Episode #349:
Alysha McCree, Head of Marketing at FPT Americas, explains why simply claiming AI leadership no longer sets a company apart. She shares how domain knowledge, governance, and meaningful outcomes can demonstrate real value. Alysha discusses adapting marketing as buyers use AI to evaluate vendors and rely on outside sources for trust. She also describes using AI and company data to improve decisions, equip teams, and assess future events.
“The whole point of it all isn’t that you just put yourself out there as an AI leader. You really have to prove it by showing what you do differently and enabling your business to do something differently. It’s looking for those opportunities to go beyond just execution into the strategic.” – Alysha McCree
Alysha explains how B2B marketers can connect AI to measurable outcomes. She shares how specialized knowledge, governance, and results can prove AI leadership as buyers use AI and outside sources to evaluate vendors. She also describes an event intelligence database that compares potential opportunities with historical costs, ROI, and team feedback to guide investment decisions.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:10] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. We’ve got a very special guest on here today, Alysha McCree. Now, Alysha, you are the head of marketing at FPT Americas, and that’s a huge job, by the way. Congratulations. I’ll have you explain a little bit more about what you’re doing there. But what I loved about your background was that not only are you a marketer who has covered everything from branding to PR to AI adoption and execution, and we’re going to talk a lot about that today.
[00:00:42] Steve MacDonald: The role of unlocking value in our business through AI and personalization is something that a lot of us have done a lot in terms of being more efficient at what we’re producing, but how we produce that and connect it to business value in a way that others aren’t doing it. It’s very easy to have AI write a bunch of content for us. That can work against us in terms of how we’re posturing and positioning the brand and creating awareness and trust in the marketplace.
[00:01:11] Steve MacDonald: We’re going to unpack a lot of that today, and what was interesting about your background, I thought as well, is that you spent eight years as a teacher in Nicaragua, and you learned Spanish. You and I were just talking about how a big part of marketing is telling the story and educating our audiences. I love the background. The professional background, both as a teacher and as a marketer. But if you wouldn’t mind just explaining a little bit more about your background and what you’re doing currently before we get started.
[00:01:42] Alysha McCree: Sure, sure. So first I want to say it’s great to be here, Steve. Thank you so much for inviting me to join you today. As you mentioned, my name is Alysha McCree. My journey has been primarily in marketing. I came out of college and studied marketing, went immediately into it, specifically for field marketing on a global level, supporting a global team. Then over the years, I’ve just had the opportunity to add more and more of those marketing tools to my toolbox, and I’ve had, like you said, the opportunity to do really all facets, all channels of marketing. It’s been an exciting journey. Now working for a company that is globally based out of Vietnam, it’s an even more interesting experience because we’re taking the stories and the identity of a Vietnamese-headquartered company and globalizing that here for the Americas market.
[00:02:31] Alysha McCree: It’s been fantastic, and on the education side of things, as you said, having that chance to go to Nicaragua and spend eight years there, it was amazing. Built up a program for English-speaking students there at the school, and then eventually became the director of education, and you’re right. It’s amazing how much you can tie together education and teaching into marketing. So I guess you can really use all facets of life to support marketing journeys.
[00:03:00] Steve MacDonald: Well, Fantastic. Here’s where I’d love to start out is you called it the AI leadership challenge, right? In standing out when everyone is trying to lead. We always try to lead, right? It’s called thought leadership for a reason, and positioning ourselves as leaders and educators in the marketplace, not just vendors, but trusted advisors to our clients and our prospects. So how do you see the AI leadership challenge today, and how has that changed, and what can we do about it?
[00:03:30] Alysha McCree: Sure. AI leadership is interesting now because everyone claims to be an AI leader, right? It really has become table stakes. The whole point of it all isn’t that you just put yourself out there as an AI leader. You really have to prove it by showing what you do differently and enabling your business to do something different, especially on the marketing side. So I think back to the internet and internet companies. At one point, that was a differentiator. People really stood out. But now the internet has evolved so much that there isn’t much differentiation between those things.
[00:04:10] Alysha McCree: The same thing is happening with AI. It’s embedded not just in how businesses do work, but also in how consumers do their day-to-day lives. So now we have to figure out how to differentiate ourselves, not just based on capabilities or these cool bells and whistles that we do now with AI. It’s all about creating meaningful outcomes, and that’s how you separate yourself. That’s how you build trust. So with marketing, we’re absolutely challenged by not just calling ourselves AI leaders, but being able to prove how we lead and how that’s different from how others lead in this space.
[00:04:45] Steve MacDonald: It makes so much sense, right? The difference here, and it’s what’s interesting, was part of the conversation we had before, when we talked about leadership and how we do that through AI. The actual models themselves are a commodity. I can have the exact same Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini model that you can. We can both get the newest and the greatest. The AI tool itself isn’t what’s going to differentiate us. We have to go beyond the tool as a commodity in providing value to our clients. And so how do you think about unlocking that commodity?
[00:05:20] Alysha McCree: Absolutely. No, that’s a good point. Yeah, saying that you have AI or that you leverage the XYZ model is not a true value proposition. We can’t use that in our marketing. So instead, I think the question we have to answer, especially as marketers, is: what can we add to the AI journey? That’s the differentiation point. What can FPT, for example, do that maybe someone else can’t, one of our competitors can’t? And that has to come through having maybe specialized domain knowledge or proprietary accelerators, a level of security and governance that maybe others are missing, integration of some sort, or a speed to value or scalability that others can’t offer. But the ability to just say that, “Hey, we have AI,” is not, you know, real differentiation above just the technology. It’s the discussion around the AI and how that enables businesses that becomes more important.
[00:06:20] Steve MacDonald: I love that because now what you’re doing is you’re actually becoming not just an AI user or deployer; you’re actually becoming an AI advisor. I talk to C-suite executives all the time, and they’re getting asked by their boards, their CEOs, “What’s your AI strategy?” and for a lot of us, we get more efficient, and we produce things more efficiently, and we can review things more efficiently, but the kind of things all the way through governance and guardrails and proprietary knowledge and how do we train the LLM actually and not just accept the commodity that the basic model itself.
[00:06:58] Steve MacDonald: Last year MIT did a study, and they said that even as these new models come out, half of the value comes from the prompt, like designing the prompt right. What we ask, what we put in, and how we ask is just as important as the AI tool itself. So I know as an educator, training is a big part of how you think. How we train our teams to be able to actually utilize these and not just assume they’re AI literate. They’re good prompt engineers. They know exactly what to do. Do you spend time with your own team and internally on how to utilize the AI, and then is that something that can help in terms of the value we provide to our clients as well?
[00:07:48] Alysha McCree: That’s a great question. My team and I, we do spend time talking, actually a lot of time talking about AI and learning from one another. I feel like AI, of course, we are beyond experimentation in a lot of ways, but I still feel that as the models improve and things change, there’s still going to be a bit of experimentation that’s happening. What we do is individually experiment, and we learn, and then we come together, and we teach each other, and we try to build documentation, prompt libraries of our own that we find really work well in order to help each other leverage AI tools better or do better prompting, to your point.
[00:08:28] Alysha McCree: I think we can take those types of things and also apply it forward to our clients in that the way that our company has been standardizing, for example, how they’re augmenting our software engineers to be able to develop code faster or to be able to work through the software development life cycle more efficiently, so we help clients go to market faster or speed their time to value, all of that is important. We’re all working under that same premise of ensuring that, okay, standardize, document, experiment, and then, or maybe I should switch the order of that, experiment, document, standardize, and then to continually be in a position of optimizing that as well is the best that you can do. I know my team, and I do it on a very regular basis, and I know our organization overall follows that same pathway.
[00:09:18] Steve MacDonald: What I love about that, and I’ve talked to others about that, is that they’ll even have, like, competitions internally, and what that really says to me, and what you’re talking about, is a culture of experimentation. A culture of what can we do? How can we push this? What value can we create? And that’s going to open up new opportunities. And everybody these days wants to be more AI literate anyways, and keeping our talent and retaining talent is huge. And so if a part of what they’re doing is becoming more AI literate and understanding, not only just applying it to the craft of marketing or sales or entire go-to-market strategy, but that’s an important part of the career progression today is: how are you harnessing the power of AI?
[00:10:06] Steve MacDonald: I love that from kind of a leadership perspective; you’re really encouraging that internally. Makes so much sense. Here’s where this conversation turns and goes next. The expectation from our clients and prospects these days is that we’ve not only experimented, but we can now deliver more, faster, and for less. That’s one of the biggest disruptions in any playbook, so how do you handle that? There are new expectations that are coming out that you have to manage every single day and then deliver against.
[00:10:46] Alysha McCree: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it’s interesting because earlier this year I went to the Gartner Marketing Symposium, had the opportunity to meet incredible leaders in marketing. From all types of backgrounds, and everyone was grappling with this point because the traditional marketing that we’ve all known and loved has evolved, of course, over the years, but not with the speed that we’re seeing now. It’s like that entire traditional methodology playbook is almost going down the tubes. We’re almost having to rip up our own playbooks all because of one technology, AI. It’s completely changing everything.
[00:11:25] Alysha McCree: So I think it’s one of those things that we have to take the time, like we mentioned, to experiment. We need to also be open to taking a look very regularly at what we’re doing and why we need to change that. So, for example, now a lot of the buyers are using AI first as a mechanism to do their evaluation of various vendors. So that means our playbook can’t be that we just put all the information on our website, then come. If you build it, they will come, right? Field of Dreams.
[00:12:00] Alysha McCree: Now we need to include working with influencers, third parties, doing PR push so that your core messaging is being talked about beyond yourself, far beyond yourself. Nobody’s going to your website first to be able to find out if they want to work with you. So that discoverability, that influence is so key, and traffic honestly isn’t the goalpost anymore. That’s not the end zone for us any longer. You need to be convertible. You need to have a level of influence, and you need to have other people bringing you that sense of influence or that sense of trust.
[00:12:35] Alysha McCree: I think that’s what changes when AI changes the customer journey. We have to adapt by reassessing what the entire playbook looks like, tearing it up entirely, giving ourselves space to experiment, and then being willing to learn what’ll make you successful in the future, not keep trying to hold onto what maybe made you successful in the past.
[00:13:00] Steve MacDonald: You know, amongst a bunch of important stuff that you just said there, you talked about not only being on the website, but how do we garner influence? How do we garner trust? And there’s one stat that just always sits with me. It’s the latest Edelman Trust Barometer: 32,000 respondents worldwide, and 69% think that business leaders like you and me are being intentionally misleading and exaggerating. You might as well just say they think we’re lying to them. right?
[00:13:33] Steve MacDonald: That’s 69%. What that means to me is what you just said: our voice can’t be the only voice out there, and part of SEO strategies and everything is that they’re looking at other influencing voices out in the marketplace and what they’re saying about us. We have to garner a strategy these days around how our voice can still lead.
[00:13:59] Steve MacDonald: We want to be the ones that say, “We’re making sense out of all of this. Here’s where you need to go.” But how that is supported, how that is validated by the peer community, who you’re selling to, by the leading analysts in the industry, and how we’re weaving that story together. That’s one of the biggest things I took away from what you were saying: it’s part of the playbook that it’s harder to build trust today than ever. But if we’re not known and trusted before the day one short list closes, we’re out of the deal.
[00:14:32] Alysha McCree: Completely. Absolutely.
[00:14:33] Steve MacDonald: Is that a good takeaway from what you were just saying there?
[00:14:36] Alysha McCree: That’s a perfect takeaway. In fact, I love that stat you used, and it was interesting because I heard a similar one, but it talked about, I think, 89% of answer engines using third-party content to draft their shortlists. And that is astounding, right? If you’re not showing up there, you’re, right, you’re completely out of the game. Before you even had the chance to try out for the team, right? You’re entirely out of it. So yeah, that, that is a great takeaway.
[00:15:09] Steve MacDonald: We would all love to be household names. We’re just automatically going to be on the shortlist. That would be a fine dream. But so we’ve got to work harder than ever, and I think what’s important about that is there’s something that we all know, and that the voice of our customers is our North Star. What our customers say, what our prospects say, how they define their challenges, and then how we define our strategy to meet them and align with what the market and their peers are saying. That’s just table stakes these days in order to do that.
[00:15:46] Steve MacDonald: But I read a, a stat the other day, and it was, I think it was a McKinsey study, that less than 15% of companies ever even use the voice of the customer to inform their strategic decision-making. Less than 15%, and so to me, that’s one of the big powers of AI, and I was going to ask this as an opinion to you: when we have a voice of the customer, and we attach it to our AI tool, it allows us then to make decisions on whether it’s a blog post we’re putting up, an email addressing an objection from a sales meeting yesterday, whatever it is.
[00:16:23] Steve MacDonald: Those are the kinds of things that, to me, make AI an extraordinary tool: we’re training our AI to understand our buyers and our market and our company, our products, our services, our go-to-market strategy, so we can put it all together. You talked about shifting from order takers to strategic advisors; we have to not only be able to do that as a C-suite, but we have to enable that to happen across every marketer, every salesperson, every customer success person that we have needs to have those kinds of advisory capabilities. We’re talking all about AI today, right? How do you see AI going from something that we can help train to something that can help execute every go-to-market team member, and how important is it that we, as leaders, make sure that we’re making that happen?
[00:17:20] Alysha McCree: Sure. I think in order to leverage AI to be able to position yourself as that strategic advisor, it really is about leveraging it beyond, and I think you, you made a really good example. AI really started when everybody was looking for just generative responses. Everyone was looking for productivity. Everyone was looking for just doing things faster and easier, kind of the shortcut, the cheat code. I think now though, we’ve moved so far past that, where it needs to be a tool for, like you said, decision-making. So how can this help with analytics? How can this help to get this layer of work done while I’m working on these more strategic components? I think that’s one of the things to solve for: thinking, so what am I trying to accomplish, and then where does AI fit in that picture and not just helping me create a blog post faster or just helping to respond to an RFP quicker or more concisely, correct?
[00:18:22] Alysha McCree: It’s looking for those opportunities to go beyond just execution into the strategic. But to be more strategic, you’ve got to be able to have Faster analytics and insights into what you already have, or even use it for predictive. So looking forward to the future. I can give you all of this data, pop it into AI, find the trends I should look for in forecasting, and get greater predictability in the future to make decisions on as well. I think that’s the difference. Now we have to look at the overall accomplishment and the goal, and not just the task at hand. Looking further. Not-
[00:19:00] Steve MacDonald: So smart. What you just made me think about is, so I had one CRO on, and he said, “Steve, it’s harder and harder to get access to these executives these days. It’s longer and longer between our meetings, and the meetings are shorter and shorter.” In that environment, what’s your competitive advantage, right? What’s the secret sauce that you and your entire sales team have?” He said, “It’s really down to the insights that we bring.” ‘Cause the insights extend the conversation. The insights are why they want to have another conversation. They move them down the journey. I just started asking all kinds of CROs about this. 100%, everybody’s in agreement. Nobody’s ever in disagreement with that.
[00:19:43] Steve MacDonald: To me, one of the biggest powers of AI is that it makes us smarter so that we can not just be order takers. We’re not just vendors. We are the Gartner, Forrester strategic advisors. But as humans, we can’t understand everything that’s in every database. Just yesterday, I had a conversation. He’s like, “Steve, I’m pressed that I can’t even keep my team trained on just our own product, let alone what’s going on in the marketplace, let alone what the buyer challenges are.”
[00:20:10] Steve MacDonald: Do you feel like AI is one of those tools that’s going to allow us to have at our fingertips what’s going to help us have smarter, more strategic conversations, make smarter, more strategic decisions? Is that the direction? Especially as you’re experimenting and your team and everything, the power of what’s coming out of that. What are you seeing?
[00:20:33] Alysha McCree: Yeah. No, that’s such a good point. Being able to condense so much information down to that, before you’d have to have an analytics person that had to spend an entire day maybe crunching numbers and trying to pull out insights. You’re right, we’re going to miss things on the human side, and so being able to condense that information more quickly and get to what you need a lot faster, you can answer questions that your sales team has. You can deliver insights to them more quickly so that they can go into sales meetings better.
[00:21:03] Alysha McCree: I think because so many tools these days are integrating AI into them, it’s making the tool sets that we use a lot stronger as well. So anything from doing research on the industry and being able to get to what you need faster and easier, it is speeding it all up. But it’s doing it in a way that’s far more analytical versus just spitting out information. Just generic information, which is, I think that was the first iteration of everybody’s usage of AI, right? Just help me find what I can find. It was a souped-up internet, and now, we’re getting details. We’re getting more granular and being able to ask those specific analytical questions. So yeah, I think that’s great.
[00:21:48] Steve MacDonald: We’ve talked about a lot here, and if we wanted to boil it all down and say, what’s the most important takeaway? Our poor human brains can remember only about two or three things at a time. And so if you could prioritize for us, like if there was one main takeaway that you wanted the audience to have after consuming this podcast, what would that one main takeaway be?
[00:22:13] Alysha McCree: So one key takeaway would be it’s important to embrace AI, not allow it to replace human ability, judgment, the thought process that we put into things. But it’s going to happen regardless of whether or not you’re ready for it. So I think being open to it, being experimental with it, looking for ways now to immediately integrate it if you haven’t already. I’m talking beyond just generative AI.
[00:22:45] Alysha McCree: Leveraging agentic, leveraging some of these other tools that are coming out because now this is the new normal for us, and it will continue to be. It’s only going to grow from here, so the faster you can grasp it and turn it into not just a business tool, but part of your business value, the better off I believe you’ll be in the future.
[00:23:08] Steve MacDonald: So I love that, and thank you so much. I got one last question, and I’ve been dying to ask it ever since you talked about kind of the experimentation that your team does. Out of all the experimentation, give us an example of something that’s been yielded from that experimentation that you’re like, “Oh, that’s going to change the way we do things. That’s going to change the way that we can provide value.” Is there anything that you can share with us?
[00:23:30] Alysha McCree: Sure, absolutely. So one thing I’m really excited about right now, actually, is a newer initiative that we’ve taken on. My team and I execute a lot of events, whether it’s large trade shows, high-touch dinners, whatever it is; we execute a lot of events throughout the year, and we recently created an event intelligence database that has all of our past event history. So everything that we’ve gone to over the last about two to three years, and what the results of all of those were, what the cost was for every single one of them, how much ROI we got or didn’t get. We also captured feedback from our sales and marketing teams as they attended those events. Now, we’ve placed a layer on top of that that allows us to evaluate future events against what we did in the past and how that works. So there’s an agent that will go out, and we can feed it, “Hey, here’s the event that we’re considering at this time.”
[00:24:31] Alysha McCree: What it does is it compares the audience with our ICPs. It’s comparing the location. It’s comparing who we’re planning to send, how we’re planning to go to market, what our messaging will be, what’s the agenda, who the speakers are. Looks at all aspects of that, and it makes recommendations. It’s essentially recommendations that help us decide whether it makes sense to move forward and invest in that event, and it forecasts potential positive outcomes based on our history. That personalization piece is so incredible. I think you mentioned it a little bit ago: not just giving us results, but giving us results for FPT and our marketing, the way our program functions in particular. So that’s one I’m very excited about. It’s brand new, brand spanking new. So, we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll give you an update later on its progress.
[00:25:27] Steve MacDonald: What I love about that is that’s the exact example of how you’re taking a model that everybody has that is a commodity, and then training that model on all the insights and the data and the knowledge that’s come out of all the learning from all those events. That just sat in people’s heads before that we had to remember on our own, and you’re actually using it as a predictive tool now to do things more strategically and better in the future. That was phenomenal. Thank you for sharing that.
[00:25:57] Alysha McCree: Of course!
[00:25:57] Steve MacDonald: The whole mission behind this podcast is just to bring different ideas and perspectives and insights and experimentation that we can all learn. If we can all learn from each other, that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. And you were an amazing part of that rising tide today. I just wanted to say thank you, Alysha, for coming on.
[00:26:15] Alysha McCree: Oh, you too. It was such a pleasure to join you today. Thank you for your time!