On Shirley Macbeth's first day as Forrester's chief marketing officer, the office vanished. She joined in March 2020, just as cars stayed in driveways and workplace life collapsed into a grid of faces. The ordinary tools of a new executive - corridor conversations, an open door, the quiet intelligence gathered before a meeting begins - were suddenly unavailable. Macbeth had been hired to activate a brand and increase demand. First, she had to learn how to build trust through a camera.
She adapted by becoming more deliberate about communication and more explicit about connection. Then she noticed something hopeful in the new arrangement. On a video call, every employee occupied the same-size square. Headquarters did not automatically get the largest seat. Distance did not determine proximity to the conversation. Macbeth wondered whether companies could preserve that equality when conference rooms reopened. It was a small observation with a large implication: the design of a room changes whose ideas travel.
That episode captures the useful tension running through her career. Macbeth works in fields that reward scale, complexity and specialized language, but her instinct is to pull the conversation back toward people making choices. Payments software has to be trusted. Research has to guide action. Artificial intelligence has to improve a workflow. A brand has to be carried by employees. Her work is less about making complicated things sound simple than deciding what the complication is for.
“Bold decisions can happen at any level.”Shirley Macbeth
A translator enters technology
Macbeth studied English and French at Colby College, graduating magna cum laude in 1993. The double major reads almost like advance notice. Her professional life would be spent moving between languages: engineering and commerce, product and customer, expert and executive. She began in public relations at Schwartz Communications, later part of MSL, where technical companies needed stories that could survive outside their own buildings.
The assignments grew with the industry. At Sybase, she became a senior director of marketing for an enterprise software company. At Yankee Group Research, she served as vice president of marketing in a business built on explaining shifts in technology and communications. In October 2011, she joined ACI Worldwide as senior vice president of corporate marketing. She remained through March 2020, nearly nine years inside the machinery of electronic payments.
Public relations at Schwartz Communications, turning technical work into public language.
Marketing leadership at Sybase and Yankee Group Research.
Senior Vice President, Corporate Marketing at ACI Worldwide.
Chief Marketing Officer at Forrester.
Brand and marketing leader, then Chief Marketing Officer, at EXL.
Payments are a revealing school for a marketer. The infrastructure is mostly invisible when it works. The language is technical. Buyers include banks, merchants, processors and other institutions with little appetite for ambiguity. A marketer cannot substitute a clever campaign for operational credibility. Macbeth's long ACI tenure placed her at the point where an intricate product portfolio, a global market and a high-trust customer relationship had to become one coherent story.
The champagne test
Forrester offered a different kind of challenge. It sold advice to the same leaders Macbeth worked among. A research and advisory company could tell marketers how to build a demand engine, focus on customers and measure outcomes. The awkward question was whether it could apply that counsel to itself. Macbeth liked to call the exercise “drinking our own champagne.” The phrase is playful, but the standard behind it is exacting. Advice becomes credible when the adviser accepts its tradeoffs.
Soon after arriving, she examined Forrester's marketing spend using the company's own benchmarks. The analysis suggested that the company was underinvesting. It gave her a way to argue for resources in the language of evidence, not departmental desire. She also used Forrester's demand frameworks to follow marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced opportunities, and its customer experience index to locate gaps between the promise of customer obsession and the customer's experience of the firm.
The most vivid act of simplification concerned the portfolio itself. Forrester had accumulated well over 100 products and permutations. The new portfolio introduced during Macbeth's tenure offered 15 choices organized around five top-line buyer audiences. The numbers make the result look tidy. The process was anything but. A smaller portfolio required product, sales and marketing to agree on whom they would serve, which offers belonged together and where they would stop investing.
Macbeth described saying no as both scary and liberating. Some existing business could continue, but the company would no longer chase every possibility with equal intention. This is where positioning stops being a word exercise. A slogan can promise focus while the operating model continues to spray effort across the map. Genuine focus moves budgets, changes systems and disappoints someone who preferred an option that no longer leads the list.
Employees carry the promise
Forrester had another integration underway. Its acquisition of SiriusDecisions brought together two strong identities and a loyal community built around B2B frameworks such as the demand waterfall. “Bold at Work” was ready when Macbeth arrived, but activating it meant more than placing a phrase behind executives on video calls. The combined company needed a product that supported the promise, systems that could follow the new demand model and employees who understood their place in the story.
Macbeth's advice from that period is unusually concrete: align product, sales and marketing around a small set of targets, and do not underestimate employees as part of the brand value proposition. Employees deliver the work. They also explain it to the market, formally and informally. Internal orientation is therefore not the soft launch before the real campaign. It is part of the product.
“Don't underestimate the importance of employees as part of your brand value proposition.”Shirley Macbeth
Her approach to planning has the same bias toward visible choices. She has described a “Plan on a Page” as a simple map of goals and strategies whose elegance is earned through prioritization and negotiation. The page is not valuable because it is short. It is valuable because the arguments happened before the page was finished. A team can see what matters, and just as importantly, what did not survive the edit.
Making AI real
Macbeth joined EXL in 2025 as Head of Brand and Marketing. She now serves as Chief Marketing Officer. The move placed her inside another company whose capabilities are easier to list than to explain: data, analytics, artificial intelligence and digitally enabled operations across industries such as insurance, banking, retail and energy. The marketing problem is familiar. Buyers do not need one more abstract promise about transformation. They need to understand where the technology enters the work and what changes after it does.
That is the premise of Make It Real, the EXL podcast she hosts. The series places Macbeth across from executives who have tried to move AI beyond the pilot. Her questions keep returning to operational terrain: What use case earned support? How healthy was the underlying data? Which teams had to align? What happened to the human role? How did the organization manage fatigue as work changed?
In a 2026 conversation with David Anderson of CNO Financial Group, the subject was organizing unstructured data and improving customer service. Macbeth drew out three practical themes: align stakeholders before adopting a tool, show people the larger purpose of a changed workflow, and resist novelty for its own sake. Later episodes examined agentic AI, ways to work around rather than replace core systems, and the scaling of AI in service organizations.
Her interest in conversation predates the new series. While discussing B2B customer events during her Forrester years, Macbeth described the CMO as a host who brings people together and uses the gathering to collect feedback. The point was not simply to fill a room or deliver a polished program. Marketing and customer experience teams could listen to clients and invite them into the next iteration of a product. She was equally direct about what gets lost when an event becomes passive content. In virtual formats, an audience can leave for email or a chat window without crossing the room. Quality and participation have to earn their attention. A useful event, in her telling, is a working loop: convene people, hear what they say, and let the response alter what the company makes next.
The format suits her. A podcast host has to make expertise travel without flattening it. She has to listen for the decision hiding inside the technical account. Her career has moved from telling technology stories to running the systems that produce them, and now to questioning other operators about what survived implementation. The common thread is translation with consequences.
The decision beneath the story
Macbeth's public persona is measured, collaborative and gently amused by the absurdities of executive work. She can joke about upgrading from Listerine to champagne while describing a rigorous internal test. She can call a simplification liberating and scary in the same breath. Colleagues have publicly described her as a clear thinker, a mentor and a leader who gives teams room to grow. Those qualities fit the operating method visible in her interviews: use evidence, invite the relevant voices, narrow the choices and leave people able to act.
This method matters more as AI expands the distance between what a company can demonstrate and what it can reliably deploy. New tools arrive quickly. Workflows, incentives and trust change slowly. A marketing leader in that environment can decorate the gap with larger claims, or help the organization close it. Macbeth's questions favor the second path.
The same-size square from 2020 remains a useful image. Technology changed the room. Macbeth looked past the novelty of the screen and asked what the arrangement did to participation. Her work at Forrester asked what a crowded portfolio did to a buyer. Her work at EXL asks what AI does inside a workflow. Each time, the technology is only the beginning. The real subject is the human decision on the other side.