customer-data-platform
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Grace Bacon Is Teaching AI to Remember the Customer
After a career spanning Quartz, Showpad, and BlueConic, Grace Bacon has arrived at a useful conviction: faster marketing means little if the machine has forgotten the person.
Karen Wood Spent 15 Years Teaching Machines to See Customers. Then AI Changed the Assignment.
The Treasure AI CMO began with creative writing, built a career translating complicated software, and arrived at a useful answer to the AI frenzy: keep learning, keep testing, and distrust anyone who claims the map is finished.
Karen Stephens Took the Scenic Route to the C-Suite
Before Karen Stephens sold hotel software, she taught French and sang in a Midtown Sacramento rock band. Her route to Revinate's C-suite is a study in useful detours, listening first, and letting talented people become stars.
Rekha Srivatsan Makes Enterprise Data Feel Human
The engineer-turned-marketer has spent two decades learning how to translate complex technology into stories people can use. Now, as CMO of Salesforce Data 360, she is putting trust, participation and human judgment at the center of the AI-data conversation.
Courtney Keating Wants to Make Data Feel Human
The CMO of Acxiom spent twenty years in mortgages, fintech and real estate learning to translate complicated things into plain language. Now she runs the brand at one of the most data-heavy companies in marketing.
Abhinav Kapur
He spent his nights doing food deliveries and his days reading equity research. Then he built the software his mother-in-law never had - so every restaurant could remember its regulars.
Tejas Manohar
Tejas Manohar is the cofounder and co-CEO of Hightouch, the San Francisco company that helped create the Composable CDP category by bringing customer data platform capabilities directly onto the data warehouse. He moved to San Francisco at 16 to become one of Segment's first ten engineers, then left in 2018 to start Hightouch with Kashish Gupta and Josh Curl. Under his leadership Hightouch has crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue and raised a $150M Series D in April 2026 at a $2.75B valuation, pivoting the company toward AI Decisioning and agentic marketing.
Tony Owens
Tony Alika Owens is the Chief Executive Officer of Amperity, the AI-powered lakehouse customer data platform, a role he took in November 2024. A veteran enterprise software operator with more than 20 years of experience, he spent a decade at Salesforce running field operations in the Americas as the company grew from $1.4 billion to well over $20 billion in revenue, held a group vice president role at Oracle, and served as president of worldwide field operations at LivePerson. He also sits on several boards and is known for a relentless focus on customer value.
Eric Presbrey
Eric Presbrey is the CEO of Leadspace, the B2B customer data platform and revenue automation company whose AI-driven data intelligence powers go-to-market teams at enterprises such as Microsoft, Salesforce and Nvidia. Appointed in April 2025, he brings more than two decades of commercial leadership across marketing technology and data companies, having served as chief revenue officer at PebblePost and Centrical, president of publicly traded Zeta Global, and a member of the Epsilon leadership team that drove 10x growth. Based in Dallas, Texas, he is known for building high-performing go-to-market teams and scaling data-driven revenue engines.
Jason Davis
Jason Davis is the co-founder and CEO of Simon AI (formerly Simon Data), a New York customer data platform that rebranded around agentic AI in 2025. A machine-learning PhD who built search algorithms at Google, he founded the ad-tech startup Adtuitive, sold it to Etsy in 2009, then ran Etsy's search and data teams as the marketplace grew from $180M to a $1B+ run rate. He and grad-school friend Matt Walker started Simon to give marketers direct, governed access to the data trapped inside their own warehouses. The company has raised roughly $117.8M, including a $54M Series D led by Macquarie Group.
Nicholas Kontopoulos
Nicholas Kontopoulos is the Vice President of Marketing for Asia Pacific & Japan at Twilio, the cloud communications platform. Based in Singapore, he brings over 30 years of marketing and business leadership experience across APAC, with prior senior roles at Adobe (DX), SAP, Magento, and Capita. A recognized thought leader in customer experience and AI-driven marketing, he is a frequent speaker, published author, and LinkedIn Power Profile holder known for challenging marketing orthodoxy across the region.
Bryson Koehler
Bryson Koehler is the CEO of Revinate, a hospitality SaaS company specializing in guest data platforms, CRM, and marketing automation for hotels. A career technology executive with deep roots in enterprise data and cloud infrastructure, Koehler previously served as CTO at IBM Watson & Cloud Platform and as EVP/Chief Technology, Product, Data & Analytics Officer at Equifax. He built the legendary Weather Company data platform - processing 4GB of data per second from 40 million mobile devices - before IBM acquired it in 2016 partly due to his work. His return to hospitality with Revinate merges two career obsessions: data engineering at scale and the guest experience.
Chris O'Neill
Chris O'Neill is a veteran technology executive with 25+ years of leadership across Google, Evernote, Glean, and Xero. Best known for leading Evernote's turnaround as CEO (2015-2018) and doubling its user base, he joined GrowthLoop as CEO in August 2024, steering the composable CDP startup through its AI transformation and Series D funding. A Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth) MBA and former Google Canada Managing Director who scaled that business to billions in revenue, O'Neill is also a board director at Gap Inc. and a published contributor to Fast Company and Fortune on the themes of AI, leadership, and compound growth.
Ilya Volodarsky
Ilya Volodarsky co-founded Segment in 2011 with MIT dorm-mates, building it from a failed classroom tool into the definitive customer data platform before selling to Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020. After nine years scaling Segment to 600 employees, he pivoted to the problem of catastrophic wildfires, co-founding Wildfires.org and joining Convective Capital as a partner to back early-stage climate and healthcare startups.