The best marketing promise in artificial intelligence may have nothing to do with intelligence. It may be dinner. A chair still warm. A conversation that begins before someone asks whether you are almost done. Valerie Zlotsky arrived at Freed with more than seventeen years in technology marketing and a résumé fluent in scale. Yet the line that drew her to a much younger company was domestic, almost defiantly ordinary: clinicians should be able to get home on time.
Zlotsky is the chief marketing officer of Freed, a company that turns patient conversations into clinical notes and moves those notes into existing workflows. Her brief is to make growth happen, certainly. She speaks comfortably about revenue and pipeline. But she places another phrase in the same breath: clinician love. In most executive vocabularies, affection and attribution live in separate buildings. In hers, they share a desk.
That pairing makes sense when the product is measured in time returned. Freed says its AI scribe can save a clinician more than two hours a day. The company reported 17,000 users and 2 million notes a month when it announced a $30 million Series A in March 2025. By 2026, its site put the number at more than 26,000 clinicians across 1,300 organizations. The figures tell a growth story. The better story begins when the laptop closes.
A lead-generation machine learns bedside manners
The career before Freed was built around sharper edges: acquisition, conversion, channels and sales. Zlotsky worked as a marketing manager at Intermedia and, by 2015, was director of acquisition marketing at eMarketer. One former colleague remembered her as a change agent who remade the website, channel marketing, events and team into a lead-generation machine. After a year or two, he wrote, her programs were driving about half of global new business sales and adding millions of dollars in revenue.
It is the kind of recommendation that makes a performance marketer sit a little straighter. It also describes an operator. Zlotsky did not merely polish messages. She changed the apparatus by which attention became business. Her ideas, the colleague noted, reached beyond campaigns and into decisions about the brand, revenue and profit.
Then came more than eight years at Google Cloud. Freed's announcement of her appointment described that period with an economical verb: accelerating. The company also said she had built and scaled teams at organizations ranging from a $30 million startup to a $45 billion enterprise. Scale, in this telling, was not a trophy. It was a controlled experiment conducted at very different altitudes.
Those altitudes ask different questions of the same craft. At a research company such as eMarketer, a marketing program can be traced closely from channel to lead to sale. At a cloud platform, the product stretches across industries and buying committees, and a campaign must survive many translations before it reaches a decision. Zlotsky emerged from that span calling herself “hands-on” and “AI-forward.” The adjectives belong together. The first keeps the second from floating away.
Her background also carries an international note without turning it into biography. She lists Russian and English at native or bilingual proficiency, along with Spanish. Marketing across a cloud business is partly an exercise in translation even when everyone uses the same language: engineers describe capability, sellers describe urgency and customers describe the day that is going badly. The executive in the middle has to hear all three versions and find the sentence they can share.
“Marketing is a growth driver for the business.”Valerie Zlotsky, introducing her role at Freed
At Freed she brought the machinery closer to the customer. In a short recruiting video, speaking into a microphone small enough to disappear in her hand, Zlotsky laid out a compact theory of the department. Every marketing role, she said, helps drive growth, revenue, sales pipeline, clinician happiness and clinician love. The list moves from financial language to emotional language without pausing to apologize. That is the point.
The long tail is where the people are
Healthcare software offers a marketer a temptation: let the alphabet soup do the talking. AI, EHR, API, HIPAA. A pitch can become a bowl of initials before a human being appears. Zlotsky's public writing about Freed's EHR Push feature does something more useful. She starts with fragmentation. More than 500 electronic health record systems sit in the market, and the long tail is used disproportionately by small and midsize clinics. Those practices are often underserved by technology.
The problem is not abstract interoperability. It is copying, pasting and clicking after the meaningful work is finished. Traditional integrations can demand technical support and weeks of setup. Freed's browser extension takes a different route: map a generated note into the appropriate fields of a web-based record system with one click. A clinician seeing 20 patients a day could save more than three hours a week on note transfer alone, on top of the time saved creating the notes.
The one-click story
Freed captures the visit and drafts the clinical note.
The clinician checks and edits the note in the browser.
Mapped sections move into the existing EHR workflow.
Zlotsky called the launch an “agentic approach” to a thorny issue, then immediately translated the technology back into an operating principle: clinician-first innovation. That phrase only earns its keep if it affects what gets built. Here it leads to a product that works around a fragmented market rather than waiting for the market to become tidy.
This is also a shrewd piece of positioning. The inconveniences that seem too small for a keynote are often large enough to ruin an afternoon. Two minutes of transfer time is forgettable once. Repeated across 20 appointments and five days, it becomes an argument. Zlotsky's marketing instinct is to preserve the irritating detail until the value becomes obvious.
Building a department with the lights on
Joining a growth-stage company as CMO means accepting that the organization chart is a draft. Zlotsky began building across brand design, demand generation, lifecycle marketing, analytics, offline advertising and product marketing. Later came searches for field marketing and a demand-generation leader in New York or San Francisco. Her invitations are energetic and unusually direct: here is the mission, here is the customer, come help.
Public recommendations from earlier colleagues fill in the management style behind those messages. One described her communication as assertive and charismatic, her strategic judgment as influential and her support as steady even through difficult work. Another emphasized the commercial transformation. Together they sketch the sort of executive who can talk about a nurture program in one meeting and the emotional center of a brand in the next.
The hiring video offers a small glimpse of how she makes that combination feel ordinary. There is no stage, no elaborate lighting and no executive desk. Zlotsky stands in a public interior in a bright blue sweater, holding a tiny microphone and talking straight to future colleagues. She calls the team creative, excited, smart, talented and powerful. The sequence is generous, but it also assigns responsibility. If marketing is truly a growth driver, every specialist is close to the commercial result. No role gets to hide behind the word awareness.
Her New York base adds another useful contrast. Freed is headquartered in San Francisco, but the marketing team is being grown on both coasts. Zlotsky has spent her career in and around New York, studied at NYU Stern from 2009 to 2012 and participated in its Graduate Marketing Association. The route to a San Francisco AI company runs through the city that taught an entire industry how to buy attention by the inch.
“Clinicians are superheroes and deserve a game changer in their day-to-day life.”Valerie Zlotsky on joining Freed
A softer unit of measurement
The move from Google Cloud to Freed can be read as a change in company size. It is more interesting as a change in distance. Enterprise cloud marketing often addresses transformation in the aggregate. At Freed, the result fits inside one evening. The user finishes a note sooner. A family gets someone's attention back. A clinician begins the next morning without yesterday's charts waiting.
Zlotsky has said success means putting Freed into the hands of every private practice. The ambition is large, but the customer remains specific. Independent practices do not have unlimited implementation teams or procurement patience. Their buying question is gloriously blunt: will this make tomorrow easier?
A marketer trained in acquisition knows how to produce demand. An operator knows demand is expensive to earn and easy to disappoint. Zlotsky's career has connected the two disciplines for years. The new element at Freed is a product whose most persuasive output is absence: fewer late clicks, fewer copied fields, fewer pieces of work following someone through the front door.
There is wit in that bargain. Artificial intelligence arrives carrying the language of the future, only to discover that the customer would like an ordinary Tuesday evening. Zlotsky's job is to keep the grand technology and the modest desire in the same frame. Pipeline matters. Revenue matters. Love, improbably but usefully, belongs on the dashboard too.