How Marketing Leaders Win With AI: Signal Integrity, Brand and Women in AI | Lara Shackelford

What separates good demand generation from truly scalable growth? Marketing and AI leader Lara Shackelford, who has held senior marketing roles at Oracle, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, DataStax, Looker and Qlik, tells host Henry Clavo it comes down to signal integrity: listening to the right customer signals and acting on them at scale. Who it's for: CMOs, marketing and growth leaders, sales and product leaders, and anyone leading AI adoption or building a career in tech. In this episode you'll learn: - How to use your first 30 days in a new role: listen to people, customers and the data - The two leadership principles she relies on: clarity and prioritization, and empowerment - Why signal integrity is the difference between demand generation and scalable growth - Why sales and marketing are becoming one team, and why brand and demand generation go hand in hand - Why AI projects fail when success is not defined at the outset, and why change management matters more than ever - How she builds with Lovable, Replit, ChatAndBuild, ChatGPT and Zapier, and why she is teaching vibe coding - Why executives still struggle with AI literacy and how to prioritize AI use cases with a simple framework Lara shares how three years at Levi Strauss and eight years at Oracle shaped a leadership style that combines caring about people with standing firm, why she makes customers the heroes of the story when creating a category, and what research says about women's hesitancy to adopt AI. She previews her keynote theme, Rise, for the Xerox women's conference, explains her personal term, bounce, and tells the story of the Nicole Miller internship interview that taught her persistence. Chapters 0:00 Cold open 0:13 Orlando Insights Podcast intro 0:53 Meet Lara Shackelford 3:02 From Levi's to Oracle: the shift that shaped how she leads 5:23 Where to focus in your first 30 days 6:30 Leadership principles: clarity, prioritization and empowerment 8:46 Signal integrity and scalable growth 10:34 Aligni