Richard Lane: I’m delighted to be joined today by Mark Boothe, CMO at Domo. I’ll come clean now: Domo are both a customer of durhamlane’s, and we’re a customer of Domo’s. So it’s a great opportunity to get under the skin of a company I feel I know really well, admire, and have spent good time with. Mark, welcome to the episode.

Mark Boothe: Thanks, my friend. Good to be with you.

Richard Lane: It’s excellent to have you with us, and I’m excited for our conversation today. We’ve created a title, Mark — “From Dashboards to Decisions: Building an AI-Native Revenue Engine.” Say that with your teeth in! But what’s really exciting about today is that I know firsthand the work you and the team at Domo are doing from an AI point of view, building your business and changing that world. So we’re going to try and get into that, and hopefully give our listeners some clarity and insight into how the world is changing — and changing so fast — plus some things they can take away and put into practice. So, Mark, perhaps you could introduce yourself to our listeners, and give them a quick sense of how you got to here.

Mark Boothe: Yeah, of course. I’ve been at Domo for about four and a half years as CMO, and was an executive running field, partner and customer functions before that. I spent a decade-plus at Adobe, and was at Instructure for a bit — so I’ve had a front-row seat watching marketing mature. I was part of Adobe when it was still Box Software, and part of the company through that transition to what it’s become now. And AI, without question, Richard, has been the biggest shift I’ve ever seen in any kind of business setting in the history of my life. At Domo, we’ve leaned in very heavily. We hired an individual off the street who is an absolute AI native and an AI rockstar — he thinks in ways I didn’t grow up with. His job was to come in for my entire marketing organisation and help us be not just AI users, but AI fluent and AI advantaged — making sure we’re getting the advantages you should get out of AI. We did that with our marketing org, and with our account development org in the US as well. We had an individual whose entire job was focused on helping us use AI and other systems to be more effective, and it’s made all the difference. For those who don’t know Domo, we’re an AI and data products platform company — we help build agents and apps that help businesses run, from the biggest in the world to small, corporate-size accounts. We service all along that spectrum.

Richard Lane: Yeah, awesome. I think it’s going to be great getting into this conversation, because everybody is talking about AI, but there aren’t many who’ve really got under the skin of it properly yet — certainly not in a corporate sense. So maybe to set the scene: most marketing teams have more data than ever before, but they’re struggling to convert that into fast commercial action. I thought we’d start with that piece around data and decision-making. One thing I’ve learned through my own AI journey is that without great data, you don’t really have anything. So it’d be great to get your thoughts on that challenge with data, and how Domo has got ahead of it.

Mark Boothe: Great question. Without question, AI is only as good as the data foundation you have behind it. That’s why at Domo we talk about three, maybe four — you’ll see why I say that — key pillars we focus on. One, we help you build that data foundation wherever it lives — Snowflake, Google, Databricks, wherever it is — we help you access the data and make sure it’s clean and AI ready, so you can then take action. The next step is how you actually take that action — whether that’s building an app, an ETL, a data flow, an agent, whatever’s going to help you drive business outcomes, that’s what we help you build. From there, we help you distribute it. There are so many platforms out there that can help you vibe-code an agent or an app in seconds, but if the data foundation isn’t there, it’ll be no good. Hard stop. And if you can’t distribute that in a safe, secure and governed way, you will never see success. That’s the third — or really the most important pillar — governance. Do you have an auditable trail? Is IT going to say no way are you putting that into production? Those are the big things you have to have to be successful in the AI era: a stellar data foundation, the ability to action that data, and the ability to distribute it in a safe, secure, governed way. From a marketing perspective specifically, we’ve brought tools in for the team, but so much of it comes down to enablement. I see it too often — it’s easy for people to say, “Oh, we gave them Gemini, we gave them Claude, we gave them XYZ tool, now go play around.” I don’t want people to do that. I want people to figure out how to be more effective and more efficient at their job. I don’t need my paid media director or a VP of digital marketing to be really good at creating videos via Claude — I don’t need that. Can Claude do that kind of stuff well? Of course. But I need people to focus on the thing they have to nail and be the best in the world at. How do I use these amazing AI tools? How do I enable myself or my team so they can use the tools that will make them effective? That’s where most people get it wrong, Richard — “yep, you’ve got Gemini now, you’ve got Claude, you’ve got whatever — oh, how come we’re not seeing results?” Because you didn’t teach them.

Richard Lane: And I mean, that’s 100% — I think you’re right, this is where people are falling down. They’re not thinking about the end goal, they’re just saying “here are the tools, go off and use them to be better.” But actually it’s about enablement. How have you done that at Domo — how have you facilitated, directed or encouraged that pathway for your people? Because that’s quite a big shift in mindset for many people in an organisation.

Mark Boothe: Yeah, it is. And so much of it, Richard, comes down to the fact that we put two people in those roles — for our ADM org and for our marketing org — totally focused on how we help people be more effective and efficient. The one on the marketing side spent a ton of time with individuals in our team just figuring out: what are your use cases, how could you use this now, how do we set it up, what agents do we build, what can we do to make you more effective? And honestly, it’s been pretty wildly successful. The stat I have is around 200-plus hours a week of team capacity that’s been reclaimed because of that work. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in vendor costs we no longer have to pay because we’ve been able to build things internally, and a million-plus dollars a week in AI-attributed, Salesforce-tracked pipeline. It’s been pretty game-changing for us. We’ve got a lot of work still to do, and not everything is glowing the way we want it to be, but there are a lot of things AI has helped us do that are pretty revolutionary.

Richard Lane: Wow, that’s incredible. Domo has been built on that dashboard premise, and you’re clearly so much more than dashboards, as you’ve just stated.

Mark Boothe: It’s intriguing, Richard, and you were there — you were at Domopalooza this year. There’s an individual named Nicole, the CEO of a company that got up on stage, and we had a good meeting with her while we were there. I think she thought exactly that — “oh, they’re a dashboarding company” — and then she showed up and saw the possibilities of what we could do, and met with the right people. It was a pretty revolutionary experience for her, because she realised — are dashboards bad? Of course not. All data is only as good as the action it drives, if it delivers business outcomes. If it’s a dashboard you need, fantastic, we can do dashboards in our sleep. If you need an agent with workflows built in that does certain things, great, we’ll do that — but it has to take action and solve business problems.

Richard Lane: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a shift in itself, isn’t it? You’ve become intrinsically more valuable to an organisation — I can say this being a customer — because if Domo was just providing dashboards, that’s one thing. But to be building agents, providing the data governance and so on, suddenly you’re operating at different layers within an organisation, which is a pretty cool place to be. Just thinking about listeners to this episode who might be wondering how to get started, or who’ve started and it hasn’t gone so well — could you give a couple of things they should think about in terms of that enablement piece, and how they might set that up and create some value for themselves quickly?

Mark Boothe: You’re talking specifically about the AI enablement piece?

Richard Lane: Yeah, 100%.

Mark Boothe: So, number one: get your data in a good place. At Domo we have a whole AI-readiness offering where we can help you get your data AI ready. If your data isn’t AI ready and you throw it at AI to answer questions, you’ll get garbage, period — there’s no way around that. Make sure your AI is ready, that the context is there. If the context isn’t there, you’re set up to fail from the very beginning. Two: don’t make it someone’s afterthought. We put individuals in place whose entire job was to help people be more effective — it wasn’t “well, I don’t know, maybe I’ll get to it.” It’s the same issue as “here’s Claude, go figure some stuff out” — people don’t have time. They’re focused on building pipeline, delivering ads, making dials — they’re not going to go and do that, and if they do, it’ll be a waste of time. So have someone whose job is to help people be more effective, rather than just giving tools and hoping people figure it out. And then, don’t be afraid to fail. There are going to be mistakes — things will happen that you didn’t think about, didn’t realise. But test and fail fast, move fast, and you’ll see results.

Richard Lane: Yeah, awesome. Be purposeful in terms of what you’re having these people do who are leading this for you. You said you went out and found a couple of people — are you finding people from a different walk of life to the usual Domo hire? Much younger, very different experience?

Mark Boothe: That’s a fair question. One of them, from our ADM org, was already an ADM — very technical, has a master’s in analytics or something, so the AI side wasn’t anything new to him. The other is an individual who was sent to me — bad story, and Jake, if you’re listening, I apologise — Jake, on the marketing side, sent me a LinkedIn message. I get a fair amount of LinkedIn messages, which is no excuse, but I do — and this was probably a year before I even responded, Richard. What was sent to me was essentially his resume, which was a custom agent that had been created to answer any question about him. I was told I should look at this person, so I started interacting with this agent, and I was like, “holy cow, this is next level.” Any question you could think of — even set up to be extra safe and secure, so if you tried to trick it, he’d thought of everything. So I called him, I think that same day, got hold of my boss and said, can I hire this guy? He said yeah, so we hired him really quickly. Both of them very young, but AI native and AI focused, and driving things for our business and our customers that are pretty mind-blowing.

Richard Lane: Now that is very cool — that takes some courage too, to hire people who are in a different space. But you wanted to do something different, so that’s cool. Moving on — we mentioned Domopalooza. I had the pleasure of being there, it’s an amazing event. My business partner Lee actually saw One Republic in Hyde Park just this last weekend — he was more excited to see them with his daughter than he was to see Maroon 5, who were headlining, because he’d seen them on stage at Domopalooza. Massive event, unbelievable. I thought it’d be good to talk about how you’ve used that event — which I imagine is a huge time-sink to organise and expensive to run — to draw out value from customer feedback. It’d be great to understand how you take that feedback and use it to drive the business forward.

Mark Boothe: Yeah, it’s our flagship event — the most important and strategic event we run all year. A significant amount of our customer base comes to it, and it’s multiple days of teaching, learning, keynotes, great concerts and parties. This year we had 1,400-plus people — somewhere around a quarter of our total ARR is represented by attendees at that event, plus a massive amount of sponsorship revenue. Prospect attendance this year was up 50-plus percent, so lots of interest. The big focus for Domopalooza this year was AI — how you use Domo with Claude, with Cursor, with Gemini or whatever else, to make yourself more efficient and effective. We rely heavily on that event to build relationships, build pipeline, and help us hit the numbers we need to hit throughout the year.

Richard Lane: And does the feedback you get shape the strategy for future years? I presume it’s a huge listening event for you too.

Mark Boothe: Huge listening event, for sure. The feedback is always very positive. We’re releasing product throughout the year, but this is the biggest time of the year where we’re actually showcasing and highlighting product and getting a lot of feedback from customers. We’ve got a really active Domo community giving feedback on the product on a regular basis, and our product team takes that into account. So yes, it’s a place where we spend a lot of time listening to our customers — though there are others too, like our Connexions tour coming up in the fall — but it’s the single biggest event of the year to get customers together and hear what they need, and how we help both organisations move forward.

Richard Lane: Yeah, unbelievable — it’s an amazing event, incredibly well put on. Maybe a final topic, and back to AI — the theme du jour. From a marketing point of view, where should people be starting in terms of using AI, not just to do what they’ve done before with fewer people, but to up their game? I like what you said earlier about the goal being to help people increase their performance, output and outcomes — not to get rid of everyone, but to become next level. I was listening to someone yesterday who said the floor is rising, which in sales I think is a good thing, but she said never before has “good” been so underwhelming, because everybody’s now at the same place. There’s really no excuse anymore for not doing your sales research before you meet a prospect — it’s a couple of sentences and a click of a button. So from a marketing point of view, where have you seen the biggest wins so far on this journey?

Mark Boothe: Yeah, totally echo your thoughts there, Richard. In my opinion, it’s never been easier to be in a sales-focused organisation or role than it is today — but you’ve also never seen more trash than there is today. I am amazed at the AI slop that hits my inbox on a regular basis, and it’s maddening, because I’m like, don’t be dumb — it’s not hard, it’s a really well-written prompt away from making you look like a genius. But if all you say is, “AI, go do my research, do my writing, do my sending, do my outreach, do everything,” and you’re not even involved, you’re doing it wrong. That old adage, Richard — people buy from people they trust — is still true. Look at the very best and most successful reps of all time: what do they do? They have really good relationships. The best reps, the best marketers, the best whatever-other-role, are using AI to make their goodness better — to take out the stuff AI is better at, and help them be more efficient with their time. What people have to think about is the sequence: mindset first. I have to make sure I’m helping people understand this is not to reduce your job. Look at how many organisations have let people go in the eyes of “oh well, this is the AI cut,” and then so many since have had to rehire. It’s a mistake. So, mindset — how do we help people understand I want to help you be more effective, more efficient, 10x, 2x, 3x better at your job. That’s number one. Number two is hands-on enablement — that’s not first, and people get that wrong all the time. “Oh, there’s Gemini, there’s Claude, how come you haven’t 10x’d your productivity?” Well, nobody ever sat down to think about how this could make them more effective. Nobody taught them how to build the agent, or showed them how to make the data AI ready. We miss the most important part, we throw a tool at people, and then companies say, “well, I don’t know what happened, AI doesn’t work.” Yeah — AI works. You don’t work.

Richard Lane: Yeah, yeah. Do you think that’s what’s giving Domo an edge — in that you as an organisation are moving into different parts of your customers’ organisation, providing that data governance, which we’ve talked about a couple of times as pivotal and the number one requirement? You’re able to provide that purposeful support — “we’ve built lots of these things, we understand how to do it, we can help you do it, or do it for you, and then help you be successful.” You can help bring that mindset. Part of the challenge for organisations, I think, is that it’s sort of the Wild West out there at the moment, and in my industry, it’s making it harder for everyone, because the amount of rubbish has been 50x’d or 500x’d — which ultimately makes it harder for everybody, even if you’re approaching things in a meaningful way, because everyone is so overloaded with rubbish. It’s even harder to cut through. I talk about AI for speed and scale, humans for connection — there’s an opportunity to take out the tasks that don’t necessarily have meaning but need to be done, and give ourselves more time to be meaningful. I just wonder, from a Domo point of view, because you’re a platform, whether you’ve got that additional benefit of being able to support the governance and everything else as well. Does that make sense?

Mark Boothe: Yeah, I think it is. So much of the value customers see today is that the barrier to entry is so low. We just had an event a couple of weeks ago, Domo Build, where a significant number of customers — ESPN, Yum! Brands and a whole host of others — showcased really cool agents and apps they’d built, and you don’t have to be a deep data scientist to build those things anymore. The barrier is so low if you do it right — if you put your data in a good place, the foundation’s there, and you build the stuff with IT involved the whole time, rather than shadow IT — you’ll see success if you build the right stuff and enable your teams to be really good at what they’re good at. That’s the key. But part of the issue is that people think AI is just going to reduce the time they need to work, that they can work 20 hours a week and that’s plenty. No — still be the best you can be, put the work in, but focus on the stuff you’re uniquely good at.

Richard Lane: Yeah — it doesn’t replace hard work. You could argue everyone needs to work harder to create the gains, but I think the results are there for people who follow your steps and get that right. I think that’s been a whistle-stop tour, Mark, through the world of Domo and how AI is reshaping what you’re doing. I’m always excited to hear where you’re taking it, and I think the advances from Domo, and the support and enablement in how you’re helping organisations take on AI sensibly and intelligently, is fantastic — so thank you and the team for that. I noticed you’ve also just recently been recognised by Snowflake as a partner to watch, which is great news. To summarise today’s conversation for our listeners: get your data and context right, be purposeful, enable your people well because you understand what you’re trying to do before you build, don’t be afraid when things don’t go right first time — iterate and go again — have the right mindset, use the tools to create the value you’re looking for, and work hard to be successful.

Mark Boothe: Nailed it. You said it better than I could — well done.

Richard Lane: Well, you said it, I just summarised. Mark, thank you so much for being with us on this episode of Inside the Funnel. As always, I really enjoyed the chat, and I’ll look forward to speaking to you again soon. Thanks so much.

Mark Boothe: Thanks, Richard.