Episode #284: 

Atri Chatterjee, Chief Marketing Officer at DigiCert, explains why trust is central to scalable growth. He shares how customer proof, platform value, and consistent delivery create stronger buying confidence. The conversation also explores AI, security, and evolving expectations. It offers practical lessons for modern growth leaders.

“The voice of the customer is really important because we want to be able to see how that particular product and solution we’ve built manifests with the customer and what value they’re seeing there.” – Atri Chatterjee

In this episode, Atri shares how trust is built through product performance, customer proof, and consistent execution. He explains why marketers must translate technical value into business outcomes that buyers understand. The conversation also explores how platform thinking, AI readiness, and adaptability help leaders create sustainable growth in fast-changing markets.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Ken Rutsky: Hi, I am Ken Rutsky and welcome back to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m your host today, and I’m really excited to have a very special guest. He’s not only been my boss, he’s been my client, and he’s a peer and a friend. And he is currently the CMO at DigiCert, where he leads growth strategy for a company at the center of Digital Trust on the internet, and we’re going to talk a lot about that today. So welcome to the show, Atri Chatterjee. Atri, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit?

[00:00:40] Atri Chatterjee: That was a great introduction. Thank you. Nice to be here. And as Ken said, we’ve known each other forever. And in fact, we have the dubious distinction, I think, of being early on in the start of the internet together, me as a product manager, and Ken as a demand generation customer marketing manager that did a variety of different things at a very crucial point in time, and in a great company, Netscape Communications. A little bit about my background, as I just said, you know, I’ve been in this business for 30 plus years, and started out originally as a programmer and then moved into product marketing, which is where I did a lot of my work.

[00:01:20] Atri Chatterjee: But over a period of time, worked in a variety of different roles. Many of them in marketing, some of them in sales. I’ll sort of summarize it, as Ken was saying, sort of like I look at it as three main areas that I think of myself and my expertise in.

[00:01:35] Atri Chatterjee: The first one is obviously, you know, having grown up on the internet really as a product manager at Netscape in the early days. And then after I left Netscape, going to help start a company that was an application that was running on the web. In those days they were called application service providers. Today they are called SaaS companies, and the name of that company was Responsys. And so just sort of like building on those technologies to create applications. In this case, it was an application for marketers. So another area of some level of expertise is marketing automation and marketing technologies.

[00:02:12] Atri Chatterjee: Responsys was probably one of the first business to consumer marketing companies out there using internet, email, and a variety of different web technologies to provide that internet experience to business to consumer companies. It became eventually part of Oracle. It’s part of the Oracle marketing stack.

[00:02:29] Atri Chatterjee: So MarTech is sort of a part of what I do, both as building products for MarTech as well as, of course, now using MarTech technologies a lot. And of course the third area is Cybersecurity. And that’s Ken, you and I worked together at Secure Computing and McAfee, where we did a lot of cybersecurity work, and I have sort of worked in a variety of different areas of cybersecurity.

[00:02:50] Atri Chatterjee: We were together in network cybersecurity, network security. I’ve been on the endpoint side of the business also at McAfee, and I’ve been in the cloud side of the business, having been at Zscaler for a while. And then in the identity business, having been at ForgeRock, which eventually is now part of Ping Identity.

[00:03:10] Atri Chatterjee: And so a lot of different cross sections of the cybersecurity world, which is quite significant in its own right in terms of how broad it is. DigiCert is also a company in the cybersecurity world, but really we call it a trust company. It’s in the general area called Public Key Infrastructure.

[00:03:29] Atri Chatterjee: And when I talk to people about Public Key Infrastructure, I often use this with a lot of interview candidates also. I ask them, do you know anything about PKI and do you know anything about digital certificates? And they say, no, I don’t know. Maybe, you know, something about certification, certifying people.

[00:03:44] Atri Chatterjee: And then I ask them, have you used DigiCert products in your life? And they go, no, I don’t think so. And I say, what if I told you you use a DigiCert product every day, maybe multiple times a day? And then they’re quite surprised by that. And I think for all your listeners also, DigiCert is a certificate authority. One of our businesses is called our Public Certificate Authority Business. We use this technological PKI or Public Key Infrastructure. It’s a technology that basically involves, it’s used for authentication and it’s used for encryption. And it uses some really fascinating mathematics to essentially create public and private keys that can then be used by any website to be able to communicate with everyone else in a secure fashion.

[00:04:24] Atri Chatterjee: The technology itself is quite fascinating. The mathematics is even more fascinating. But if you think about it in its simplest form, when you connect to any e-commerce website, or literally every website these days, you basically start off a secure connection. This used to be known as an SSL connection.

[00:04:50] Atri Chatterjee: Now it’s called TLS, Transport Layer Security. And what essentially happens is the first thing that happens is when you connect to that site, say you go to your bank, the first thing that a bank does is basically send you a digital certificate.

[00:05:03] Atri Chatterjee: That basically is used as an identifier for that bank. It’s like a passport. You get that digital certificate, your browser gets it. Your browser already has the public key from DigiCert or some other certificate authority. We are the biggest commercial certificate authority that opens up that certificate and actually verifies that that in fact belongs to the bank in question or the e-commerce site in question, such as Amazon.

[00:05:28] Ken Rutsky: Back to the word trust, so that now I can trust that I’m actually at wellsfargo.com or chase.com, as opposed to someone trying to spoof that. So you’re creating trust between the consumer and the website.

[00:05:43] Atri Chatterjee: So that’s the first thing. It’s very simple. It’s just like, you know, sort of like in the physical world, it’s like passports, right?

[00:05:48] Atri Chatterjee: You verify in fact that I’m connected to Amazon, for example. And then when you establish that, because that will be in that certificate, then you actually, some information in that certificate is actually used for you to essentially create encrypted communication with that particular site.

[00:06:06] Atri Chatterjee: Effectively, they’re sending you their public key. Their public key that only they can decrypt. So when you encrypt everything with that public key, that other side will decrypt it, you have a secure communication. So there’s all this stuff that’s going on under the covers, but to make it quite simple, it’s an authentication mechanism.

[00:06:22] Atri Chatterjee: You authenticate someone and then once you authenticate them, then you can securely communicate with them in an encrypted fashion. And you have that encrypted communication channel.

[00:06:32] Ken Rutsky: And yeah, I think a lot of our audience, Atri, who are marketers, have had that day where they get a call and they say, what’s going on with the website?

[00:06:40] Ken Rutsky: The certificate’s expired. Exactly. So that’s when, all of a sudden, now it’s like, why is it broken? I’m a marketer. I don’t understand this stuff. So maybe just for fun, what does that mean, when that next CMO gets that message from his CEO, hey, it looks like the website’s broken.

[00:06:59] Ken Rutsky: I’m getting this message. I can’t access it. Or, you know, one of my board members called me and said, your certificate’s expired. Yeah. Maybe you could explain, one, why that matters, and two, how that breaks trust, and then how do marketers kind of think about trust in the context of their job? And most of us listening to this are not banks.

[00:07:21] Ken Rutsky: Some of us do commerce over our sites, but a lot of us also use our website as a hub for our communication to prospects and customers, and to build the brand, right? So maybe you can just put this in the context of a marketer for us.

[00:07:37] Atri Chatterjee: And so, in the context of a marketer, frankly, we gave the example of a bank or an e-commerce site. But effectively what has happened in the last decade plus is that if you’re not using encrypted communications on your site, you are not going to be ranked well by Google. So literally, every website is using the protocol, H-T-T-P-S. Secure version. People don’t use the just normal HTTP anymore because they’ve found that the HTTPS is so much more secure, establishing that connection.

[00:08:11] Atri Chatterjee: So even if you’re not doing e-commerce, your website is, I would say, 99 percent chance that your website is using the H-T-T-P-S protocol, which means you have certificates on your public website. Now going back to the question you asked, Ken, which is, you know, this business of certificates expiring.

[00:08:30] Atri Chatterjee: So this whole process of, you know, basically back in the day when you and I were at Netscape, the big challenge that Jim Clark put out there, and people like Dr. Taher Elgamal came in and solved this problem, was we needed to secure the internet. And basically working with the IETF and now what’s called the CAB Forum, this is a regulated business where certificates are issued.

[00:08:56] Atri Chatterjee: And they have a lifespan and certificates expire over a given amount of time. That time has been shrinking also. And let me come back to that maybe later in the conversation talking about quantum computing, which is another big area that is shaking everything up because the certificates have a particular lifespan and then you have to renew the certificates, get a new certificate, because.

[00:09:19] Atri Chatterjee: It actually adds to the security of it because over time people can try to crack that certificate if they had a lot of time and a lot of compute power. So one of the ways you do that is you reduce the amount of time of the validity of certificate and change them around. And that’s what happens.

[00:09:33] Atri Chatterjee: So when a certificate is expired effectively, the message that’s going back to your browser, the person who’s trying to get in front of your website, is that this website can’t be trusted anymore because we don’t know about the certificate. And that’s the trust that you were talking about. And one very important part of this whole business is, as you know, there’s a lot of technology in IT.

[00:09:57] Atri Chatterjee: There’s a lot of mathematics and all that, but there’s a lot of process also and integration and all of us that are on the internet in a business to business environment have to make sure that these things actually work all the time, not just some of the time. And making sure that those certificates are up to date, that they’re managed, you renew them before they expire, et cetera.

[00:10:18] Atri Chatterjee: Because when you have an expiry, you know, essentially what ends up happening is that you have downtime. And more often than not, that’s reputational costs. That’s financial costs, that’s all sorts of things.

[00:10:30] Ken Rutsky: So if I zoom up to this level, you guys sell a trust infrastructure that allows people to trust that they’re talking to the person they think they are, or the entity.

[00:10:42] Ken Rutsky: Because that could be a computer, it could be a website, it could be a person. So I can trust who I’m talking to and I can trust that this conversation isn’t essentially being snooped on. Trust is such a big thing. And, you know, on this podcast, we’ve pointed out a lot of times that one of the biggest challenges for B2B marketers is maintaining trust with their prospects and their customers, or building trust or establishing trust.

[00:11:08] Ken Rutsky: So outside of the technical area of trust, you’ve got, I think you told me prior to this, over a hundred thousand customers that trust DigiCert to help them build trust with their customers. So you’re in a really, to overuse the word, you’re in a really trusted place as a business. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how do you build customer relationships outside of the technology that continue to build and leverage that trust so that you can succeed in your business goals?

[00:11:41] Atri Chatterjee: Great question, Ken. And you know, you sort of like have given the hints to the answer right there, right? Which is that when you are a business like us, people depend on you for ensuring that their businesses keep working and that they depend on you for things. When you basically assert to them that you’re going to have availability, reliability, scalability, those are all very important things for them, and that reputation and that trust is you don’t just say it, you have to do it right and you have to basically not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk, and that’s how you build trust by doing, by making sure that they’re always up. They don’t have unforeseen circumstances that break them down, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:12:25] Atri Chatterjee: Now with that said, you know, then what ends up happening is that it also gives us an opportunity to look at sort of like what other things a customer can do with that trust. We talked a lot about the outside internet, right? Between websites and browsers and things like that. Take the same technology and look at how complex the internet has gotten over the last few decades.

[00:12:48] Atri Chatterjee: You’ve got the same level of, there’s a concept of trust and authentication that’s needed for devices. Give you an example, every TV in Europe has a digital certificate in it because that way, you know, it identifies that particular device. You have trust for software, software development has gotten very complicated, and you need to sign the software.

[00:13:13] Atri Chatterjee: How do I know that X, Y, Z company has actually not only published that software, but it hasn’t been tampered with? So when you have a software package and you have a bill of materials for that software package, you wrap all that up and you sign it with your certificate saying this is what it is. So that concept of trust has also expanded beyond websites on the internet to other things that we’re doing.

[00:13:37] Ken Rutsky: Not even mention AI agents that are coming.

[00:13:40] Atri Chatterjee: There you are. Exactly. And so one of the big opportunities, and it’s kind of ironic and you and I are having this conversation. We started off in the early days of the internet, but this trust technology that was developed basically made e-commerce possible. Frankly, there wouldn’t have been e-commerce without it.

[00:13:54] Atri Chatterjee: Now, in this other big tsunami that’s happening and this big transformation that’s happening with AI, well, how do you trust AI? Is it, you know, the models, people are developing models. How do they trust those models? Once you develop a model, you can sign the model and essentially give it a certificate.

[00:14:12] Atri Chatterjee: To establish the fact that X, Y, Z company that has built this model, it could be a medical company, it could be a financial company, it could be a packaged goods company, that model that they’re basically using actually belongs to them and has been signed by them.

[00:14:28] Atri Chatterjee: The agents that use that model need to be signed. So this whole concept of trust is so fundamental to everything that we do, that now it comes in as a marketer, you go in, of course, we are dealing with people who are in the security business. They’re worried about, they are responsible for maintaining that infrastructure.

[00:14:47] Atri Chatterjee: We’re fundamentally an infrastructure company. We often talk inside our company that we joke about how we’re basically electricity and plumbing for the internet because we are the fundamental backbone, that piece of technology that keeps things going. And it can be applied. And as a marketer, we go out to those folks and basically make them aware of kind of like what this capability does and what the real value of it is.

[00:15:13] Atri Chatterjee: And, you know, that’s one of my fundamental core areas as a marketer to think about. And it permeates into all marketing activities that we do.

[00:15:22] Ken Rutsky: Before we started the podcast you were talking about four pillars that you see as kind of your mental framework for what the marketer needs to do, and value was one of those. But maybe you can go through that.

[00:15:34] Atri Chatterjee: As a business to business marketer, not just in the security business, but I think this has applied to many other business to business situations also, I sort of look at us as marketers as having sort of like four key pillars that make up what we do as marketers, and those pillars are, one is.

[00:15:50] Atri Chatterjee: Typically we are selling a product or a service. That is what we’re in the business of doing, right? We’re not selling a feeling, we are selling a product or a service. We’re not selling, you know, sort of like a flat brand. We are trying to build some value so that product or service that we sell, the solutions that have come out of that, and the value that you get from those solutions and the return on investment, that is a core piece of what we’re doing. That’s one of the pillars.

[00:16:15] Atri Chatterjee: That pillar, if you take that, goes into the hands of customers. Those customers see their version of that value. They realize certain gains. Those are where, you know, we talk about the customer stories, the voice of the customer. You’ve done the podcasts on the voice of the customer.

[00:16:31] Atri Chatterjee: Well, for us that’s really important because we want to be able to see how that particular product and solution we’ve built, how it’s basically manifest with the customer and what value they’re seeing there. Those two things combine to basically contribute to us establishing awareness and brand. The brand and awareness selling into a CISO or a CTO or a Chief Information Officer CIO is all about kind of like, how are you going to help me do my job correctly and how do you help me keep out of trouble, right?

[00:17:03] Atri Chatterjee: How do I make money, how do I save money, and how do I stay out of trouble? 

[00:17:07] Ken Rutsky: To your point, if that’s articulated in the voice of the customer who’s already received value, it’s not only just heard better, but it’s trusted more.

[00:17:17] Atri Chatterjee: Absolutely, and it gives you real meaty proof points that people can relate to.

[00:17:22] Atri Chatterjee: If I’m a healthcare company, I want to know what other healthcare companies are doing with this. If I’m a financial services company, how are they doing it? If I’m a logistics company, how are we doing with it? All of that then contributes to demand. And as marketers, we spend a lot of time on demand generation and demand creation, but really these things all contribute to that demand creation.

[00:17:40] Atri Chatterjee: So those are my sort of like those four pillars, products, customers, the brand built out of that product and customer experience that drive eventually, and that can be used to drive demand.

[00:17:52] Ken Rutsky: Yeah, and I think the other unique thing about your business that we talked about is you’ve got like a hundred thousand customers, right?

[00:17:59] Ken Rutsky: And so, you have pretty good penetration and adding the hundred and first, the next hundred thousand customers isn’t really the strategy. It’s really more how can I build more trust, provide more, all the things you talked about, is how can I leverage the brand and the trust I’ve created to build more trust in the new solutions I can provide to customers that create demand and revenue for the company.

[00:18:25] Ken Rutsky: So that’s a really different thing than when you were at Responsys and you were creating a new category, trying to get new customers. You didn’t have any customers. So how did that change your view of marketing or how does that change your day to day, the way you think about marketing leveraging the voice of the customer and trust in that context?

[00:18:46] Atri Chatterjee: Yeah, that’s a great question. And there’s a product component to that also. So where that comes from is, and we sort of touched on it a little earlier, right? So for those of us who have been in startup companies, building, going from zero to one, kind of like crossing the chasm, all that sort of stuff, we have to get those customers one at a time, build that, et cetera. It’s all about new logos, getting new logos in.

[00:19:03] Atri Chatterjee: At the DigiCert case, when I joined two years ago, we knew, I mean, DigiCert has been in business for 30 years. It’s got a core business, the public trust business that we talked about, right? Hundred thousand customers. Out of those hundred thousand customers, 95,000 of them are not enterprise, right? There are 5,000 enterprises there and everyone else is, you know, medium size or whatever.

[00:19:22] Atri Chatterjee: There is the other piece of this. And so when you put that jigsaw puzzle together, you’re going, wait a minute, okay, I’ve got them using this stuff. But we just talked about how trust permeates to other things also. We talked about the fact that hey, devices need trust, software needs trust, right? We all send emails, messaging needs trust, right? There’s technologies out there that basically let you put a certificate on a message so that the inboxing of that certificate is much better, right?

[00:19:56] Atri Chatterjee: A VMC, Verified Mark Certificate, for example. So then the challenge becomes, okay, I have got these capabilities, just using the PKI technologies. Not to mention we also sell DNS, which is the Domain Name Service, which is the other part of our foundational business. How do we go to organizations that are using our public trust product and how do we get them to look at these other products that are also very germane to what they may be doing?

[00:20:23] Atri Chatterjee: There’s no enterprise out there that is not a software company today. Marc Andreessen said this, right? Software is eating all businesses, and now of course they’re talking about how AI is going to eat software, et cetera. But just think about it. Every company is building some sort of software, right?

[00:20:37] Atri Chatterjee: If you’re a healthcare company, you’re building software, you’re integrating various pieces together. If you’re a financial company, you’re doing that. You are a packaged goods company, you know, the Targets of the world, Sainsbury’s of the world. They’ve got all this stuff.

[00:20:51] Atri Chatterjee: How do they make sure that software supply chain, so to speak, is safe. And so that’s an example of how we go and look at these customers and say, okay, what is the potential opportunity there and where can we go? So you asked another interesting question, which is, and that’s not an easy thing, by the way, because the buyer of the public trust product who’s managing the website presence is probably going to be quite different from the people who are doing the backend IT to basically build software.

[00:21:16] Atri Chatterjee: So that’s where the marketer comes in, has to now use his or her brains and try to figure out, okay, how am I going to penetrate that? What types of programs am I going to do? How do I build customer relationships to be able to connect to those people?

[00:21:32] Atri Chatterjee: And you know, in big companies, in enterprises, that’s not easy. Just because you’re talking to a person in this particular section of the enterprise doesn’t mean you’ve got an inroad into the other one. The only thing that you have is you’ve got a contractual relationship with the customer. So maybe that does make things easier.

[00:21:48] Atri Chatterjee: However, you’re still not solving the problem of the other guy who may not know the first guy you’re working with. In some sense, it’s a way of account, it’s like account based marketing techniques that have to be used except you’re using it within your own customer base.

[00:22:00] Ken Rutsky: Yeah. And so the question is like you have this trusted position with the head of public products, right? In a company or you.

[00:22:10] Atri Chatterjee: The head of e-commerce. So someone.

[00:22:11] Ken Rutsky: Who’s in the e-commerce team, head of e-commerce, right? But now you’re saying, look, Joe trusts me, Jane over here, you should trust me. How do you create that trust with Jane? Like what are some of the ways you’ve looked at trying to leverage the trust you have and the trust you deliver in order to create trust with new buyers? 

[00:22:32] Atri Chatterjee: And there goes in, there’s a combination of things, right? So, we talked earlier about how, you know, trust is earned.

[00:22:39] Atri Chatterjee: And you have to earn it by actually doing it right. Reliability, availability, scalability, et cetera. Now, it really helps when you know Jane is your first customer already using you for several years on their public website, and Jane says, you know what, this thing has never gone down. I’ve always been completely satisfied with this because the certificates we’re getting.

[00:22:59] Ken Rutsky: Voice.

[00:23:00] Atri Chatterjee: That’s the voice of Jane, right?

[00:23:02] Ken Rutsky: Right. Yes.

[00:23:03] Atri Chatterjee: It’s not exactly what I’m going to be doing with the software development side, but you know, it’s nice to know that, hey, these guys have a great reputation, we’ve got a great reputation. So that’s one part of it. The other part of it is also then we talked about the value, the product value, right?

[00:23:18] Atri Chatterjee: And in the context of what the other person is doing, right? And so, you still have to do that work. If you are going to sell to people in IT who are building software, you have to show them why your Software Trust Manager product, what we call, you know, digital signing for software, is going to be useful to them and what value it gives them.

[00:23:39] Atri Chatterjee: The ability to make sure that software is safe, make sure it can’t get penetrated, can’t get malware in there, and so on and so forth. So those are the things that you still have to bring, that value, but you can build on that foundation of your experience and what you’ve done with the customers.

[00:23:54] Atri Chatterjee: And of course, like every other thing, even when you were landing and expanding in a small company, you need to be able to have customers talk about what value they’ve seen and you have to cross the chasm with them too. So just because I have a hundred thousand customers in one product base, for the new products that I create, I still need to start from zero and I got to build that.

[00:24:20] Ken Rutsky: I was thinking when you take organization A. You’ve got trust in the e-commerce division, you extend that trust to the software development and the CIO, and now you’ve got a big footprint in A. Now how do you then capture that customer’s voice so you can go to B who’s still sitting at e-commerce and say, hey, look how A created a more trusted world in their environment.

[00:24:46] Ken Rutsky: Is that part of what you try to do, try to build those success stories and then leverage their discussion of it?

[00:24:55] Atri Chatterjee: Absolutely. And you know this is also another thing where you have to look at the IT buying cycle and the buying nature of CIOs these days, right?

[00:25:04] Atri Chatterjee: People don’t want to deal with 50 different companies, right? They want to limit how many contractual entities they have, how many companies that are serving them. This is also where the P word comes in that’s really important. And what I mean by the P word is the platform word, right?

[00:25:21] Atri Chatterjee: You’re a platform. What is the value that platform provides, right? So that you want to incent companies to say, listen, if I sign up with the DigiCert platform, I’ve got a common platform base. I’ve got these other products that sit on there. I can manage them.

[00:25:36] Atri Chatterjee: I’ve got a single pane of glass that can look at them. I’ve got a single throat to choke. All of those things become very important also, right? And so not unlike other big B2B companies, take Salesforce, take any of these companies, they’re all platform companies. They have related products.

[00:25:52] Atri Chatterjee: And the value of it is that I’m working with one customer. There’s a lot of synergies between those products. There’s common data, shared this, that management, et cetera. So there are all these values that come at different levels. There’s a product level value, there’s a platform level value, there’s a relationship value.

[00:26:08] Atri Chatterjee: There’s a customer service and support value that, you know, those are the things that your customer is getting from you. And of course, key to all of this, of course, Ken, is that building that relationship and building that relationship with your customers so that you can actually have that conversation at a high enough level where they make these decisions.

[00:26:27] Ken Rutsky: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting, I could sum this whole conversation up with that word that we keep coming back to, which is have trusted products that deliver and do what they say they do. Use that to create a trusted brand, but then use the trusted voices of the customer to drive the platform and the brand forward.

[00:26:48] Atri Chatterjee: That’s well said. I think I’m going to incorporate that somehow in a data sheet or something that we’re going to do.

[00:26:52] Ken Rutsky: Credit for it, Atri.

[00:26:53] Atri Chatterjee: Yes, of course.

[00:26:54] Ken Rutsky: Hey, so as a wrap up, I just have a couple of last questions for you that we’d like to ask. Is there anything in this, what we’ve talked about, that you feel we’ve missed that the audience should hear in this broad discussion of trusted technology, trusted internet, trusted people, trusted customers, trusted brands. Is there anything else that you think we’ve missed that we should briefly chat about?

[00:27:20] Atri Chatterjee: How did we go through this conversation with so little said about AI, right? All we talked about is trusting AI agents, and we talked about trusting AI models and all that.

[00:27:30] Atri Chatterjee: But I thought maybe something that, you know, we should talk about after all this is for sales and marketing individuals is how one can actually use AI. And people are so scared about AI taking away all their jobs and all that sort of stuff, but I think there’s a huge opportunity also for us. I’m sure you do. I do. We use AI every day, and really the value here is that.

[00:27:49] Atri Chatterjee: I think one of the things that your audience should keep in mind is that, you know, they’ve got a lot of know how already in their head. They know how to do these things. AI is not going to replace that. AI is going to replace large amounts of data, that’s going to replace querying that sort of stuff.

[00:28:12] Atri Chatterjee: But that know how, being able to prompt AI to be able to create programs, create solutions, even just the voice of the customer, more intelligently interacting with your customer. You can use AI to be able to do that. You have the know how of what you want to be able to ask. How do you go out and do that?

[00:28:29] Atri Chatterjee: How do you look at a different way of creating things, creating new marketing programs and things like that where you can use this to do that. I think it’s important. But I think something that people should think about in all of this is when you think about your business and you think about penetrating accounts, you think about account based marketing, you think about, you know, how do you interact with the customer to get the most value that customer relationship and reference.

[00:29:06] Atri Chatterjee: How can you use AI to augment that, to be able to ask the right questions, suggest the right things, and also just help that whole process, make it faster and just make it more relevant. Right? And I think it’s something that I get this all the time from. We use it a lot in our company. One of the things we have an effort on is like, what is the real tangible value that we’re getting with the AI technologies we’re using? How has it saved time? But more importantly, how has it improved what we’ve actually generated as output? And so this is something to keep in mind.

[00:29:28] Ken Rutsky: I’d love to keep chatting about that. But we’re kind of getting a little long here because it’s, you get two friends together and they just want to keep talking. Maybe final two questions. Is there one achievement or transformation that you’ve done in your career that you’re the most proud of or learned the most from, that you’d like to share?

[00:29:51] Atri Chatterjee: You know, that’s a hard question because I will sort of aggregate that into sort of a modus operandi I’ve used in my own career, and I’m sure Ken, you’ve done that, is to constantly evolve. And we as marketers particularly need to be very quick and constantly evolve into how we are going to adapt to new technologies, adapt to new situations in the market and how do we put that to work for us?

[00:30:21] Atri Chatterjee: And I think being nimble is really important. And the lucky thing for us in our field, frankly, is that we can do that because we are exposed to a lot of things, right? It’s different from being siloed as an engineer, for example, working on one thing. Sometimes you miss the next wave.

[00:30:38] Atri Chatterjee: But in our case, we’re encountering it all the time. New technologies that we can use, new ways of doing things. Just look at some of the things that we’re talking about. So I think in some sense, the value I’ve seen, many have said that I should be retired by now, but I’m having so much fun that I’m still doing this because I enjoy the challenge and I’ve been nimble and I’ve considered myself so lucky.

[00:30:59] Atri Chatterjee: You and I were in the dawn of the internet age, and here I am still plowing away in the dawn of the AI age.

[00:31:05] Ken Rutsky: Yeah. It’s quite a journey. And I think that’s a great wrap because I was going to ask you for a key takeaway from this whole conversation, but I think you just said it, be nimble, evolve, and enjoy the journey, right?

[00:31:17] Atri Chatterjee: Yeah.

[00:31:17] Ken Rutsky: Well, Atri, it’s great catching up, and keep on evolving and keep on being trusted. Thank you.

[00:31:23] Atri Chatterjee: We never talked about the yoga, but we’ll do that.

[00:31:25] Ken Rutsky: Next time. No, we’ll do that another. Well, I know that’s one of the ways you’ve evolved. You’ve become a yogi, so thanks a lot.

[00:31:31] Atri Chatterjee: The journey is the reward, Ken. Take care. Bye.