Holly Semerad learned 3M from the inside out

A roll of tape is an easy object to overlook. It sits in a drawer, does its job and disappears behind whatever it holds together. At 3M, the question behind that roll can become far more complicated: Which surfaces need bonding? What temperatures will they face? How should an engineer trade flexibility against strength? Somewhere inside a company built on material science is an answer. The commercial problem is helping the right person find it before time and prototypes run out.

Holly Semerad has spent nearly 30 years learning that problem from multiple sides. Her career at 3M has moved through national sales, human resources, business transformation, digital channels and global customer operations. In 2024, she became Chief Marketing Officer for the Safety and Industrial Business Group. She now also holds the title of Senior Vice President and leads its Global Marketing and Commercial Centers.

The title suggests campaigns and positioning. The route suggests something broader. Semerad arrived in marketing leadership after working inside the systems that determine whether a promise can be kept: the sales team that hears the customer's hesitation, the people organization that shapes how teams operate, the transformation office that untangles processes, and the digital channel that turns a vast catalog into a usable path.

A career made of useful detours

Semerad studied business operations at the University of St. Thomas, then earned an MBA focused on marketing at the University of Minnesota. That combination - operations first, marketing second - reads like an early sketch of the career that followed. Her public work history places her as an Industrial Business National Sales Manager from 2007 to 2009. By late 2010 she had moved into human resources, where she spent roughly four years.

Moving from sales into HR is not the standard route to the CMO chair. It did, however, put Semerad close to a different set of constraints. Sales teaches what customers ask for. People work teaches why organizations can or cannot respond. A public recommendation from a former colleague described her as focused, creative and goal-oriented, then added a detail with more texture: although she was in charge, she made team members feel like major contributors.

Next came business transformation, followed by a digital-channel directorship from 2017 through 2019. In 2020, she became a vice president leading global customer operations inside the Safety and Industrial Business Group. Each move widened the frame. The recurring subject was the handoff: strategy into execution, expertise into a channel, a large company's knowledge into a customer's next decision.

“At 3M, we're combining decades of material science with AI so engineers can make better decisions, faster.”Holly Semerad, December 2025

Making the catalog answer back

That sentence accompanied 3M's announcement of Ask 3M, an AI-powered assistant introduced ahead of CES 2026. Its initial focus is narrow enough to be useful: engineers working through bonding challenges with tapes and adhesives. The tool asks about substrates, environmental conditions, assembly methods and performance goals, then guides users toward suitable options.

Beside it sits the expanded 3M Digital Materials Hub, where engineers can use simulation-ready material data and optical models earlier in product development. The hub also offers a route to 3M scientists and to virtual materials for requirements that an existing catalog item does not meet. In 3M's description, the two products are meant to reduce iterations before physical prototyping and compress the route from a design question to a candidate solution.

This is industrial marketing at its most concrete. The customer does not merely need awareness that 3M makes adhesives. The customer needs to locate a material, understand the tradeoffs, test it against a design and gain enough confidence to move forward. Every extra search, unclear specification and dead end is part of the brand experience, whether or not a marketing team owns it on an org chart.

At CES, Semerad called customer and industry engagement a powerful reminder. She wrote that some of her most meaningful moments came from discussing Ask 3M with customers in the booth and getting experiential feedback. The product launch became a listening post. A customer could see the tool. The team could see where the customer paused.

That is an operator's version of marketing. It favors observed behavior over a polished assumption. It also explains why a career in customer operations belongs in this story. Digital products create evidence: what people type, where they hesitate, which terms they understand and what they still cannot find. The marketer's job expands from describing value to removing the friction that prevents value from being reached.

Science needs a way to travel

Semerad's work outside the immediate product launch sharpens that theme. She sits on the advisory board of the University of Minnesota's Institute for Research in Marketing, a group designed to connect academic rigor with the practical concerns of industry. The role is a natural bridge for an executive whose career has repeatedly crossed functional borders.

In 2025, she also served as a judge for the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, the middle-school competition run with Discovery Education. Afterward, she praised the ten finalists for two things in the same breath: their application of science and their poised storytelling. The pairing is revealing. A scientific idea must work, but it also needs to be understood by the people who can test it, fund it, adopt it or improve it.

At a manufacturer with tens of thousands of employees and products used across industries, translation is not a cosmetic task. A technical capability must pass through product data, sales conversations, digital interfaces and customer workflows without losing its meaning. Storytelling, in that setting, is less about flourish than fidelity. The useful story preserves what is technically important while giving someone a clear next move.

The compounding value of context

Nearly 30 years at one corporation can sound like a story about staying put. Semerad's record looks more like a story about changing seats while the context compounds. She learned different parts of the same organization, at moments when the work of reaching customers was itself changing. National sales gave way to digital channels. Product search widened into simulation. Customer service began to include an AI conversation trained around technical knowledge.

Institutional memory can become a brake when it is used to defend the old route. It becomes leverage when it helps a leader identify which barriers are real, which are inherited and which teams need to meet. Semerad's path gives her a map of those internal borders. The map matters because tools such as Ask 3M are not only software projects. They require material science, product data, cloud infrastructure, digital design, sales judgment and customer trust to arrive in the same experience.

Her public vocabulary stays close to that practical center: customer focus, customer experience, vision and execution. Even her remarks at CES returned to direct engagement. The aspiration visible in the work is to make a large company's knowledge feel closer at the moment of need - not by shrinking the science, but by making entry into it less cumbersome.

The distinction matters in a business where the buyer may be an engineer, a procurement team, a distributor or a production manager, each arriving with a different question. One person starts with a performance target. Another starts with a failed assembly. Another knows the product number but needs data that will survive an internal review. A single campaign cannot resolve all of those journeys. A connected commercial system can at least meet them with consistent knowledge. Semerad's progression through sales, channels and operations makes that system visible as a whole. It also makes the CMO role unusually accountable. If the promise is easy to understand but the material is hard to evaluate, the experience remains unfinished. If a tool returns a plausible option but offers no clear route to testing it, speed becomes theater. The more practical standard is continuity: the question asked in one channel should retain its meaning as it moves toward a sample, a simulation, a specialist and finally a decision.

There is a pleasing fit between the product and the career. Industrial adhesives create value in the joint, the place where separate materials must hold. Semerad has built her career around organizational joints: sales and strategy, people and process, digital tools and physical products, scientists and customers. Her work now asks whether those connections can carry knowledge with less waste.

The answer will not be settled by a single launch. It will show up in the small, observable moments: an engineer finds the right data card, a prototype cycle disappears, a booth conversation exposes a missing question, a student scientist learns to explain an idea without flattening it. That is where marketing becomes useful. It helps the science travel.