The AI Movement with Brooke
The AI Movement with Brooke, explores how entrepreneurs, founders, creatives, and leaders are navigating the rapidly changing world of AI.
Through real conversations with people building, experimenting, pivoting, and growing with AI, Brooke goes beyond the latest tools to uncover how this technology is changing the way we work, make decisions, build businesses, create, and define success.
The AI Movement with Brooke
Inside Carta's Enterprise AI Rollout | Nicole Baer
How does an enterprise move from experimenting with AI to building it into the way the company actually operates? CMO Nicole Baer shares what that process looked like behind the scenes, from what she calls AI "recess" to a more focused enterprise AI adoption plan.
Recorded live at eMerge Americas 2026, Nicole Baer joins Brooke to share how Carta was turning individual AI experiments into systems its employees and customers could use.
Nicole also explains Carta's work on what it calls the first agentic ERP for private markets. ERP stands for enterprise resource planning, a connected system for managing a company's core operations. She shares how the acquisitions of Accelex for LP reporting and ListAlpha for CRM helped Carta bring more private-market workflows into one platform.
If your company is trying to turn individual AI experiments into systems an entire team can use, this conversation gives you a useful look at what that shift requires.
In this conversation
- How Accelex and ListAlpha fit Carta's agentic ERP for private markets
- How Carta introduced Claude Enterprise and trained marketers to build their own skills and agents
- Why Carta tests an AI vendor against one deep use case before expanding it
- How AirOps, Evidenza, and Storydoc fit into Carta's marketing stack
- What Carta Change Agents does for customers using Carta's Claude plugins
- Why curiosity is no longer enough when interviewing for a marketing role
- How content engineering, marketing engineering, and go-to-market engineering are changing traditional jobs
About Nicole
Nicole Baer is the Chief Marketing Officer of Diligent. At the time of this interview, she served as Chief Marketing Officer of Carta, where she led global marketing as the company expanded its platform for founders, investors, and private-market organizations. Her previous leadership experience includes roles at Logitech and Zendesk.
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How I AI is now The AI Movement with Brooke.
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We're starting to see the rise of roles that typically have like blank engineer tacked onto them. So as I mentioned, content engineering is the new content strategist, but that content engineering role is really a mix of a content strategy role, a brand role, and a digital marketing role. There's another one that's come up that's uh go-to-market engineer, which has been popularized by Clay. That role, go-to-market engineer, really crosses different roles within revenue ops, for example, that used to be more defined. So there's these new hybrid roles are going to start to be normalized.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to the AI Movement Podcast. The space where modern entrepreneurs and founders come to stay current and navigate their next move with AI together. I cover the conferences, sit with the people leading this shift, and I bring it all here. Broken down, without the hype, whether you're building something, pivoting your work, or trying to keep ahead ethically. You are in the right place. Let's get into it. This week's featured conversation was recorded live during Emerge America's 2026 with Nicole Bayer, the chief marketing officer at Carda. Nicole joined Carda as a CMO in 2024 and currently leads marketing across the company's corporations, fund advisory, and alternative assets business. He oversees everything from brand and demand generation to content, communications, events, and digital. Before CARDA, she held leadership roles at companies, including Logitech and Zendask. And today she's helping create what an AI-powered marketing organization looks like from the inside. In our conversation, Nicole takes us behind the scenes of how Carta is rolling out AI across its marketing organization, from cloud enterprise to new ways of testing, building, and thinking about talent. We also get into how AI is changing the roles companies are hiring for, why curiosity alone is no longer enough, and what do you believe the professionals need to be doing now to stay competitive? This episode is for marketers, founders, business leaders. And anyone wondering what meaningful adoption really looks like and what skills should I be building to keep up in the AI movement? All right, let's dive into today's talk with Nicole. Well, Nicole, thank you so much for being here. We are day one of Emerge America's Miami 2026. Yes.
SPEAKER_03So excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_02I know you have a couple talks today. Yes. Before we get into everything about B2B, AI, how Carta is personally integrating AI, I'd love for you to first introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Carta. Sure.
SPEAKER_03So I've been at Carta for two years. Actually, I just had my two-year anniversary. It's been a really exciting two years for us. Yes. We introduced the first agentic ERP for private markets during that time. Creating unified workflows for founders, funders, and investors across the private capital landscape. So really exciting time. We've been fleshing this vision out that our CEO Henry had around an agentic ERP. We've made several exciting acquisitions over the last six months to really complete the vision, including XLX, which is for LP reporting. We recently announced earlier this month that we acquired ListAlpha for CRM. So really the vision is that we have a complete end-to-end solution from back office, middle office to front office for funds. And then our cap table business, which has 50,000 companies that use us for cap table, and 85% of all US unicorns is sort of the atomic unit that powers our platform. It really starts with ownership and flows all the way through allocation with limited partners.
SPEAKER_02I did a bit of research on what a cap table is before our conversation. I am not personally investing yet or raising funds. But for those who don't know what a cap table is, could you briefly go into it?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, really good question. So a cap table essentially reflects the ownership of everyone who owns a part of a company, whether it's the founder, it's the early employees, or their investors, and it reflects how much ownership they have, what the valuation is of the company, what that represents in terms of in terms of total percentage of ownership across the company. So it's a really, really important system of record for companies, it's a requirement, number one, not to have one. But also it it's very easy when you don't use uh CARTA and you operate in spreadsheets to make very significant errors in cap tables that can cost founders millions of dollars later on. Yeah. Yeah, and then making sure you're making smart choices around dilution, for example. How much of a company are you willing to give away if you're a founder? So the cap table plays an incredibly important role in private markets. It's really the starting place.
SPEAKER_02All right, question of the day AI. Yeah. Let's dive into first how you use AI and with your team as the CMO of Carta.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so we've been on a journey over the last two years around AI. It really started more with us thinking through what is the impact of things like AI overviews, which was Google's sort of first foray into LLMs. Like, how was that going to change our content strategy? So we sort of started there, I think, with what were the things that we needed to adjust to. And then from there, we focused on what are the best vendors in AI native tools in this space that could really give us leverage in market. And we've discovered some great ones like AirOps, Evidenza, Story Doc that have been have become very integral to our tech stack in marketing. And then more recently, we rolled out Claude Enterprise Wide to all of Carta. So all of the marketers are now deep in training to be able to build their own skills, build their own agents. Um and we're really in that transformative process right now where the marketers are all in there themselves building, learning. I'm in there building myself. I spent eight hours last weekend building my own skills in Claude. And I really think it's important to kind of get in there. It doesn't matter what level you are in the company, you need to understand how to ground up build with AI because that's how you get the results that you want on the other side. Like understanding how to give, for example, Claude the necessary context, the correct data sets, et cetera, to get the outcomes that you want. Yes. And you know, these things are these are important ideas whether you're buying AI tech or you're building uh tech, like understanding how these things fundamentally work means you have to work in them yourself. So we've gone from, we've been in this phase that I've been calling recess for the marketers, which I like that term, where everyone's sort of just playing, you know, experimenting, building. There's no real constraint saying you only do this, you know, build this or that thing. And the next phase is what we're calling the harness phase, which is curating every everything that has already been built in marketing and really like bringing that the skill set, literally our set of skills that is used for marketing, to what are really the best tools and what provide leverage for all of the marketers, right? Or all of Carta as opposed to individuals. And then after that, we're gonna go into a phase that I call the full court press, which means we're gonna map everything that we built against strategic priorities and see what do we need to build now where there's a gap.
SPEAKER_02And so you're on enterprise Claude. How has all of this shifted the way that you view leadership and are building out your teams?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Super interesting, and I've been thinking a lot about this. How do you lead through? This is, I mean, of course, leaders always are like leading through transformation, and you know, that's sort of normal, but this is like a seismic shift. This is unlike anything I've ever seen in my career. Yes. And I've been in tech my entire career. Um and you know, I would say what what I number one, I think it's my job to be calm and to be planful. This is how we're gonna do this, kind of like the way that I just described. This is how we're gonna we're gonna sort of approach and attack the opportunity that we have here. And then, you know, being knowledgeable enough myself to be able to give direction to the team and understand how we're gonna build strategically, I think it's something that's a a new mandate for leaders.
SPEAKER_02My next question is what are you looking for in talent than you weren't a year ago? How can someone remain competitive? Yes.
SPEAKER_03Specifically within marketing. It's an excellent question. The first thing that I want to see is I want to see curiosity. And that was, you know, it's always been important to be from my perspective, anyone that I was interviewing for a role at Carta, I wanted them to have curiosity about Carta. That was that was sort of like a baseline. If you weren't really that interested in what we were doing or like really excited about what the company was doing, that to me would be something I would need to dig into in the interview a little bit more. Um now it's that it's like the definition of curiosity has expanded into curiosity around how to use AI in in your job. And it it can't just be like, oh yeah, I'd love to learn, you know, love to learn. Of course, like there is a learning curve for everyone. In fact, Carta is very far ahead in terms of enterprise rollouts, even according to Anthropic. Um so we're setting, you know, the the bar there, but I do I do need to hear from people how they've leveraged AI meaningfully in their past roles. And that's not just using chat. Yeah. That's that's more deeply using AI, whether it's AI native tools and starting to understand how to use those or their own their own skills that they've built. Those are things that are now really a requirement for anyone who we're gonna bring on the team.
SPEAKER_02Can you dive a little bit deeper on your AI native tools and the vendors that you work with? Like how do you pick a good vendor? Yeah, there's a lot of competition out there right now for people. Everybody is AI native, have AI capabilities. What really sticks out for you when you choose who to work with?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's a um uh it's something that uh also have spent a lot of time thinking about how do we, there's a sea of AI native vendors, and they're all like coming at you with their AI native story. Yes. Their magic. Um and I think the what I find to be the sort of the straightest point from like the the initial sort of like this looks interesting. Um it could have legs at our company to like, yes, we we want to invest deeply in this tool, is to do a deeper a use case that goes deep. Okay. And I think that's where a lot of CMOs go wrong and why many CMOs, like there was a report that came out last year that the vast majority of Fortune 500 CMOs have not successfully rolled any AI tools out on their teams. Wow. And some of that is because they tend to do these trials that are like sort of broad and shallow because they're trying, understandably trying to get a sense of how would this work across my organization. Yeah. But ultimately, you still have you're still gonna have subject matter experts who understand the tool and are deploying it. Um what's worked successfully for us is to say we're gonna test this tool very rigorously against one use case that we know if it works here, it's gonna scale well. So an example of that would be um AirOps, which is a content engineering platform. And essentially what AirOps does is you have a human content strategist works alongside their LLM to create new content that is based on all everything we can feed them that is our existing expertise around a top a particular topic we want to talk about. And a lot of our content is highly regulated because we're a fintech company. And so we have expert, reliable, trustworthy content, and we feed that into the AirOps LLM. And then there's sort of a human and it at Carta, her name is Lucy, who is a content engineer, and she like she rides along in the workflows with the LLM to say you're getting off track here, double down on that, that's a good point, and essentially works within the LLM, just like you do with any LLM where you're like sort of like working to get the right result. And then when we get to the point where we think it's created the right, the right piece for what we're looking for, then we're able to test it using synthetic personas, which is something that's really cool. So AirOps will then test and say, okay, here's your fine your piece. We have synthetic personas that we will then go see how this is gonna perform with, and it will give you feedback right away on like, well, you missed the mark on this thing that CFO, private equity CFOs really care about. And so let's like go back, and then you go back into the workflow and you rework it. So it's it's an like incredibly um powerful tool end-to-end, and then it also provides dashboards for how our content is performing with with the the major LLM, so perplexity, Claude, OpenAI, um, and will tell us what share of voice do we have in the market, how many are the extractability and citations that are happening, which is really the key driver of showing up in Answer Engines, optimization AEO as it's called. And so we uh we have sort of the end-to-end look of creating the content, testing it, then getting it in market and seeing how it performs in really powerful ways, and then how we're performing sort of at the high level. And you know, discovery by prospects and customers for products in AEOs is significantly on the rise, and we think it's just gonna keep taking off. Yes, everybody is mad about AEO and acronyms. Yes, we gotta like settle on an acronym because we I I feel the same way. Like I gotta always say, like, what are we AEO, GEO, what are we talking about here? I AIO. Uh but essentially it's all just you know, it's all LLM discovery.
SPEAKER_02Wow, so you're really testing and you're piloting programs, you're consistently going back and and making sure that it's performing. Yeah. Because I know so many teams really have those consistent check-ins to even see that you know what they're paying for is performing. Yeah, so that's incredible. You and I also discussed about two exciting new plugins that you're launching. Yes, have launched.
SPEAKER_03We launched them. Yep, we launched them um 10 days ago now. It seems like it was a long, I mean, time is moving in a totally different way than it did before. I like to joke that we talk about things as being BC before Claude and Claude's new definition of BC. I'm gonna use that. Yeah, new definition of BC. But yes, we rolled out um our first plugins for our investors' audience and for our um for companies, for our investors, customers to be able to go in and work with their own data in Claude using our plugins. And the same thing for um for companies that can go in and look at their cap table and work in their cap tables and query, ask questions, have different looks at the data that's and and actually like export those looks for reporting out of the cap table or out of out of the fund. Um, and it's been incredibly exciting. The response that we have gotten from the market has been overwhelming in a good way. Um, and one of the things that we're starting to stand up is this uh program called Carta Change Agents, which helps customers understand what to do with with these plugins because what we're finding is that you know there's some, for example, a core audience for us are fund CFOs. Yes. And another core audience are founders. Fund CFOs in particular are very eager to find ways to learn. Everyone's looking for ways to learn. Yes. But when you have the opportunity to learn using a data set that you're very familiar with and and be able to experiment in ways that actually make a really big difference to your job that can feel like these aha moments, CFOs are seeking those moments. So we're offering this Carta Change Agents program to go into our our an initial set of customers and work with their whole finance team if that's what they want, what depending upon what the what is needed, and teach them how to use these plugins and how we think about plugins and really help them in their own their own journey in becoming AI proficient. That's incredible.
SPEAKER_02Can you talk about those that are first-time founders and startups and now they have access to this incredible data, they haven't had this empowering knowledge before.
SPEAKER_03Uh-huh. How does that impact businesses today? Um, super interesting. So there's a couple of things that are happening. Like in the broader market, what we're seeing is this very strong um increase in the number of solo founders. And uh and it's you know, it's like it's it's like in the 10%-ish increase, but that's actually a lot. Yeah. Like if you think about year over year, if you think about what the way that companies used to have a founding team, you would have five founders, you know, co-founders on a team. You know, two or three was probably more common. But to have a spike of 10%, you know, where of companies just have a solo founder, that is a one-to-one um dynamic with AI. That is the only reason. There's not another reason that this is happening. It's it's being driven by the fact that AI is making these founders so much more efficient and able to do things entirely on their own that they could not have done before. So they don't feel like I have to bring in another founder to complete their knowledge on something because they can actually just leverage AI to do that. Or they're able to start getting scale on their go-to-market motion, for example, using AI. So this trend line I think is gonna be really interesting and develop over the next the next several years.
SPEAKER_02That's my next question. So, with this drastic increase, if you could get your future thinking hat on, what do you think the next year looks like?
SPEAKER_03Oh man, I get this question a lot, and I feel like I feel like I can sense about nine months. Yeah, really to the end of this year, and then I think it gets it gets a little bit difficult. Some of that is seeing what happens with IPOs, and like does the IPO market really start to, you know, like finally unfurl a bit after sort of the tight, the tightness we've had in the IPO market if when SpaceX goes goes public, uh, whenever that happens. So, you know, there's a lot of like private market dynamics that I think are gonna shift over the next year potentially. In terms of what's gonna happen with AI, I think for sure the enterprise rollouts that both OpenAI and uh anthropic are chasing are definitely gonna hit like most tech companies are gonna do enterprise rollouts. And then I think going into other industries from there, and I think there will be this like rolling thunder of enterprise rollouts where companies are having every employee needs to use Claude, for example. And that's that's where we are today. But again, we're an early mover. Um I do think this is gonna impact the types of jobs on the market as well. So for sure, we're already starting to this is already happening in go to market where we're starting to see new new jobs pop up that are really hybrid jobs because AI has really made the swim lanes, at least in go to market, very blurry. Between marketing and sales and go-to-market ops and rev ops, it's like, well, I can go in and grab whatever I whatever data I need. I can build a skill. I don't have to go necessarily to RevOps and ask for that data. Yeah. But they're still the SMEs and they still help me understand what I should be working with, for example. But that kind that ability to really cross domains because if you have access to all the data sets, um it's incredibly powerful for anyone and go to market. But we're starting to see the rise of roles that typically have like blank engineer tacked onto them. So as I mentioned, content engineering is the new content strategist, but that content engineering role is really a mix of a content strategy role, a brand role, and a digital marketing role. Um, there's another one that's come up that's uh go-to-market engineer, which has been popularized by Clay. And Clay called that role go to market engineer really crosses uh different roles within revenue ops, for example. Right. That used to be more defined. There's another one that's come up recently that's been coined by Profound, which is called a marketing engineer, and that's really a blend of AEO, GEO, growth marketing, and marketing ops. So there's these new hybrid roles are gonna become are gonna start to be normalized. And so we're gonna see different kinds of hiring. Just like, you know, 15 years ago you didn't really talk about growth marketers, you know, and then that became normal. We're gonna see the normalization of these new types of roles that are a hybrid of what used to be very defined roles in marketing and go to market.
SPEAKER_02I like that insights, and I agree, we just can't even imagine what type of roles are gonna be coming through. It's really hard. So I appreciate you trying to think what the next nine months will look like. Yeah. My final question for you is just to share one key takeaway for listeners, especially for those that are trying to effectively position themselves and remain competitive in the job market. Yes.
SPEAKER_03So important. And this is you know an important question for everyone to be thinking about. Doesn't again, doesn't matter what you know what level you're at, whether you're a CMO or you're just getting started in your career. Right. Um, I think number one, like really important to find ways to, and if you don't have necessarily access through the company you work for now, finding ways to be able to work within tools like Cloud and OpenAI and build your own, build your own stuff. Yes. Um getting your hands dirty is really important. It's they're great things to talk about in an interview, for example. So like actually getting, you know, going through a certification process, for example, which Claude offers certification processes, like actually going out and getting some of those, not only do they look great on a resume, but they also are real skills that you can that you can bring to your role. I think where you have a skill set around particular platforms, like I was mentioning AirOps. There's a lot, there are a lot of them out there. Um, Jasper, Evidenza is another one for market research, Story Doc is another one that we're we're using that is great. Some of these AI native tools, if you have experience in those tools, that's also great to bring into your thinking about where you kind of want to take your next role. Um and then, you know, staying like staying curious, staying on top of what's happening with it, and like really trying to tap into the energy around AI and find your own ways to learn and grow your skill set from there. There also are great resources like section or this podcast that talk about, you know, how do you acquire the right skills that you need to be able to position yourself in the future.
SPEAKER_02Beautiful. And that's exactly why we're here at Emerge, is to remain curious, stay ahead of what's coming through. I look forward to the talks that you have today. Yes, thank you. And I can't thank you enough for your time today. I love discussing uh what's on the forefront and learning all about cat funds. Yeah. It's all right. Thank you so much, Brooke. Thank you so much, Nicole. A great show. That's a wrap on this episode of the AI Movement Podcast. If this conversation sparked something for you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you're loving the show, writing a review means everything. It helps more founders and career pivoters find their way here. Want to partner with us or bring the AI movement to your next event, reach out. I'd love to connect. Until next time, stay curious, keep adapting, and move accordingly. If you're tuning into this podcast, you're most likely an AI advocate. And you may have also wondered how to support your body against the invisible stress of EMFs. Think Wi-Fi, cell towers, or hours in front of your laptop. Leela Quantum products are lab-tested and triple blind studies and are proven to help harmonize and neutralize EMF signals. Their products are the few things I felt a real energetic shift from. And I personally wear their quantum energy necklace daily. And if you're someone who cares about optimizing your energy and nervous system like I do, you can explore their offers with my affiliate link in the show notes below.
