Nvidia hires first-ever CMO, snatches former Google exec for the tough job of helping sell more chips — Alison Wagonfield spent nearly 10 years at Google building its Cloud project

Nvidia's marketing and PR strategies and campaigns have always been second to none, but ironically, the company has never had a dedicated chief marketing officer (CMO), as people who were in appropriate teams have reported to vice presidents of marketing. Instead of training a special AI model for the job, Nvidia has recruited former Google executive Alison Wagonfeld as its first CMO, reports the Wall Street Journal.

"After nearly 10 years of building Google Cloud from a promising start-up in 2016 to a thriving $60 billion run-rate business today, I will be leaving Google in late January to join Nvidia as its Chief Marketing Officer," Wagonfield wrote in a LinkedIn post. "I am excited to be joining Jensen's leadership team in a new role heading up marketing and communications as NVIDIA embarks on its next phase of growth."

While Nvidia has always had a decent communication and marketing organization, it has never been managed by a person with a CMO title. Dan Vivoli, who was responsible for Intel's PR and marketing activities from 1997 to 2014, was executive vice president, whereas Gilad Shainer is senior vice president of marketing. So indeed, Nvidia has never had a CMO before. Interestingly, the reporting line places the new CMO at the top management level, though for now it is unclear who she reports to and whether Nvidia will have both a VSP of marketing and a CMO of marketing.

Wagonfeld is set to assume the role in February and will oversee the entire marketing and communications organization. Prior to joining Nvidia, Wagonfeld spent nearly ten years at Google, where she was responsible for marketing the company's cloud computing business. Her background does not include any consumer-oriented companies, but rather centers on B2B, which pretty much aligns with Nvidia's current role as a supplier of AI hardware to big companies.

Speaking of big companies and the role of CMO, it is necessary to note that the company is hiring its new marketing leader at an important time, as the company has clearly transformed from being a supplier of GPUs for gaming and AI accelerators to being a supplier of complete AI systems with CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, networking, and software stacks. As a result, Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang has become the most visible public face of the AI boom, a combination that creates executive bottlenecks and messaging complexity as the CEO is supposed to sell a more strategic agenda and roadmaps rather than actual products.

Furthermore, the situation on the AI hardware market is set to change over the next couple of years. First up, in a period when extreme demand exceeded limited supply, marketing was largely irrelevant as clients bought what they were offered just to jump on the AI bandwagon in general and the AI training bandwagon specifically. Secondly, inference workloads are set to increase their role dramatically in the coming years, which opens doors to makers of AI inference accelerators, and therefore, competition is set to intensify dramatically. As a result, Nvidia must actively shape how its products, platforms, and roadmaps are perceived and compared, something that CEO talks cannot achieve. Also, the company must become more flexible to address different market needs (from small businesses to government and from academia to hyperscalers), but preserve its narrative. Last but not least, as Nvidia gets considerably bigger, it cannot rely on a single public spokesperson.

"I am thrilled to be moving from one AI leader to another at such a transformational time," Wagonfield added. "Google and Nvidia share a strong partnership, and we look forward to continued collaboration."

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