Profile · Marketing Leadership
How the marketing chief of the company behind a big slice of the internet talked a room full of engineers into caring about their why - and why she now thinks AI decides which brands get remembered.
You have used Kim Salem-Jackson's work today. You almost certainly do not know it. When a video loaded without buffering, when a bank login held, when a retailer survived a traffic spike it never advertised - a lot of that runs across Akamai, the company she markets. It sits under a large share of the daily internet, and it does its best work when you notice nothing at all. Which is a strange problem to hand a marketer: sell the thing designed to be invisible.
Salem-Jackson has spent more than twenty years in that gap between what a company does and what people feel about it. She is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Akamai Technologies, a business with roughly $4 billion in annual revenue and about 11,000 employees, headquartered up the river from her in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her remit is broad - brand, purpose, corporate communications, product marketing, field marketing, digital. The through-line is narrower than the title suggests. She keeps asking the same question about the machinery she represents: why should anyone care?
The missing why
When she stepped into the CMO seat in 2021, she noticed something that a lot of technical companies never quite face. Akamai could tell you exactly what it did. It could not, in a single human sentence, tell you why. The mission was a spec sheet. The purpose - the reason the work matters to a person who will never read a spec sheet - was missing.
She could have written a tagline and moved on. Instead she treated it as a real problem with a real process. She got the CEO on board first, then built a coalition across the company, pulling engineers, salespeople and executives into the same conversation until they agreed on an answer none of them could have written alone. The result was a line that frames the work at the scale it actually operates: Akamai exists to make life better for billions of people, billions of times a day. Underneath it, a mission that finally sounds like something a person would say out loud - to power and protect life online.
“We spent years building our brand, but if we don't guide how AI models find and share our content, we're essentially giving up control over our own reputation.”
Kim Salem-JacksonThe important part is not the sentence. It is that she refused to hand it down. A purpose you announce is a poster. A purpose a coalition argues its way into is behavior. That distinction is the whole reason it stuck, and it is the kind of distinction you only reach for if you started, as she did, as a writer rather than an engineer.
Akamai's purpose, built from the top down and the bottom up
A storyteller who learned the numbers
Her degree is in journalism and mass communications, from the University of South Carolina. That is not a common line on a tech CMO's resume, and she has never treated it as a curiosity. The instinct to find the human angle in a pile of facts is a reporter's instinct, and she carried it into an industry that often forgets there is a person on the other end of the dashboard.
The path ran through enterprise software. Before Akamai she led worldwide marketing and business development at Informatica, a data-management company, which is roughly where the second half of her toolkit came from. She is relentlessly data-driven, and she means it in a specific way - not analytics for its own sake, but analytics as proof that marketing moves the business. Inside Akamai she rose from Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Corporate Communications, running field marketing, customer and channel marketing, events, communications and sales development, before the CMO title arrived.
Put the two halves together and you get her actual argument, the one she has been making for years: marketing is a growth engine, not a cost center. Prove the impact with numbers, then earn the memory with story. Most people are good at one side. She has spent a career insisting the job is both.
Betting that AI is the new gatekeeper
The part of her thinking that feels most alive right now has nothing to do with logos. It is about who tells your story when you are not in the room. For most of the internet's history the answer was a search box. Salem-Jackson thinks that era is closing and a new one has opened, where AI models summarize, frame and recommend brands before a human ever clicks anything. She calls the discipline of shaping that Generative Engine Optimization - GEO - and she has been one of the earlier corporate voices willing to say it out loud.
Her worry is concrete. A brand spends decades building a reputation, and then a model with no obligation to it decides how that reputation gets described to millions of people. If you do not guide how the model finds and reads your content, you have quietly handed over the narrative. So she did the thing marketers rarely do with a new idea. She ran the experiment on Akamai's own website first, before selling anyone else on it, and used the results as the argument.
“The most GEO-optimized voices will win. The tech companies that will win will master how AI finds and frames their story - because speed matters.”
Kim Salem-JacksonThere is a tidy symmetry here that she clearly enjoys. Akamai's business is being the fast, reliable layer between content and the person who wants it. Her marketing thesis is that brands now need a fast, reliable layer between their story and the machine that will retell it. The company sells speed. She is arguing speed matters for reputation too.
How a brand gets found — then and now
Authenticity, on purpose
The obvious risk in all of this is that a company optimizes itself into something hollow - machine-readable and soulless. Salem-Jackson has been vocal that the answer is the opposite. She has written about principles for authentic AI, the idea being that automating how your story travels only works if the story underneath is genuinely yours. The tooling is new. The requirement that a brand actually mean something is not.
You can see why the purpose project and the AI project are the same project for her. Both come down to controlling meaning at scale. One did it inside the company, aligning thousands of people around a why. The other does it outside, shaping how an indifferent model describes that why to the world. A weaker version of her job would pick one. She keeps insisting the interesting work lives where they meet.
“By testing this technology on our own site first, we proved that brands can reclaim their narrative.”
Kim Salem-JacksonThe record, and what's next
The recognition has followed the work. She was a CMO Award winner in 2021, has been named among the Top 100 B2B CMOs, and has been counted among the top women in tech in Boston. She is a founding member of the Forbes Communications Council and sits on the board of the Akamai Foundation, the company's philanthropic arm - the same purpose she stitched into the brand, given somewhere to go. On stage at industry summits she tends to press the same practical point: fix the fundamentals - team structure, tech stack, retention - before you reach for the shiny AI capability, because the tool amplifies whatever it is pointed at, including a mess.
What comes next, in her telling, is an AI-fluent marketing organization - one where data, brand and storytelling are not three departments but one motion, delivering something faster and more personal on the other end. It is an ambitious way to describe a job that, for the public, still means making invisible infrastructure feel like it matters. She has been closing that gap for two decades. The tools keep changing. The question she starts from does not: why should anyone care, and who gets to say so.
For a marketer who represents the plumbing of the internet, that turns out to be the whole game. Find the human reason behind the machine. Then make sure that reason survives contact with whatever tells the story next.