This article is based on a Q&A from LiveRamp Chief Marketing Officer Jessica Shapiro with Greg Kihlström for The Agile Brand Guide’s Expert Mode series.
Most of us have sent the memo, or gotten it. The company is going AI-forward. Everyone should experiment. Here are the approved tools, here’s the training portal, here’s the enthusiasm we’d like back. And most teams read it the same way — as a headcount memo in a growth costume. That reading isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition, and it’s usually been right.
Jessica Shapiro, Chief Marketing Officer at LiveRamp, thinks the memo problem is fixable, but not by writing a better memo. Her argument is that the “why” has to survive contact with what employees can see on their own calendars and in their own performance reviews, and that leaders who won’t say the uncomfortable part out loud shouldn’t expect to be believed on the comfortable part either.
The Memo Everyone Reads Between the Lines
When LiveRamp sent its company-wide push on AI adoption, Shapiro says nothing was attached to it. No reductions, no planned cuts. The stated purpose was professional growth, operational efficiency, and faster innovation, and she reports that the effect showed up fastest among the newest people on the team — builders who not only shipped things but ended up teaching colleagues with a decade more tenure.
“Leaning into AI is critical to driving the business forward. It enables marketers to move faster, work smarter, and deliver greater impact… There’s also an important benefit for the individual: building AI fluency helps you grow your career and stay competitive in modern marketing. While broader market pressures may eventually force headcount reductions, the best career protection is becoming the practitioner who can perform your role better with AI.”
That last sentence is the one worth stealing. Shapiro doesn’t promise nobody loses a job — she says market pressure may eventually force cuts, and then hands people the one lever they actually control. A promise you can’t keep gets tested in about two quarters. An honest framing survives the news cycle. The other half of the credibility here is sequencing, and it’s the part that’s easy to get wrong: LiveRamp’s memo didn’t ride alongside a reorg. If your AI push lands in the same month HR sends a calendar invite with no agenda, no amount of language repair will fix the read. So a CMO’s real first move is a scheduling decision, not a writing one.
Curiosity, Operationalized
“Culture of experimentation” is the kind of phrase that usually gets applause at an offsite and then dies quietly on Monday. Shapiro’s version has meetings attached to it, which is the only version that ever works.
“During Monday meetings, team members rotate demonstrations of AI applications that are producing real value. Our ‘Friday Failures’ recognize thoughtful risk-taking and, importantly, what people learned from it. We also introduced formal AI fluency training, protected time for hands-on practice, and dedicated building sessions at our in-person offsites.”
Recognition is doing the heavy lifting. AI work now factors into the team’s Marketer of the Month award, and strong applications get airtime in quarterly business reviews, which puts them in front of company leadership rather than just the marketing operations crowd who already care. One distinction in her answer deserves more attention than it’ll probably get: performance conversations weigh whether someone improved the quality, speed, or impact of work that drives pipeline — not how often they opened a tool. Seat-license dashboards are the easiest thing in the world to measure and nearly the least useful, and plenty of marketing organizations are currently reporting them upward as adoption. Shapiro also named what she gave up. She stopped treating experimentation as extracurricular, replacing the expectation that people “figure it out on your own time” with hours that live inside the work week. Those hours got paid for partly by consolidating redundant tools out of the stack, which is a budget conversation most CMOs are already having for other reasons.
Three Tools in Eighteen Months, and the Test That Tells You Which Is Which
Her team’s tooling history reads like churn if you only see the endpoints. About eighteen months ago LiveRamp deliberately left the door open, letting employees try a range of tools with learning as the goal. Six months in, they standardized on Gemini — they’re a Google Workspace shop, so the integration, security posture, and cost all pointed the same direction. Then they added Claude when coding and more complex work outgrew the standard, and Glean on top, giving the team access to several large language models inside one enterprise environment.
“I don’t see that evolution as thrashing. I see it as learning, optimizing, and staying agile in a market that is changing extraordinarily fast. We explored broadly, consolidated when there was a clear operational advantage, and expanded again when the work demonstrated a legitimate need.”
She gave a usable test for telling the two apart. Are the changes driven by a specific use case and evidence? Is the quality, speed, or impact of the work improving? Are the practices that worked getting documented and scaled to other people? A team failing all three is thrashing — switching without a rationale, abandoning workflows that were fine, spending more hours evaluating software than producing anything with it. Worth being direct about the obvious: LiveRamp sells data collaboration infrastructure into this exact market, so Shapiro has a commercial interest in marketing leaders moving quickly, and a CMO should discount accordingly. Asked who should move slower than the market is telling them to, she pointed at regulated industries — financial services and healthcare — and argued that governance policies need to be clear and working before execution accelerates. That answer does route back toward LiveRamp’s own data clean rooms and identity technology. It’s also just correct, and it’s the rare vendor answer that tells part of the market to wait.
Everyone Owes the Team a Growth Mindset
Shapiro’s team spans a real range. At one end are the “builder-lite” marketers using AI to pressure-test an idea or clean up copy. At the other are what she calls power-builders, people assembling multi-step automated workflows for marketing ops and account-based marketing. Meeting people where they are, in her framing, doesn’t mean the low end has no obligations.
“Not everyone needs to code advanced AI agents, but everyone owes the team a growth mindset… Even if a team member’s core strength is deep subject-matter expertise or strategic human judgment, they have a responsibility to their peers to build baseline AI literacy. That means understanding what’s possible, using tools built by others, and guiding builders on what problems need solving.”
And if someone doesn’t move? It becomes a performance discussion. Shapiro calls AI fluency “no different from any other core professional competency,” which is a bigger statement than it sounds — it converts a nice-to-have into something a manager can put in writing. The supporting machinery is already built at LiveRamp: AI mindset questions in candidate interviews, quarterly fluency check-ins running through the HR system, an enterprise agent embedded in performance reviews, and dedicated build time plus executive visibility for the people doing the most, which feeds directly into promotion. That last piece is the one most organizations skip. Plenty of CMOs have added AI language to a competency model. Far fewer have made building it a faster route to a bigger title, and people read the promotion list a lot more carefully than they read the competency model.
The memo, then, isn’t the intervention. It’s the announcement of an intervention that either shows up on the calendar, in the recognition, and on the promotion track, or doesn’t show up at all. Everything Shapiro described costs something concrete — a standing agenda slot, protected hours, a line in a review template, a harder conversation with someone who’s been coasting. None of it requires a budget approval most marketing leaders couldn’t get.
If you’re picking one thing this quarter, take her closing advice, which costs the least and compounds the most: normalize showing your work. On her team, sharing prompts and workflows is just standard practice, and the people who teach others get rewarded for it. As she put it, tech stacks will never stop changing, but a team that knows how to learn together is still an advantage three years out. Start with a meeting you already have on the calendar. Give ten minutes of it to somebody demoing something that worked.