November's Off the Record: AI in Marketing, What's Working, What's Not
The pace of change in AI is overwhelming, even for those living it daily. Staying competitive requires direct, honest access to the practitioners actively building, deploying, and wrestling with these technologies.
Join TiE Silicon Valley for Off the Record, a recurring series for entrepreneurs featuring candid, behind-the-scenes conversations with front-line practitioners—product leaders, engineering heads, founders, and enterprise operators. Rather than polished keynote speeches or corporate marketing, this series offers frank, practical insights on what is actually changing, what works, and how to navigate it.
Missed previous sessions? Catch up on the unvarnished insights and highlights:
Event Details
Date: Wednesday, November 11, 2026
Time: 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM PST
Location: TiE Silicon Valley Office, Palo Alto | Interactive Zoom session via Live Video Conference
Curators: Smita Hashim & Shivani Govil
Format Policy: Off the record — Chatham House Rule applies. Nothing will be recorded or attributed to ensure open, candid dialogue. No slides—just direct conversation.
Session Overview: AI in Marketing, What's Working, What's Not
At our first Off the Record session, we heard that as engineering builds faster, the bottlenecks are shifting. Marketing is one of them.
How is marketing using AI today? Where does it make sense and where does it not? What are the specific use cases, the successes and the failures, and how is ROI measured?
Marketing is many things: product, field, prospecting, nurturing, account-based marketing. In this session, we go beyond press releases to take a 360-degree view with two candid, grounded CMOs who are doing this work every day. Learn practical lessons that will help you explore how to scale your marketing with AI.
Featured Speakers & Curators
Andrew Savitz — Chief Marketing Officer at Azul Systems
Andrew leads global marketing at Azul. He is building an AI-first marketing organization where people and AI agents work as one team across every marketing discipline, from brand and messaging to demand generation, events and customer programs. He is also a self-described Claude enthusiast who finds a way to build a Claude artifact for just about everything. Under his leadership, marketing grew from 0 to 40% of pipeline and ACV, the largest source in the company, and Azul was sold to Thoma Bravo in December 2025.
Andrew has more than 25 years in enterprise software and SaaS, with five exits as CMO. He led marketing through the KXEN acquisition by SAP, the Aconex IPO, AppDynamics’ acquisition by Cisco, and BetterCloud’s #SaaSOps launch, and helped grow salesforce.com’s Service Cloud. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science and an MBA from UCLA.
Outside work, he loves time with his family, surfing, international travel, his golden retriever, and reviewing Mexican restaurants in Marin as a Yelp Elite.
Chandra Rangan — Chief Marketing Officer at Shield AI
Chandra Rangan is the Chief Marketing Officer of Shield AI, where he works to accelerate growth by advancing Shield AI’s brand, increasing its visibility, and supporting the sales team to drive, land, and expand deals. Before joining Shield AI, Chandra served as the Chief Marketing Officer of Neo4j, where he helped mature the graph database category and established them as one of the fastest-rising database companies in a highly competitive space. Prior to Neo4j, he led strategy and operations for Google Maps' enterprise API business and scaled Google Cloud's product marketing organization in its earlier years. Chandra holds an undergraduate degree in software engineering from the National University of Singapore and an MBA from Dartmouth College.Smita Hashim (Moderator & Curator) — Partner, Disruptive Ventures
Smita is a Partner at Disruptive Ventures and a strategic advisor to founders and venture companies. Previously, she was Chief Product Officer at Zoom, where she led products across the platform, and earlier held product leadership roles at Google and Microsoft.Shivani Govil (Moderator & Curator) — Senior Advisor, McKinsey & Co.
Shivani is currently a Senior Advisor at McKinsey. Prior to this, she has held CPO and senior leadership roles at Google, CCC, and SAP.
Agenda / Schedule
5:30 PM – 6:00 PM: Doors Open, Snacks & Networking
6:00 PM – 6:45 PM: Moderated Conversation (Featured Speakers + Moderators)
6:45 PM – 7:15 PM: Open Q&A (In-person & Interactive Remote)
7:15 PM – 7:30 PM: Post-session Networking
Registration Note: In-person seats at the TiE Silicon Valley office in Palo Alto are limited. Remote participants will join by live video and have access to interactive Q&A.