There is a peculiar kind of marketer who keeps volunteering for products that disappear when they work. Search advertising. Payment rails. Compliance software. Institutional knowledge. These are not objects people place on a pedestal. They are machinery behind the wall, heard chiefly when something begins to rattle. Dustin Sedgwick has spent his career opening that wall, pointing at the gears and saying: look, there is a human story in here.
The stages have grown with the argument. An Xbox comedy spot with Marshawn Lynch. A Microsoft Surface on an NFL sideline. A J.P. Morgan Payments partnership with the business podcast Acquired, performed before 6,000 people at Chase Center and later at Radio City Music Hall. Now, as Chief Marketing Officer of Intapp, Sedgwick is trying to make the operating logic of a professional firm - its relationships, conflicts, prices, judgments and lore - feel as urgent as a fourth-quarter drive.
His career can look, at first glance, like a tour through prestigious logos: Princeton, Harvard, Google, Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, Intapp. The more interesting pattern is not the logos. It is translation. Again and again, Sedgwick takes a system designed for specialists and gives it a scene, a character, a joke or a metaphor that an outsider can carry home.
The recurring assignment: take infrastructure people barely notice, reveal the moment it changes, and make the team behind it visible too.
A sports fan finds his laboratory
The impulse started well before the executive titles. Sedgwick has written that he did not want to join a basketball team as a child in a new town. His parents made him. The reluctant first practice became a lifelong attachment to arenas: the noise, the concessions, the raffles, the overpriced merchandise that somehow feels mandatory when a foam finger is involved. Years later he took his son to a University of Washington game. They left with new hats, the foam finger, and a first taste of Dippin' Dots - still, he noted, selling the “ice cream of the future” after more than three decades. A marketer notices durable copy even while buying dessert.
Sedgwick calls himself a “pseudo ex-athlete” and jokes that he peaked in high school, when he appeared in a Sports Illustrated milk-mustache advertisement. The joke carries a useful truth. Sports taught him how technology becomes culture: not through specifications alone, but through rituals, rivalries, heroes and the sudden roar from a play you missed while standing in line.
At Microsoft, where he held marketing leadership roles from 2011 to 2021, that laboratory became very large. He helped launch sports marketing at Xbox in 2013, worked across the NFL, MLS, NCAA, World Cup, NBA and action sports, and ran marketing for Microsoft's NFL partnership from its beginning. He wrote and produced comedic Xbox spots with Marshawn Lynch. He worked with engineers on a HoloLens vision for augmented-reality sports. With Surface Create Change, the product became a tool for NFL players to support charitable work in their communities.
Eventually he led integrated marketing communications for Surface along with partnership marketing across Surface, Windows, Bing, Edge and Office. His teams worked in television, experiential, outdoor, social, retail, print and influencer marketing. Surface grew from a launch into a multi-billion-dollar business during those years. The campaigns gathered Clios and ADDYs. Sedgwick's public honors list is long; his preferred punchline is that some other work was hopefully recognized by a few friends and close family.
“Think big, but then sweat the details.”
Dustin Sedgwick, in a farewell note to his J.P. Morgan Payments team
Making the back office walk onstage
In April 2021, Sedgwick crossed from consumer technology into wholesale finance as CMO of J.P. Morgan Payments. The business was enormous - about $9 billion in revenue - yet he later described its public identity as sleepy, back-office and insufficiently technological. Fintech challengers owned the oxygen. The bank owned the pipes.
The marketing problem was therefore deliciously awkward: how do you make corporate payments culturally legible without pretending they are sneakers? Sedgwick's organization worked on a rebrand, a new product taxonomy, a developer portal, a partner network, new experiences and a clearer technology story. The phrase he used was “fintech with foundation” - startup-like innovation with the scale and security of a global bank.
The product demonstrations moved where people already felt urgency. At the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix, biometric checkout and omnichannel retail were not abstract architecture. They were a faster way to buy merchandise, personalize an item and return to the spectacle. At Chase Center, pay-by-face concessions became a basketball story: keep both hands free, stop fumbling for a wallet, and miss fewer Steph Curry possessions.
The Acquired partnership made another bet. If a long-form business podcast could fill an arena, then payments could participate in culture by underwriting the kind of serious, obsessive storytelling its clients already loved. The Chase Center event drew 6,000 people. By Sedgwick's final summer at the bank, Acquired Live had sold out Radio City Music Hall with Jamie Dimon as the headliner. An operation once described with the word “wholesale” had acquired a marquee.
During Sedgwick's four-and-a-half years, J.P. Morgan Payments grew from roughly $9 billion to more than $18 billion in revenue. Marketing did not produce that result alone, and Sedgwick does not describe it that way. His accounts name business leaders, product teams, strategists, creatives, proposal writers, sales enablers, technologists, data scientists and partners. The visible story required a village large enough to qualify for municipal government.
The firm becomes the factory
Sedgwick left J.P. Morgan in July 2025 with an unusually candid note. He told colleagues to take pride in their work, find purpose in the year and the day, celebrate wins and losses, ask questions without embarrassment, teach one another and become “a battery charger, not a battery drainer.” His aspiration, he wrote, remained what it had been for years: learning and growing, family, new adventures.
The new adventure arrived quickly. Intapp appointed him CMO in August 2025. The company makes software for advisory, capital-markets and legal firms - businesses whose product is often judgment itself. Its tools sit amid client intake, conflicts, timekeeping, relationships, deal flow and compliance. In other words: backstage machinery with a doctorate.
Princeton economics degree, summa cum laude, with a thesis prize.
Microsoft leadership across search, Xbox, sports partnerships and Surface.
CMO of J.P. Morgan Payments through a rebrand, growth chapter and arena-scale partnerships.
Intapp CMO, framing governed, industry-specific AI around the business of the firm.
His early Intapp work reached for music. In the “Sound of Intelligence” campaign, a meeting note, a conflict flag, an LP update and a relationship nuance become solitary notes. Scattered, they make noise. Connected with intention, they become a symphony. The professional remains the musician; technology provides orchestration, memory and reach.
Then came Celeste, Intapp's agentic platform, introduced with a wink to Willy Wonka's “Pure Imagination.” Beneath the song lyrics sat a sober distinction. Most workplace AI makes one person faster. Sedgwick's Intapp story asks whether AI can make the firm stronger: helping originate work, screen opportunities, clear conflicts and price engagements while inheriting the organization's data and compliance posture.
His newest formulation is even blunter: “Mind your business. Not just your practice.” The LLM, in his analogy, is the steam engine, but the firm is the factory. A model trained on the public internet knows plenty, yet it does not know which partner owns a relationship, why a prior engagement was declined, or where a confidentiality wall must stand. Individual speed is useful. Institutional context is the difference between a clever demo and a changed business.
“It is an orchestration of human + artificial intelligence.”
Dustin Sedgwick on Intapp's “Sound of Intelligence” campaign
The human keeps finding new territory
Sedgwick's optimism about AI is not the breezy claim that nothing will change. He expects short-term displacement and changing roles, much as earlier technological leaps rearranged work. His faith is narrower and more persuasive: people are good at finding valuable territory that did not exist before. Automation replaces tasks; humans notice the next unanswered question.
That belief also explains his leadership language. Curiosity, integrity, collaboration and dreaming wildly big were the values he highlighted at J.P. Morgan. Joy was not a decorative extra. “What's the point otherwise?” he asked. The same person who tells teams to sweat the details also tells them to laugh, give one another the benefit of the doubt and celebrate the learning inside a loss.
There is no tidy separation between this temperament and the work. A marketer who quotes Willy Wonka, remembers a milk-mustache advertisement, writes Marshawn Lynch punchlines and notices the comic immortality of a Dippin' Dots slogan is practicing attention. He is watching for the little human handle that lets someone lift a heavy technical idea.
The products will keep changing. Search became a console, the console became a tablet, the tablet became a payment, and the payment became an AI agent that knows where the ethical walls are. Sedgwick's job has remained remarkably stable: find the hidden system, find the human consequence, and build a stage where the two can meet. The machinery may live backstage. He has never mistaken backstage for unimportant.