things going astray, that feedback is so incredibly invaluable.

[00:18:36] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Well, and, you know, I think a lot of, a lot of the emphasis is with AI investments and, and tools is on that, that speed that, you know, I know we’ve, we’ve talked about briefly already, but there’s a tension between the other thing, you know, the, the, the brand, the consistency part of that. And so, you know, so much emphasis being put on speed, you know, when every other function is kind of measuring AI purely on those efficiency gains, how do you, you know, how do you make the case internally that the guardrails are really what let that speed compound rather than create rework or adjustment later?

[00:19:18] Meghan Gendelman: I think the case is easier when you stop making arguments about brand and I want to be the brand police and start making arguments about throughput, right? Every salesperson wants to be able to move faster. Every regional manager or district manager wants to be able to sell more faster. They wanna be able to get their customers in faster. Every real estate agent, wants to be able to get their listings up faster. So when you talk about like, here’s a system that allows you to just do this faster and still look and feel like our company, actually CFOs are really into that. And so it’s, it’s, it’s less about the like, “Hey, these people are off-brand and I wanna keep them on brand.” It is more about, I wanna protect the investment we’ve made in our share of wallet, and I wanna protect the investment we’ve made in our top of funnel, and also have the throughput and the, the

[00:20:12] Meghan Gendelman: speed at which people can put things into market. And I have yet to meet somebody who says, “I wanna go, I wanna go slower,” especially in the world that we’re in right now.

[00:20:22] Greg Kihlström: Right. Totally, yeah. Yeah, love it. Well, Meghan, thanks so much for joining today. I got a couple last questions for you as we wrap up here. the first one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?

[00:20:38] Meghan Gendelman: I hope we’re talking about all the new jobs and new roles that were created from AI, and, and I’m starting to see this already, like brand system engineers and AI ethicists and things like that. And so the optimist in me really wants to be talking about that.

[00:20:53] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Love that. And last question for you, what do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

[00:21:01] Meghan Gendelman: I am a deeply curious person, but I also believe that vulnerability is a superpower. And so I’ve been really lucky to surround myself by people who are younger and more AI native than I am, and I, like, just go ask them questions. And we take hypothesis and we test them out, and when they don’t work, I, like, very vulnerably say, “Hey, that didn’t work.” And I think it allows them to do that too, and so it’s been a nice full circle.


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