A customer calls because the internet has failed. First comes the chatbot. Then tier one. Then tier two. At every stop, the customer tells the same small tragedy again. By tier three, the router may be the least irritating thing in the house. Rebecca Stone uses this familiar ordeal to explain where she thinks artificial intelligence belongs: carrying the history forward, so the next human arrives informed.
It is an unusually modest assignment for a technology that is forever being asked to reinvent civilization. Stone, Plume’s Chief Customer and Marketing Officer, would first like it to remember what everyone has already said. Automate the simple work, she argues, and people have more attention for the complicated, relationship-driven work. It is a view shaped less by speculative demos than by two decades spent connecting marketing systems, sales teams, product data, and customer conversations.
In August 2026, Plume put that philosophy directly into its organization chart. Stone had arrived as Chief Marketing Officer in January. Eight months later, the company added Customer Success to her brief and created the CCMO position. She now owns a long arc: brand awareness, onboarding, adoption, retention, and expansion. The person helping to make the promise is also responsible for what happens after the contract is signed.
A reporter’s instinct, redirected
Stone expected to become a journalist. She loved writing, studied communications at UC Santa Barbara, and discovered that journalism itself was not the fit. Marketing offered another use for the same reflexes: listen closely, make sense of unruly material, and explain it without sanding away the meaning. She has called the field a mixture of art and science. The science has become more precise as data has multiplied; the art remains the part no spreadsheet can quite produce.
Her first marketing work made “customer focus” inconveniently literal. She moved into retention and acquisition, traveled around the country to train customers, and asked why they cancelled. Those answers became campaigns intended to improve adoption. Long before customer data platforms acquired glossy diagrams, Stone was collecting the raw material face to face. The habit survived the technology around it.
Her career then ran through several layers of the modern internet business. Occam Networks and Calix put her near broadband equipment and service providers. DataSift dealt in social data. LiveRamp connected identities and advertising data. Meraki sold cloud-managed networking. Cisco brought the scale of a global enterprise. Plume returns her to the service-provider world, now with AI, telemetry, cybersecurity, and home Wi-Fi folded into the subscriber experience.
“There’s nothing more valuable than hearing from your customers, learning from them and turning those insights into action that helps them win.”Rebecca Stone, on taking the expanded role at Plume
The growth engine had plumbing underneath
Stone joined LiveRamp around 2014, when its demand operation was young. A later account of that period describes two sales development representatives, a funnel that was not reliably feeding leads, and a technology stack with plenty of growing to do. Five years later, the system included roughly 40 tools, 20 sales development representatives, an in-house data lake, and models connecting marketing spend to expected revenue. The demand engine accounted for a reported 60 percent of sales pipeline.
The numbers are tidy. The work was not. At one point, campaign analysis could require as many as 12 separate reports. LiveRamp and its advisers blended data from Salesforce, Marketo, Pendo, and many other systems into a common view. The achievement was partly analytical, partly domestic: make the tools agree about what had happened in the house.
The same preference for connected evidence appeared when Stone moved to Cisco Meraki in 2019. She doubled the global marketing team to 150, led a rebrand and messaging shift, and grew marketing-sourced pipeline contribution to 35 percent. Integration mattered alongside growth. Meraki was already a Cisco business; Stone later moved into broader Cisco networking responsibilities, carrying processes and technology from the business unit into the larger organization.
Eight platforms walk into a data lake
By 2025, Stone was leading Cisco’s global revenue marketing organization. Her remit connected integrated campaigns, planning, marketing technology, digital channels, and a virtual demand center that qualified leads. The elegant description was a journey from campaign to digital interaction to human follow-up. The less elegant reality included eight marketing automation platforms that needed consolidation.
Stone’s answer began with a shared data layer. Put information from the various platforms into one lake, then let teams use the same underlying record in different ways. Her operations leader called this the “democratization of the data.” A field marketer could ask a conversational tool about an account; a data scientist could look for deeper patterns. Both would begin from the same evidence.
Her favorite illustration of bad data is deliberately unglamorous. One system stores first and last name together. Another separates them. Capitalization changes. Soon “Rebecca Stone” appears to be four customers. Reconciliation can be a simple join, yet the benefit travels upward and outward: a customer-success manager gets the history before a call, while an executive gets an intelligible view of the account base.
This is why Stone’s enthusiasm for AI comes with a raised eyebrow. At Cisco, she encouraged teams to use internal AI tools and explored models that could make enterprise data conversational. She also advised asking models where their answers came from. On outbound sales automation, she was cautious: “I don’t know if I’m quite ready to make that leap yet.” The useful dividing line is not machine versus person. It is context versus confidence theater.
A two-month webinar learns to sprint
Data was only half of Cisco’s speed problem. Work moved in a waterfall: copy, then design, then editing, then production. Each handoff waited politely for the last, and politeness is expensive at enterprise scale. Stone’s organization adopted an agile model in which disciplines worked concurrently. Within nine months, webinar production fell from two months to two weeks. Email production dropped from three or four weeks to less than one.
She did not present the change as a frictionless victory. It required new habits, education, architecture, and repeated communication. Her team created an 18-month marketing curriculum, required of everyone regardless of previous training. Announcements also had to be made more than once. People take leave. New employees arrive. An email sent on Tuesday does not become institutional memory by Wednesday.
Stone made a point of crediting the project-management group that kept this parallel system from becoming a tangle. She called its members the lifeblood of the operation and thanked them for deadline enforcement that can be “fairly thankless.” It is a revealing aside. Leaders often collect the photograph after a transformation; Stone named the people holding the stopwatch.
At Plume, the promise meets the proof
Plume sells an open, hardware-agnostic platform to internet service providers. Its software sits in the mundane but intimate territory of the connected home, where a video call, a security alert, a game, and a temperamental appliance compete for the same network. The company says its platform manages roughly 600 million devices in 40 million homes for more than 450 ISPs across 58 countries. That produces an ocean of telemetry. Stone’s job is to help turn it into action customers can recognize.
The expanded role makes organizational sense when viewed against her earlier work. At LiveRamp, the question was whether campaign data could predict revenue. At Meraki, it was whether a brand could grow while being integrated into a much larger company. At Cisco, it was whether thousands of marketers could share data and move faster. At Plume, the same concerns meet at a single door: does the experience delivered after the sale support the promise made before it?
Customer training, retention, and acquisition in broadband technology.
Built demand generation and marketing systems during LiveRamp’s expansion.
Led Meraki marketing, then broader Cisco networking and revenue marketing work.
Joined Plume as Chief Marketing Officer.
Added Customer Success as Plume’s Chief Customer and Marketing Officer.
Stone is now learning a new discipline in public. Customer success had not previously been her formal function, though customer journeys had occupied her for years. She describes team building as both exhausting and energizing: learn the dynamics, identify what needs repair, and create something durable. Two books remain close at hand, Made to Stick for ideas and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team for the rooms where those ideas must survive.
A Colin Powell quotation about preparation, work, and learning from failure has hung on her wall for years. It suits an operator whose most persuasive stories concern databases, production calendars, and support handoffs. There are grander ways to discuss intelligence. Stone’s version begins with a properly joined name field and ends with a customer who does not have to repeat herself. Between those points lies the less theatrical business of being useful.