The clue is an obsolete BlackBerry. Jon Borgese keeps it with a badge and a business card from his first job, three artifacts from an early chapter in a long technology career. The hardware aged as hardware does. The lesson attached to it kept improving. Once, while explaining a process to a new boss, Borgese reached for the answer that has protected mediocre workflows since the invention of the committee: this is how it has always been done. The boss replied that history might explain the process, but it did not justify it. Borgese says he never gave that answer again.
That exchange has become unusually relevant. Borgese is now chief marketing officer at CB Insights, where he works amid market maps, private-company signals, and the great corporate scramble to make artificial intelligence useful. His answer is not a prettier prompt pasted onto an old process. It is a clean-sheet question: if the team began today, with the tools available today, would it design the work this way?
“If I were building this from scratch today, would I design it this way?”Jon Borgese on his Day 0 test
He calls it Day 0 thinking. The phrase could have been manufactured in a strategy off-site, but Borgese gives it teeth. Approvals, handoffs, reports, meetings, and job boundaries all return to the witness stand. Longevity is no longer an alibi. Every assumption has to earn its place.
The marketer starts carrying boxes
His résumé begins far from the usual C-suite choreography. In Boulder, Colorado, he co-founded Blue Kangaroo Moving in 2005. A moving company is a useful early education in demand: the promise is concrete, the customer is on a deadline, and the product is either in the truck or it is not. He then founded BorgMedia, studied marketing at the University of Colorado Boulder, and moved into product marketing at IBM.
At Intermedia, the climb became visible. Beginning as a marketing manager in 2011, he rose through four roles in less than six years. Channel Futures reported that he built the company's channel-marketing team and infrastructure from the ground up. The work was not glamorous, which may be why it was instructive. Partners needed campaigns, training, sales collateral, and leads that could survive contact with a customer.
Intermedia said more than 1,200 partners used its university, and active Hosted PBX partners who used it sold 65 percent more of that service on average than those who did not. The careful phrase is important. It is an observed difference, not a magician's claim of sole causation. Still, it reveals Borgese's preferred kind of marketing: something that changes behavior and leaves a number behind.
Brand gets a pulse
Borgese next entered a faster current. At LivePerson, between 2016 and 2021, his roles expanded from global marketing programs to commercial strategy, sales development, and senior vice president of global marketing. During those four years, the company doubled revenue. He also became a named co-inventor on technology for conversational websites and apps whose displayed content changes while a customer and bot, or human agent, exchange messages.
The sequence matters. His title did not simply acquire grander adjectives. The work moved steadily toward the whole commercial system. Programs became strategy. Marketing widened to include sales development. Customer conversation became both a brand concern and a product surface. By the time he reached the top marketing job, he had spent years learning that a clean departmental boundary can be a costly place to hide a messy customer experience.
Bot response generation with dynamically changing content
Two grants, issued in 2023 and 2025, name Borgese alongside Robert Lester and Augusto Garcia. The idea joins conversation to a live content area that changes with the exchange.
Patents are not personality tests. These happen to expose something useful: Borgese has repeatedly worked near the seam where a message becomes an experience. At Front, where he became senior vice president of global marketing in 2021, that seam was the quality of customer communication. His team's Human Touch campaign used mannequins as the joke and the warning. A company that lets process overwhelm conversation begins to look rather plastic.
He was delighted that the campaign was something he could show his mother. This is a disarmingly good creative standard. Most B2B work is perfectly intelligible to the buyer and completely useless at dinner. The mannequin idea passed both rooms. Yet Borgese's account of the campaign quickly left the joke behind. Positioning had to be precise. Distribution needed as much thought as the creative. The conversion journey had to be planned. Success required quantitative measures.
“I am, at heart, a numbers guy,” he wrote. Coming immediately after a defense of emotion in advertising, the line resolves the apparent contradiction. Emotion earns a place in memory. Measurement earns a place in the budget. Borgese wants both.
When marketing builds the machine
After Front came the CMO role at Showpad in 2023, then CB Insights in 2024. His arrival note emphasized the practical stakes of market intelligence: choosing markets, tracking competitors, finding companies to partner with or acquire. The job sounds like marketing from the outside. From inside his department, it has begun to look like software development.
It is also the fourth senior marketing seat in which Borgese has carried either the CMO title or an SVP-level global remit. Repetition at that altitude can make an executive protective of the old playbook. His public argument runs the other way. A playbook is useful only while its assumptions remain true. Once the cost of intelligence changes, so can the shape of the team, the software it uses, and the steps between a signal and a customer conversation.
In March 2026, Borgese publicly introduced ChatGTM, a system built by the CB Insights marketing team for selling and managing accounts. Its premise is that a representative should not have to reconstruct the customer from five scattered tools before every conversation. CRM records carry one version of events. Calls, emails, product usage, and market intelligence carry others. The useful truth lives across them.
Borgese distinguishes a knowledge layer from a data layer. The latter stores records. The former evaluates relevance, recency, and credibility when those records conflict. ChatGTM uses that layer to prepare people before meetings, recommend next steps afterward, and produce materials intended to advance a deal. His team did not wait for a category to mature or a vendor to arrive with the perfect box. It built the missing bridge.
This is the most interesting fact in his current chapter. Marketing has long asked product teams for features, operations teams for integrations, and sales teams for adoption. Borgese's group stepped across those seams. The result does not abolish the departments. It makes their borders less precious.
“A knowledge layer, not a data layer.”Jon Borgese on making scattered account information useful
There is a pleasant circularity here. The moving-company co-founder learned early that a promise must travel all the way to delivery. The channel marketer built infrastructure partners could use. The brand leader insisted that mannequins and metrics could share a campaign. The conversational-AI executive became a co-inventor. Now the CMO is treating an internal revenue problem as a product brief.
Ambition, edited
Borgese's public writing also contains a quieter revision. In his twenties, he says, the ambition was to become the chief executive of a technology giant, make more money, and be more successful. Parenthood changed the definition. He still cares about building, achieving, and creating something meaningful. Success now includes having more time with the people for whom the work is supposedly being done.
This matters because efficiency is an empty virtue until someone names its destination. AI can produce more briefs, more messages, more analysis, and more administrative exhaust than any team could reasonably want. Borgese's Day 0 question creates a different possibility: fewer inherited steps, better judgment, and work shaped around outcomes rather than institutional memory.
His recent argument about humans and machines is equally revealing. AI can generate ideas and examine markets. Humans still decide which problems deserve years of attention, risk, and care. For a technology marketing executive, it is an unfashionably human limit to draw. It also matches the old campaign with the mannequins. Systems should amplify judgment and connection, not bleach them out.
The BlackBerry, then, is more than office archaeology. It marks the distance between one era's constraints and another's habits. Technology becomes obsolete quickly. Process is sneakier; it can survive for years by pretending to be wisdom. Borgese's career has increasingly centered on catching the disguise. The useful question remains compact enough to carry anywhere: would we build it this way today?