At Mobile World Congress, two digital avatars stood ready to discuss Amdocs. They had been trained on the company, its products and its services. Visitors could ask almost anything, and the machines were enviably prepared. They knew more about Amdocs than Gil Rosen did, which is an awkward thing to discover when you are the chief marketing officer.
Rosen did not object to their command of the material. He objected to what nobody had thought to teach them. The avatars had facts, but no deliberate sense of conduct. They could represent the database without necessarily representing the brand. How patient should they be? When should they sound energetic? What does reassurance feel like when the speaker has no pulse?
The question has since become one of Rosen's recurring themes: personality engineering. It sounds like a discipline invented over a long lunch between a marketer and a roboticist. In practice, it asks something rather old-fashioned. If software is going to speak for your company, who is responsible for its manners?
“Most of my career has been about making elephants dance. I have turned it into a craft.”Gil Rosen, on innovation inside large organizations
Before the job title learned to behave
Rosen's route to global marketing did not begin with a clever campaign. It began in pharmaceuticals, where marketing has rules, distribution has consequences and different audiences require different conversations. He has called it an excellent training ground. You learn quickly that the same sentence cannot simply be aimed at a doctor, a distributor and a patient with the volume adjusted.
Telecom made the machinery larger and the product harder to see. Rosen joined Amdocs in the years when the internet and mobile phone were remaking daily life. As vice president of innovation and digital services, he helped establish the AT&T Foundry in Israel. The foundry joined a global carrier's problems with local researchers, startups and engineers. Its hybrid model was less a showroom than a translation desk: one side brought scale, the other speed, and somebody had to make the two clocks agree.
Then came Deutsche Telekom. Rosen worked on future communications and new media, including cloud services and device concepts connected with the Tolino family. His final venture there, IMMMR, started inside the corporate body and became a separate cloud communications company. A corporate spinout is an especially literal version of the dancing-elephant trick. First persuade the elephant to move. Then persuade it to let one idea walk away.
A career built along the translation layer
At Bezeq, Israel's large telecommunications provider, he held marketing and innovation in the same brief. One remembered project paired the design of an internet router with a television commercial. Infrastructure had been invited into show business. The point was not to make a plastic box glamorous. It was to connect the engineering choice with the household experience it was supposed to improve.
This explains Rosen's unusual professional silhouette. He is a CMO with ten telecommunications and digital-experience patents credited to his name, a builder who kept wandering into the story department. The relationship is reciprocal. Engineers decide what a product can do. A story helps a large organization decide what it is for.
The invisible company needs a voice
Rosen returned to Amdocs at the end of 2018 to run amdocs:next, the division charged with cultivating future growth in areas including the internet of things, artificial intelligence, data, cybersecurity and payments. It was an incubator inside a company whose work is often hidden in plain sight. Consumers know their mobile operator. They do not usually know the software and service companies operating behind the billing, network, ordering and customer experience.
That invisibility makes the marketing problem more interesting. Amdocs sells to a small universe of sophisticated buyers across different regions. Rosen has described conversations with the executives of major communications companies as part market research, part forecast and part internal signal to the technology teams. Marketing here is not the colorful room at the end of production. It is a listening station wired back into the workshop.
During the pandemic, Rosen described communications providers as the machinery that kept work and family life moving while the world stayed home. He resisted the fairy-tale version of innovation. “There is no magic wand,” he said. The work is a system: acquisitions, new products, teams close to customers and a willingness to keep replacing parts while the machine is running.
The same view carries into 5G. The acronym is short; the stack behind it is not. Rosen speaks about networks by moving outward to the human setting: a stadium crowded with sensors, a factory, a home that is also an office. His preferred unit of explanation is the experience on the other side of the architecture.
An agent can memorize the brand and still miss it
Generative AI sharpened that old translation problem. An agent can absorb every manual, campaign and product page. It can retrieve the approved facts at remarkable speed. Yet a brand is also a series of judgments: whether to apologize, how much detail to offer, when to stop selling and start listening. Those judgments used to live unevenly in people, scripts and culture. Customer-facing agents force companies to make them explicit.
Rosen argues that marketers belong in this design process. The provocation is useful because marketing has often been asked to arrive after the software is made and find appealing language for it. Personality engineering moves the brief upstream. Tone becomes a product behavior. The brand guide stops being a PDF that everyone politely forgets and becomes something the system must execute, test and refine.
There is a comic danger here. Left to their own devices, corporations can describe themselves with the emotional range of a hotel pillow menu: bold, warm, agile, trusted. An agent trained on vague adjectives will produce vague theater. Rosen's point becomes most valuable when it demands specificity. What should the agent do when a customer is confused? Which facts matter in a hurry? When is cheerfulness irritating? Personality is visible in choices.
Take the stairs; bring a microphone
Rosen's interest in behavior is not confined to machines. For at least 18 months, he avoided the elevator to his office on the eighth floor of Amdocs. He usually listened to podcasts on the way up. Eventually, as people who work in marketing are liable to do, he turned the habit into a format.
Tech the Stairs put Rosen and a guest on the climb together. The staircase supplied a timer, movement and just enough breathlessness to sand the polish off a corporate conversation. In the pilot, a warning near the top gave the guest twenty seconds to finish before the office arrived. The gimmick was playful, but it also demonstrated a Rosen principle: communication improves when the format gives people something real to do.
He had already hosted Point of View, a 17-episode Amdocs podcast that wandered through the psychology of the internet, technology, fashion and finance. The subject range reflected a curiosity broader than telecom infrastructure. It also let Rosen reverse his usual role. The corporate storyteller became the listener, inviting authors, entrepreneurs and specialists to complicate the view.
“Our responsibility as employers is to provide the ‘AI gym.’”Gil Rosen at Tech TLV, February 2026
By 2026, he was extending the fitness metaphor from stairs to work itself. Employees, he argued, need to stay “AI-fit,” continually learning how to use the tools relevant to their craft. Employers owe them an “AI gym”: access, practice and an environment where fluency can be maintained. Fitness is a better metaphor than transformation because it refuses a finish line. You do not complete fitness on Thursday and remain fit by memo.
The idea also returns responsibility to the organization. Workers cannot be ordered to adapt in the abstract. They need time, systems and permission to practice. Rosen has spent enough years inside giant companies to know that adoption is rarely blocked by a shortage of keynote speeches. The surrounding habits decide whether the new tool becomes daily work or another tab left open.
The story inside the system
Across Rosen's career, the technologies change and the assignment stays remarkably stable. A pharmaceutical product, an innovation foundry, a cloud communications spinout, a router, a 5G stack and an AI agent all sit between technical complexity and somebody's ordinary day. He keeps taking the job at that border.
It would be neat to call him a marketer who thinks like an engineer, but the reverse is equally plausible. His public work treats stories as operating equipment. They help an organization coordinate, give a product a reason to exist and expose when the technology has not yet learned what the company claims to value.
Now the story is entering the system itself. The agent speaks, adapts and chooses. The marketer can no longer stand behind the curtain with a slogan. Rosen's newest elephant does not merely need to dance. It needs to know whose music is playing, whether the customer wants to join and when good manners require it to sit quietly for a moment.