Podcast Summary: Marketing Trends

Episode: The CMO Who Never Becomes Obsolete

Date: December 17, 2025
Host: Stephanie Postles, CEO & Founder of Mission.org
Guest: Michelle Huff, Chief Marketing Officer, Alteryx

Episode Overview

In this episode, host Stephanie Postles interviews Michelle Huff, CMO of Alteryx, offering a deep dive into how marketing leaders can remain relevant through successive industry and technological revolutions. Huff reflects on sustaining a growth and experimentation mindset, embedding curiosity into organizational culture, balancing human and AI-driven initiatives, and fostering genuine community around data products. This candid discussion is packed with real-world examples, lessons from failures and successes, and practical wisdom for marketers and organizational leaders seeking to future-proof their impact.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Staying Relevant Through Tech Revolutions

• Michelle's Journey: Huff describes her path from the late ‘90s Internet boom (websites, digital documentation) through stints in Oracle, Salesforce (cloud/data evolution), Act-On (marketing automation), UserTesting (customer feedback at scale), and now Alteryx (democratizing data access).
• Mindset for Relevance:
  • Curiosity as a Core Value:

    “I'm a tinkerer by heart. I love figuring out how things work and learning about new things. So I think curiosity is huge.”
    (Michelle, 00:07)

  • Fear of Irrelevance Is Misplaced:

    “People fear in this space that if you are out of it for a year or two, you become irrelevant… It just keeps changing... Roll up your sleeves and just volunteer to do stuff.”
    (Michelle, 00:20)

  • Balance Trendiness with Substance: It’s about leading customers into the future, not just chasing fads.

2. Empowerment Through Technology

• Alteryx’s Mission: Making powerful data tools accessible beyond data scientists, much like how no-code web tools democratized website creation.
• Parallel to Earlier Tech Waves:

  “There's a very similar thing with Alteryx… it’s really the business users who have more power to build all of that.”
  (Michelle, 05:19)

3. Building a Culture of Experimentation

• Teamwide Tinkering: Michelle emphasizes the importance of enabling the whole marketing org to experiment, not just the CMO.
• Practical Tactics:
  • Highlight wins and learnings in all-hands meetings (09:10–10:54).
  • Carve out time for experimentation in planning cycles.
  • Create forcing functions and encouragement to share experiments, even failures, as learning opportunities.

4. AI Integration & Marketing Org Transformation

• Hiring an AI Lead:

  • Role: A “startup mindset,” creator and experimenter, working cross-functionally to reimagine and automate parts of marketing jobs.
  • Skills Needed: Zero-to-one builders, product management perspective, understanding automation, and AI agent orchestration.

  • “…If I hired you five more people, what would you do?... you would break down the role... AI agents is this shift of mindset, of trying to think, are there parts of a role that you carve out that you start to allow an agent to do?”
    (Michelle, 15:28)

• Judgment Automation and Real Examples:

  • SDR Workflow Automation: Using AI to gather data and compose personalized outbound emails (20:14–22:32).
  • Analyst Workflow Evolution: Automation reduced manual tasks, shifting roles from repetitive work to higher-value analysis.

• Reality Checks & Failure Lessons: AI is not a panacea; content generation especially still requires human creativity and discernment.

  “You look at some of the times of what's output and, and you're like, ah, you know, you got to still kind of work. Like it's not at a spot where you'd be like, oh yeah, let's just kind of let it run.”
  (Michelle, 27:24)

5. Community & Customer-Centricity

• Alteryx's 700k+ User Community:
  • Grassroots Growth: Michelle credits predecessors for fostering “user love,” with stories of users even getting Alteryx tattoos (35:28).
  • Community Programs: Education, competition (Grand Prix), recognition, and leveraging user success stories in campaigns.
• Standing Out in a Noisy Market:
  • Customer stories and word-of-mouth trump generic AI buzz.
  • Programs target both users and buyers to avoid neglecting the end-user experience.
  • Engage across all audience layers—from C-level to front-line users.

6. Results from AI Experiments

• Tangible Wins:
  • 7% lift in leads from automated outbound campaigns (42:35).
  • 4% improvement benchmarked with existing user cohorts.
  • 3X increase in outbound engagement through advanced AI prioritization and personalization.

  “…the combination of what we're calling personalized AI as well as the diamond leads, we were seeing a 3x lift in outbound engagement. And that's really something that's kind of fundamentally changed how they're working with leads now.”
  (Michelle, 43:58)

7. The Evolving Role of Marketers

• From Doers to Orchestrators: Future marketers will manage teams and “agents,” focusing more on creative and strategic oversight than on repetitive tasks (Fields like finance and analytics are shifting similarly).
• Continuous Upskilling:

  “There's always problem sets that you can have the same skill set just applied into new things we've never been able to get to…”
  (Michelle, 26:22)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Experimentation:

  “It's not you don't hit success every single time, but you learn a lot, right? … As long as you take a moment to reflect on why it's not working and so you can get the learnings, then I don't think it's a lost cause.”
  (Michelle, 09:50)

• On Content Noise & Authenticity:

  “It's just noisy, actually. And then it's just all this vanilla content out there pulled from a machine… Is that helpful to the world, though, or is that just noisy?”
  (Stephanie, 29:21)
  "It almost creates a new problem sometimes where ... It's just too much ... people are trying to wade through to find the actual really thoughtful, kind of insightful pieces instead of all the fluff."
  (Michelle, 29:49)

• On Community Pride:

  “Some community members literally have a tattoo of Alteryx on them, which is kind of amazing.”
  (Michelle, 35:28)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Michelle’s background through tech revolutions – 01:23–04:51
• Alteryx: Empowering business users with data – 04:51–05:19
• Strategies for staying relevant and curious – 05:58–08:35
• Balancing curiosity, delegation, and team tinkering – 08:35–10:32
• Building a culture of experimentation – 10:32–13:33
• Hiring for AI and workflow/role transformation – 13:33–20:00
• Real-world AI application: SDR workflow – 20:00–22:32
• Evolution of analyst roles through automation – 23:26–25:47
• Challenges/limitations of AI, especially in content – 27:24–29:49
• Standing out in a noisy, AI-buzz market – 29:49–34:23
• Leveraging and growing the Alteryx user community – 35:03–41:19
• Quantitative results from AI-driven experiments – 42:13–46:14

Lightning Round Highlights (46:41–52:58)

• Belief that changed: “I used to believe in the ta-da moment… and what I’ve learned over the years is that's the starting point.”
• Emerging KPI: Tracking AI search engine referrals versus traditional search—seeing better-engaged users.
• Marketing leader admired: Autodesk’s CMO for innovative audience activation (49:16).
• Book recommendation: Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (“...the only thing you can have complete control over is how you choose to respond to something.”)
• Daily reset habit: Family dinners and storytelling with kids.

Conclusion

This episode offers a vibrant, candid exploration of how marketers and leaders can remain indispensable by fostering curiosity, embracing AI as augmentation (not replacement), and grounding work in authentic customer needs and stories. Michelle Huff’s insights are actionable, honest about the pitfalls, and applicable far beyond the realm of marketing technology.

Find out more:

• Michelle Huff: LinkedIn
• Alteryx: alteryx.com