Before Peter Mullen learned to market artificial intelligence, he learned the honest arithmetic of a swimming pool. The clock is unmoved by charm. A length is a length, the wall arrives when it arrives, and improvement tends to hide inside thousands of repetitions before appearing as a sliver of time. At Dartmouth, where Mullen became the swim team’s most valuable performer and a Presidential Scholar, that discipline was daily life. Later he crossed the English Channel at a pace that ranked among the fastest of its era. The achievement was dramatic. The method was decidedly less so: preparation, rhythm, adjustment, repeat.
That rhythm has followed him into a career that otherwise refuses to stay in one lane. Mullen is a journalist and an author. He led public relations at Netflix around its IPO years, worked on major product introductions at Comcast, moved through financial technology and customer-experience companies, and became chief marketing officer of Kore.ai in 2026. The industries range from red envelopes to autonomous software agents. His recurring job has been to explain a consequential change while the language around it is still being invented.
First, learn to watch
Mullen’s most revealing credential may be the one least likely to appear in an enterprise software pitch: he spent roughly two years watching swimmers train. Gold in the Water, published in 2001, followed athletes at the Santa Clara Swim Club as they pursued places at the Sydney Olympics. Its cast included breaststrokers Kurt Grote and Tom Wilkens, friends pulled into direct competition, and coach Dick Jochums, a volcanic figure pursuing his own return to prominence.
The book works because Mullen understood that the race is only the receipt. The purchase is made much earlier, in predawn practices, private bargains and the awkward chemistry between talent and obsession. He wrote with the technical confidence of a former collegiate and professional swimmer, but the reporting kept widening toward the people. The result earned a place among The London Times’ ten best sports books of 2001 and a starred review from Booklist. More than two decades later, swimmers still send around photographs of copies faded by sun and softened by pool water.
One line from the book gave the 2021 documentary The Water Is My Sky its title. That is a neat afterlife for a sentence, though perhaps an unsurprising one. Mullen has always been interested in the point where private labor becomes public meaning.
The red-envelope years
Netflix in the early 2000s was another endurance story disguised as convenience. DVDs moved through the post; broadband hinted at a different future; the company had to become large in one medium while preparing to migrate to another. Mullen handled public-relations leadership around the company’s IPO period. He was close enough to see a useful paradox: a company can communicate a simple promise while its operating reality changes underneath it.
His later work at Comcast put him around another set of large product launches. The lesson hardened into a specialty. New technology does not introduce itself. Somebody must decide which part matters, to whom, and in what language. A message is not a coat of paint applied after the engineers leave. Done properly, it tells product, sales and customers what sort of value the company intends to create.
One current beneath three careers
There is a funny old Dartmouth story that catches Mullen’s position between athlete and narrator. During an Olympic broadcast, an announcer explained the conditioning of synchronized swimmers by noting that Mullen, already a world-class marathon swimmer, had managed only an hour of their workout. A classmate heard this in a biker bar in Willits, California, announced that he knew Mullen and expected ridicule. Instead, the room had watched the same astonishing display. The patrons bought a round. One feat had made another intelligible.
When the customer started talking back
By 2019, Mullen had moved closer to the contact center, first leading marketing at VXI Global Solutions and then joining Payactiv in 2021. At Payactiv, his remit included customer marketing, lead generation, acquisition and product marketing. He described the job in moral as well as commercial terms, talking about financial inequity and the need to give workers more stability through access to wages they had already earned.
In 2022 he became CMO of Interactions, which built intelligent virtual assistants for customer service. The role brought together several strands of his career: technology, language, and the small indignities that occur when a system fails to understand a person. In one interview he cited a survey finding that 33 percent of people had sworn at a robot, then added that the number sounded low. It was a joke with a product brief tucked inside it.
His preferred formulation was AI plus a human in the loop. Most routine conversations could move through automation. When a request became layered or ambiguous, a person could nudge it forward. Mullen’s North Star, as he described it, was trust and confidence across the buyer’s journey. He did not treat the human as a nostalgic concession. The human was part of the design.
Five turns in one long story
- Elite and marathon swimming made repetition measurable.
- Gold in the Water turned Olympic preparation into narrative.
- Netflix made a new consumer habit understandable.
- VXI, Payactiv and Interactions put the customer conversation at center stage.
- Kore.ai moved the question from helpful bots to governed agent systems.
The real and the rehearsed
Mullen arrived at Kore.ai in May 2026, alongside the opening of its strategic Bay Area headquarters in San Mateo. The timing suited his taste for inflection points. Companies had proved that generative AI could produce arresting demos. Now they were discovering the expensive distance between a demo and a dependable system.
Kore.ai’s own survey of more than 400 American IT business leaders found 72 percent reporting that their AI agents operated with unmanaged risk, including financial and compliance exposure. Mullen’s response focused on architecture and sequence: agents should be built, deployed, managed and improved as one governed system, rather than assembled as disconnected experiments with controls added at the end.
He had already announced the new role in more theatrical language: “Everything is Tumult. Everything is Opportunity.” He praised Kore.ai’s decade of infrastructure work and argued that the coming year would separate “the real from the rehearsed.” The capitalization and cadence belong to a marketer enjoying himself. The substance belongs to the swimmer. Conditions change. Preparation is exposed. You find out whether the stroke holds.
At Kore.ai, Mullen now oversees an expanded integrated demand-generation organization. His public case for the company emphasizes governance, observability and lifecycle control. These are not romantic words. That is precisely their value. Enterprise software eventually reaches the unglamorous tests: permissions, audit trails, context, failure recovery and the moment a customer asks a question nobody predicted.
Memory is a form of manners
Mullen’s recent writing makes his larger argument plain. Customer experience is continuity. A person should be able to move from chat to voice without restating the entire case. A system that knows a name but forgets the journey is performing a database query, not offering understanding. The useful intelligence lives in the history of the interaction: what happened, why it happened and what should happen next.
It is an appealingly old-fashioned standard for new machinery. Good service remembers you. Good reporting notices what others skip. Good marketing preserves enough complexity to remain true while finding a shape simple enough to travel. Even the nickname “P.H.” feels like an editor has tightened it for the page.
Outside corporate work, Mullen has served education and social-impact organizations in the Bay Area, including After-School All-Stars and Full Circle Fund. His record also includes three Ironman finishes. These details resist a tidy moral, which is welcome. People are more interesting when they exceed the thesis assigned to them.
Still, one pattern is hard to miss. Whether the subject is an Olympic hopeful, a streaming service or an AI agent, Mullen looks for the work beneath the performance. He asks what will hold when novelty fades and conditions become difficult. The answer is rarely a grand gesture. It is context carried forward, judgment kept close, and another clean stroke before the wall.