Keri McGhee has made a career of arriving when a familiar industry is learning a new technological language. Travel was moving online. Real estate information was becoming searchable. Insurance was learning to behave like software. Retail messaging was becoming personalized by machines. Now dentistry is adopting artificial intelligence inside its daily workflows. The industries change. Her question stays stubbornly human: what does the customer care about, and what would make them believe?
In August 2026, McGhee began a new chapter as Chief Marketing Officer at Overjet, the dental AI company. It is a fresh title in a category she is still learning, but the underlying assignment is familiar. A product can be technically capable and still need translation. A buyer can understand every feature and still withhold trust. Marketing lives in that distance between comprehension and confidence.
McGhee’s public record is unusually consistent on this point. She likes data, systems, and measurable accountability. She also returns to emotion, instinct, conversation, and the small signals that reveal how a customer really makes a decision. The result is an operating style that treats human connection neither as decoration nor sentiment. It is infrastructure.
The five-industry education
Same puzzle, different rooms
She did not grow up describing marketing as a calling. In a 2026 interview, McGhee said she “fell into it,” then became absorbed by the problem of understanding what makes a customer tick and what can change a perception. Her early technology career began at Expedia, where she led consumer and corporate travel marketing teams. It was useful preparation for a working life spent moving between the person using a product and the organization buying it.
A career through industries being rewritten by software
Zillow became the long apprenticeship. McGhee spent seven years there as the company grew from roughly 380 employees to 8,500. She eventually led a B2B marketing team of more than 60 people responsible for the loyalty and experience of more than 60,000 real estate partners. Scale made the customer impossible to romanticize. Sixty thousand partners do not share one mood, one business model, or one reason to stay. Serving them requires segmentation, feedback, enablement, and a disciplined way to turn anecdotes into choices.
The Zillow lesson became her compass: begin with the customer’s motivations and decision process, and the odds of making a sound choice improve. It followed her to Tom Ferry in 2020, where she became vice president of marketing, and to Ethos Life in 2021, where she was hired to build partnership marketing for an expanding network of agents. In each move, the job sat close to a distribution relationship. McGhee was not merely finding an audience. She was helping a company become useful to people whose own livelihoods depended on the partnership.
“If you put the customer first, if at the core you understand what your customer cares about, what motivates them, what they make decisions based on, you typically come out on the right side.”Keri McGhee
Give customer love a number
McGhee joined Attentive in June 2022 as vice president of events and partner marketing, then rose to Chief Marketing Officer. The company had built strong affection among the retail marketers using its SMS platform. Yet affection by itself was not a growth model. As Attentive expanded into email and AI products, the marketing organization had to evolve from supporting the field to creating demand, deepening adoption, and helping existing customers discover more of the platform.
Her first move as CMO offers a clean lesson in organizational design. Attentive had lifecycle communications, but no customer marketing function with ownership of expansion. McGhee created one and attached it to a gross revenue retention number. The mandate now had an owner and a commercial consequence. Newsletters could still matter, but they were no longer the definition of the work.
She promoted from within, choosing a leader who already knew the customer base. That person later became a vice president overseeing acquisition pipeline, web development, and customer marketing. The sequence matters. McGhee’s version of customer centricity is less slogan than plumbing: an accountable leader, a measurable outcome, direct exposure to buyers, and enough authority to change what the company does next.
Listen where the decision happens
Customer calls, beta conversations, and executive relationships carry signals that a polished dashboard may miss.
Put an owner on the outcome
A community or customer program gains weight when a person owns it and a revenue measure follows it.
Design for different buyers
A founder, a daily practitioner, and a C-suite executive want different formats, cadences, and exchanges of value.
Make learning visible
Experiments should produce evidence, including the inconvenient evidence that a careful plan moved too slowly.
The courage to report a miss
There is a revealing ritual in McGhee’s monthly business reviews. If nobody can name something that failed, produced a lesson, and prompted a pivot, she worries that the team is being too conservative. Psychological safety, in her account, is not a soft perk attached to ambitious work. It is what permits ambitious work to exist.
She applies the same candor to her own calls. Attentive spent much of 2025 taking a measured approach to the story of its expanding product portfolio. The products could mature, the team could build confidence, and the market debut could arrive with every sentence neatly pressed. The market did not wait. The Shopify ecosystem kept moving, awareness moved with it, and Attentive spent the latter part of the year regaining ground.
McGhee’s retrospective was plain: she wished the team had turned the volume up earlier and taken more risk on the product. There is no executive fog in that answer. A cautious launch had a cost. The lesson was not to abolish judgment; it was to recognize that timing is part of judgment.
“If we come to a monthly business review and nobody has anything to share where we failed, we learned, we pivoted, well then we are being way too conservative on how we’re placing our bets.”Keri McGhee
A machine with manners
McGhee pushed Attentive’s 60-person marketing team toward full adoption of AI tools. NotebookLM, Claude, ChatGPT, and internal products became part of the working toolkit. Strong uses were recognized publicly. When a new headcount request appeared, leaders were encouraged to ask whether an agent could first handle some of the work. Adoption was placed inside performance expectations because optional transformation has a habit of remaining optional.
Yet her argument for AI begins with restraint. Clean customer data and a clear brand voice must come first. Start small. Test the experience against human-led work. Let people monitor the system and protect the complicated interactions. Scale only after the result earns confidence. She is interested in automation as an amplifier of good judgment, not a substitute for having any.
That distinction explains why she can be bullish on AI and impatient with the industry’s fixation on counting agents. Customers do not wake up hoping a company has assembled a fashionable technical architecture. They hope the right item arrives, the useful answer appears, or a frustrating moment is resolved with some grace. The machinery matters because of what it makes possible. It is rarely the emotional center of the story.
McGhee’s model of personalization borrows from the attentive store associate who remembers a preference, finds the correct version, and makes the interaction feel singular. Digital systems can reproduce some of that attentiveness at enormous scale. But the conditions are strict: useful data, recognizable voice, contextual timing, and a continuing human sense of what should happen next.
The next translation
Overjet presents a new vocabulary and a familiar communication problem. Its AI supports dental imaging, clinical workflows, administrative processes, and organizational analytics. The people evaluating it include clinicians, practice leaders, large dental organizations, and insurers. Each group enters the conversation with different work to do and different evidence it considers persuasive.
McGhee has worked this shape before. At Attentive, she rejected the idea that one generic customer community could serve everyone. The Shopify founder might prefer a fast WhatsApp exchange and useful introductions. The enterprise practitioner might value a peer forum. A senior executive might choose one focused retreat over a monthly obligation. Community worked when the format respected the person inside the title.
Her task at Overjet will be to find equally specific translations. What does an innovation mean during an ordinary workday? Which result helps a professional make a sound decision? Where does automation remove friction, and where must a person remain visibly responsible? The answers cannot be borrowed wholesale from retail marketing, but the method travels well: listen before simplifying, make the value concrete, and avoid mistaking technical novelty for a customer benefit.
The through line of McGhee’s career is not AI, nor any one industry. It is the work of helping people cross a threshold into something new without asking them to leave their judgment behind. Expedia, Zillow, Ethos, Attentive, and Overjet all occupied moments when software promised to change a familiar behavior. Promises are easy copy. Trust is accumulated proof.
A good marketer can make technology sound impressive. McGhee’s more useful ambition is to make it feel understood. That requires metrics and stories, speed and restraint, experiments and admissions. It requires a machine with manners and a team willing to say when the machine has missed the point. Her new industry will supply new nouns. The operating system is already installed.