“We as people have stopped browsing the internet completely. We’ve offloaded that chore to AI without even thinking about it, and that fundamentally changes the customer journey.”

She was one of three marketing leaders on stage at the Big Leap VIP Experience during New York Fintech Week, where CMO Uncovered recorded a live panel conversation sponsored by CleverTap. Nicole Casperson, Founder and CEO of Fintech Is Femme, moderated an ESPN-inspired round robin panel designed by Drew Glover, Co-Founder of Fiat Growth:

* 5 provocative topics

* 3 operators

* 0 rehearsed answers

The panelists: Veronica Mendoza, VP of Growth Marketing at Betterment, an online investment platform making financial advice accessible and affordable. Kathryn Flynn, VP of Marketing at Zip, a buy now, pay later company focused on serving America’s underserved population. And Ashley, the CMO of Prove, a digital identity company that helps businesses verify people are real.

Before the panel kicked off, Anand Jain, Co-Founder of CleverTap, took the stage to mark Big Leap’s second year. “In the world of notifications, emails, everything that you can’t see and touch, we have launched a magazine,” he said, holding up CleverTap’s first print publication to cheers from the crowd.

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Your Next Site Visitor Runs on a Large Language Model

The opening topic was blunt: AEO is the new SEO. The panel agreed, then pushed further.

Veronica set the frame. “AEO is not just the new SEO, it’s the new search, sort of wholesale,” she said. “People are using LLMs as their entry point all the time.” Marketers now need to show up in the conversational layer that LLMs pull from: Reddit, review sites, and press. “If you’re not there, you’re just gonna be missing entire swaths of users.”

Kathryn split the challenge in two. Human discovery still works the way it always has: great content, consistency, brand work people talk about. But agent discovery is a different problem. At Zip, her team is preparing for a world where autonomous agents make purchases on behalf of humans. “For us, it starts with governance. It starts with security,” she said, pointing to trust frameworks and identity preservation.

Ashley landed the point with a specific example. Her team at Prove adopted Scrunch, an AI search optimization tool, to monitor how the company appears in LLM-generated responses. One finding caught her off guard.

“Last week I learned that our competitors were being cited more often because they have Wikipedia pages. Now my team has the mandate to go create a Wikipedia page, which I can’t imagine having asked them to do six months ago.”

High-Trust Channels and the 3X Content Play

The second topic tested whether the traditional funnel is dead.

Ashley reframed the question around trust instead of structure. What changed is not that the funnel broke but that low-trust channels cratered. “Some of the low-trust channels, cold outbound, have gotten so bad that we feel comfortable ignoring them completely,” she said. When she joined Prove a year ago, her first two investments were customer marketing and community, then partner marketing. “Whenever we can have a customer speaking on our behalf, we want to create that platform for them to do that.”

Kathryn had the data. Zip launched a customer ambassador program where real customers create content in their own homes, sharing honest takes on why they use the product. “We have seen such strong engagement rates to that content, 2X, 3X what we’re seeing from actor or static,” she said.

Veronica pushed back on calling the funnel dead. “Maybe not necessarily that it’s dead, but that we’re all reckoning with the fact that it was always kind of an oversimplification,” she said. At Betterment, she tracks account-based marketing prospects who move “two steps forward and one step back” through their journeys. The goal is to be present at every stage, not to force people through a linear path. She pointed to Betterment’s B2B campaign built around SpongeBob SquarePants, a nod to CEO Sarah Levy’s history as COO of Nickelodeon.

“B2B customers are not just B2B buyers. It’s important to respect that people could be sitting on their couch at night and see something amusing from one of your B2B solutions.”

Taste, Bravery, and the Sea of Sameness

When every team can generate thousands of assets with AI, the panel agreed: production is no longer the constraint. Differentiation is.

Ashley tied the challenge directly to Prove’s mission. “Authenticity really becomes the moat, and taste is how you build that authenticity,” she said. For an identity company whose entire purpose is helping people prove they are real, operating in a world of AI-generated content carries a specific weight. “We have no choice but to operate by that standard ourselves.”

Kathryn argued that taste extends well beyond campaigns.

“The brand is not just the campaign. The brand is how your product works. It’s their product working every single time someone goes to use it at a critical moment in their day.”

Veronica screens for taste during hiring. What she pushes her teams toward is bravery. “Can you not worry too much about what has worked in the past or looks the same as everything else?” she said. “Let’s take a big swing and learn fast because now we have the luxury of time.”

Don’t Shrink the Team. Multiply It.

The fourth topic pushed back on the narrative that AI-native marketing teams must be smaller.

Ashley cut through the noise immediately. “If your team does not look like five marketers and 100 agents, you’re fine. Normal,” she said. She called out a growing, unspoken pressure. “A lot of marketers are silently sitting in AI shame jail right now because they feel like their team should look different than it does.” Her team at Prove is 25 to 30 people, and she has no plans to reduce it.

“The things that move the needle right now still require humanity.”

Kathryn pushed the conversation to a structural level. “It’s rethinking completely how this team operates,” she said. “What is this team accountable for delivering? And where in that system does the human judgment need to sit?” As AI removes the resource constraint, the real challenge shifts to decision-making: teaching more junior people how to make strategic calls they have never had to make before.

Veronica described the AI-native org as resembling “the scrappy and lean startup marketing orgs of the past,” but with a meaningful upgrade. Marketers can redirect time from execution to strategy. “The question starts to become less of ‘can we get it all done’ and more of ‘are we doing the right things?’”

Attribution Was Never a Perfect Science

The closing topic was the most provocative prompt of the night: is attribution is a lie everyone keeps paying for?

Veronica did not need convincing. “I have always been an attribution skeptic,” she said. She started her career in search marketing at the dawn of pay-per-click, the clearest attribution line possible: last click to purchase. But as she moved up funnel, the clarity disappeared. “If any vendor was promising clarity, it felt very disingenuous to me. It would be based on a set of assumptions that were clearly going to be biased. There was never a perfect science here, and there has just always been a lot of hand-waving, and it was all in the pursuit of credit.”

Her solution: stop chasing perfect attribution and align with finance. “When we can align with our buddies over in FP&A on CAC, on ROAS, it gives you the freedom to play within those constraints and take the swings that you can afford to swing at,” she said. That alignment breeds better cross-team partnership because everyone operates toward one goal instead of fighting over credit.

Kathryn traced the problem back to its origin. “I blame the beginning of digital marketing for this,” she said. “CMOs were finally able to go to their CFO friends and say, ‘Look what we can do now.’ That was really exciting. That probably wasn’t very true then, and it’s certainly not true now.” The answer is not better dashboards. “It’s about unlearning that truth and relearning a new set of truths that are credible across your organization so that there is that collective buy-in.”

The panel also called out the structural incentive problem: media vendors report on the efficacy of what they sell in silos, and when CMOs try to stitch those reports together, the result is what one panelist called “a little bit of a house of cards.”

Glasses Up on the Rooftop

Nicole closed by asking the crowd to raise their glasses. “We went through the round robin. They were honest,” she said, noting with a laugh that the panelists were drinking water.

Across all five topics, every panelist landed in the same place: the tools keep changing, but the decisions that matter, what to prioritize, what to say, and how to earn trust, still belong to people.

Ashley put it most succinctly when describing the new reality of site visitors.

“In a world that runs on AI, the most important visitor that’s landing on your site now is not even human.” The challenge for CMOs is making sure the humans behind the strategy still are.

This season of CMO Uncovered is supported by CleverTap. CleverTap is the world’s leading engagement platform, helping brands build meaningful relationships through data-driven personalization. Powering over 2,000 customers globally, CleverTap’s AI-powered engine processes billions of data points daily to help marketers predict behavior and automate engagement at scale. From onboarding to advocacy, CleverTap provides the infrastructure needed to optimize every stage of the customer journey. For the CMOs building the next generation of iconic brands, CleverTap offers the precision and scale required to win in a crowded market. To learn more, visit clevertap.com.

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The transition from high-stakes marketing to the invisible architecture of global finance requires a specific type of intellectual recalibration. For Katie Perry, the shift from the retail investment frenzy of 2021 to the infrastructure layer of digital assets was not a retreat from the spotlight but a move toward the “plumbing” that makes the spotlight possible. During her tenure as the first marketing hire at public.com, she navigated the volatile intersection of social sentiment and market mechanics during the GameStop era. That period defined a generation of retail investors. Today, as the Chief Marketing Officer of zerohash, Katie focuses on the exacting task of building the infrastructure that allows banks, brokerages, and fintechs to embed digital assets into their own ecosystems.

The inception of this current phase followed a two-year period of fractional consulting. During that time, Katie operated a lean business, scaling high-margin clients by using agentic systems to bridge the gap between high-level brand strategy and the technical execution of complex ad campaigns. This period of independence allowed her to observe a recurring friction in the market. Companies wanted to offer digital asset functionality but were hindered by the technical and regulatory complexity of doing so. When she encountered zerohash, a company that had operated for eight years without a formal marketing organization while securing clients like Morgan Stanley and Franklin Templeton, she identified a rare instance of product-market fit that lacked only a narrative architecture.

The Uncovered Profile: Katie’s Ideal State

Outside the precision of infrastructure, Katie operates with a rhythm defined by high-intensity curiosity and a preference for the unscripted. Her mornings frequently begin at 6 a.m. in places like the Ginza district of Tokyo, where the cold air of a Japanese winter serves as a backdrop for endorphin-heavy runs. This discipline carries over into her intellectual habits; she is a self-described “sponge” who uses her evenings to build deep-dive dossiers on topics as disparate as 18th-century infectious diseases or British period dramas. She possesses a natural inclination for the “edge case” about to go mainstream, a trait that manifests in her professional choices and her personal fascination with subcultures.

Her ideal environment is one of functional contrast. While she maintains a professional studio in a Midtown Manhattan Regis office, half-office and half-production suite, she finds equal value in the raw, unpolished energy of a NASCAR race at Talladega. This duality reflects a marketer who values the logical and the strategic but remains deeply grounded in the human element. Whether she is listening to an AI-generated audio summary of medical history before bed or taking partners to the World Cup, Katie’s persona is anchored in a belief that while technology can automate the task, it can never replace the human instinct to explore, learn, and connect.

The Mechanics of the Build

zerohash operates as the infrastructure layer for digital assets; it provides the technology and licenses necessary for companies to offer crypto functionality without building the stack from scratch. Katie describes the company as the “plumbing” of the industry. This role is frequently invisible to the end user but essential for the operation. To explain this, she uses the analogy of YKK zippers. They are ubiquitous, they are essential, and they are only noticed when they fail to work. For zerohash, success is defined by high uptime, compliance, and seamless integration into the partner’s user experience.

The operational architecture of the business rests on three distinct product pillars. First, the company enables trading, allowing platforms like interactive brokers or E-Trade to offer digital assets to their users. Second, it facilitates transactions, specifically through stablecoins, which allow for instant cross-border payments and settlement. Third, it manages tokenization, an emerging field that financial institutions are increasingly exploring for asset management. Katie notes that the demand for these services is rising; stablecoin transaction volumes have increased by 170 percent year over year within their ecosystem, and requests for information regarding stablecoin payments have increased fivefold in the same period.

The Logic of the Pivot

The transition from B2C to B2B marketing involves a shift from wide-reaching data science to surgical, relationship-based strategy. At public.com, Katie managed a diverse user base ranging from day traders to first-time investors. The messaging had to appeal to a broad demographic without alienating specific segments. In the B2B environment of zerohash, the target audience is nearly 1,000 potential decision-makers. The marketing must be surgical; it requires an understanding of what will help an executive get promoted or solve a specific operational burden.

Katie argues that empathy is the commonality across both disciplines. Effective marketing requires identifying the specific anxieties that keep a customer awake. In B2B, this often means understanding the regulatory and compliance hurdles that a partner faces. zerohash holds licenses in 52 jurisdictions within the United States, a feat that took years of manual paperwork and trust-building. This regulatory moat is a core part of the product story. By assuming the technical and compliance liability, zerohash allows its partners to focus on their primary user experience.

Code as Culture

The integration of artificial intelligence into the marketing workflow has changed the definition of an “entry-level” role. Katie acknowledges that the manual tasks she performed early in her career, such as reformatting award submissions, are now handled by LLMs. However, she maintains that these tools require an architect. The machine can identify patterns and themes within hours of research, but the human marketer must coach the system to know which “synapses” to fire.

At zerohash, Katie uses AI to pressure-test ideas. She frequently prompts systems to act as a “hater” or a skeptical lawyer to identify weaknesses in a campaign before it is launched. This “inversion” technique allows her team to address counter-arguments in minutes rather than through weeks of legal review. Despite this technological leverage, she is finding that she works more hours than before. The efficiency of the tools has not led to more leisure time but to a deeper exploration of possibilities. If a task that once took months now takes two weeks, the team can simply produce more thoughtful, high-fidelity work, such as the 60-page book on stablecoins they recently produced from end to end.

The Future of the Interface

The long-term trend in finance is the convergence of traditional finance and decentralized finance. Katie observes that the narrative is shifting from “us versus them” to a collaborative model. Large institutions like BlackRock and WorldPay are not merely observing the space; they are actively investing in the infrastructure. This shift is supported by a growing coordination between builders and policymakers. Unlike previous eras of tech regulation where a gap in understanding hindered progress, the current fintech landscape involves a more sophisticated dialogue regarding how digital assets move and settle.

As the industry matures, Katie is leaning into offline, high-integrity human experiences. While the “agentic” world allows for infinite digital variations of a message, it cannot replace the trust built during a small dinner or a shared experience at an event like the World Cup. For zerohash, the goal is to remain the invisible, trusted backbone of these transactions. Success means that the partner remains the hero of the story while the “plumbing” functions without friction.

“The LLMs need to be organized, architected. There needs to be a system and a way of thinking that you apply to how you’re using them. I’m ideally trying to train these things to have very broad knowledge of our business and our partners’ problems, broader than I could ever have as a single human.”