When Jennifer Chase takes to a conference stage, electricity buzzes through audiences as she holds the floor. It’s not just her measured voice that’s revered, or the sparkling smile, but most importantly, the woman who is respected for all that she has achieved. In the rapidly shifting landscape of AI, where fear and excitement about its capabilities dominate C-suite conversations in equal measure, Jennifer’s award-winning insights hold weight.
“Trust starts before the first line of code,” she tells crowd-goers at the SAS Innovate Tour in Sydney, which took place last week. Then, like the marketing tech guru she has become, she goes onto explain the importance of remaining ‘human centric’ and focused on the consumer. As Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of the global software company SAS, she would know. She has seen her own company, one of the leading lights in AI development, triple its size since she started with them more than 25 years ago, expanding to 160 countries and 72,000 customers by adhering to that principle.
“We have incredible technology that we’re extremely proud of, but it’s the people that create the technology and then work with our customers to implement it, that I think differentiates us,” she explains in conversation with Women Love Tech, discussing her career as a female leader in the male-dominated tech industry. “There’s a lot of technology that customers can choose from today, but if you don’t trust the people you are going to work with, then that’s going to be less successful.”
Jennifer describes herself as the product of internal mobility within SAS. Moving from communications and analyst relations to product strategy and marketing, the mother of two learned everything she could as she rose the company ranks, but it was where the path of tech met marketing, known as ‘Martech’, that really caught her attention and where she has excelled. “I’m dating myself by saying this, but I could see the power of tech impacting every industry back in the nineties,” she explains in her New York accent.
“I came in at a time when we were learning about website technology, email was growing, then mobile. The question was how do you use the data that’s being generated from these channels to understand your customer? That challenge still exists today, but with even more channels.”
Without martech, there are few businesses today that would succeed because it has become the engine that drives sales. But even with generative AI changing the martech rules, Jennifer still believes that creating trust with customers and understanding the importance of humans in the process of implementing generative AI is the future for successful businesses. Within SAS itself, no generative AI can be used without a human in the loop, and disclosure of the use of generative AI is paramount because they believe transparency builds trust.
“AI isn’t coming for our jobs. But marketing professionals with AI skills will be,” she says. “I believe this understanding will fundamentally shift how we approach AI integration in marketing. For me personally, it’s focused my attention on communicating our vision around AI for our marketing team, creating guidelines for ethical and responsible use, and paving a clear pathway for our marketers to increase their AI skills.”
With her knowledgeable, empathetic approach, Jennifer embodies the core qualities which studies show make women better leaders than men. She listens hard to the people around her and emanates integrity. She’s the kind of woman you could talk to easily. Mentoring women is also a top priority, and she considers herself lucky to have had good mentors herself, both male and female. “I talk about the three c’s with my mentees – competence, connections and confidence.
“As women, I think we’re prone to imposter syndrome. We are more likely to not believe in ourselves or devalue ourselves in some way. The solution is to understand that, recognize it and put it in its place when we see it. But it’s taken me time to get to that point myself. The struggle is real, but if we can talk about it openly and lift other women up, we’re all going to be better off.”
The disproportionately fewer number of women than men working in STEM related fields concerns her. “I have been so lucky to have an experience at SAS where from the very early days of the company, our founder and CEO Jim Goodnight has been committed to gender diversity. And our company is among those that is mitigating gender bias within the software. But it’s a struggle for me to find women for the user-interface related roles. It’s hard to attract female developers. I’ve really spent some time trying to understand why I can’t get the mix?”
One of the reasons, she believes, is that the demands of both home and work is oftentimes too overwhelming for women. “We particularly saw this during Covid, with a lot of women leaving the workforce. I wish we could just pull a lever, and we’d have an equal male-female mix, but we’ve got a way to go yet. We’ve got to encourage more girls into STEM and to stay. We need to make sure that we provide for the early career STEM workforce with mentoring and pipelines for them to grow, more paths to leadership.”
In her own family, Jennifer is the major earner and her husband the stay-at-home parent to their two children, a twenty-year-old son and thirteen-year-old daughter. “My daughter has been raised in a world where she sees an independent working mother and I love that my daughter sees that as normal, but at the same time, I’m aware that I need to prepare her for the fact that it’s still not normal and the world has a way to go in terms of gender equality”.
But Jennifer’s choices have not always been easy. Her job is demanding, and the SAS Innovate 2024 tour which has 15 global stops has taken her to conferences all over the world away from her home in Cary, North Carolina. “I’m currently on the road for two weeks. When I call home and talk to my husband, I’m thirteen hours away, not even on the same time zone, and I’m locked into work.
“I also realized recently that I wasn’t taking good enough care of myself either. I couldn’t do all the things I wanted to do as a wife and a mum and as a leader if I didn’t have the energy. So, I made a complete lifestyle change and now I get up and work out at five in the morning, and it has given me this level of clarity and energy that I didn’t have before.”
She piles that energy into everything she does and she’s clearly excited by it. “I don’t think you could have a more exciting time in tech than right now,” she says. “We’re on the frontier of AI literacy. We’ve got some exciting years ahead.” But she tempers her excitement with the practicality of a woman, pointing out that there is still a lot of hype around AI and ultimately it will need to be humans, the consumers themselves, that will dictate its best future.