The person running communications at a $23 billion software company thinks like a beat reporter on deadline.

Stacy Martinet arrived at Adobe in 2016 with something most communications executives lack: a journalist's distrust of spin. She spent nearly a decade at The New York Times during its most turbulent digital reinvention - not watching from the sidelines but building the strategy, including the company's first social media playbook. The Chairman's Award she received there was not for playing it safe.

Then came Mashable. As CMO, she helmed the brand through explosive user growth, three funding rounds, and the messy, exhilarating business of turning a tech blog into a media empire. She also held the Global Social Good Summit together, because at Mashable, mission and marketing were never separate departments.

At Adobe, Martinet oversees a 200-plus-person team responsible for every stakeholder communication the company sends into the world: press strategy, marketing, events, social media, and corporate social responsibility. The job description sounds large because it is. She does it anyway.

What she keeps coming back to, in interviews and on stage at Cannes Lions and Adobe Summit, is something simple: creativity and AI fluency are not competing skills. The people who master both - the designers who understand prompt engineering, the marketers who can build a campaign and iterate it with a model - are the ones she's hiring.

She is also a patent holder, for viral media content. It's the kind of detail that sits unexpectedly on a communications resume and tells you something about how she approaches every problem.