How Storytelling Led Me to Observo AI
My Career Journey: A Storytelling Odyssey
I have spent a 30-year career in marketing honing the art of storytelling. My career started in consulting, wound its way around to internet and software start-ups and had a 15-year stint at IBM in various roles before diving back into the world of start-ups again. That journey was made possible by telling stories about customers' challenges and how good life looks when our solutions solve them. In fact, I wrote a personal tagline for myself which has been atop my LinkedIn profile for more than the last 10 years - “I write stories that lead to sales.”
Over the past eight years, I've immersed myself back into the world of software startups, applying my expertise in product marketing to shape compelling narratives that resonate with customers. As I mentioned, before that, I spent a significant tenure at IBM, gaining deep insights into corporate marketing and storytelling at scale. Throughout my career, my core mission has remained the same: to articulate customer problems so clearly that they instantly recognize them, and to link those challenges to how our solutions can transform their business.
At its core, marketing is about storytelling—establishing trust, credibility, and emotional connection with an audience. I once wrote an article about how marketing is like a first date - detailing how you wouldn't propose marriage on the first night. Instead, you focus on understanding the other person, building rapport, and creating an emotional hook that leaves them wanting more. This same principle applies to technology marketing—it's about articulating a customer’s challenges, showing empathy, and gradually painting a vision of how our solution can lead them to a better future.
Pioneering New Markets: My Experience at Cribl
As the first marketing hire at Cribl, I played a key role in establishing the market for observability pipelines (now generally referred to as telemetry or data pipelines to denote their significant role in optimizing security data as well as observability data). This space encompasses a groundbreaking technology that enables organizations to route data from any source to any destination while reducing the volume of data sent to expensive analytics tools. My work focused on positioning Cribl's solution as an essential tool for managing the exponential growth of observability and security data. Through carefully crafted messaging, I highlighted how organizations could reduce costs by filtering out low-value data while ensuring critical insights were delivered to the right systems. I even wrote the first edition of “Observability Pipelines for Dummies.” Cribl was a formative experience that solidified my expertise in data observability and pipeline optimization while stretching my skills in customer-centric storytelling.
My journey continued through roles at other innovative startups, but my tenure at Pinecone was another particularly important stop on my career journey. It marked my first deep dive into the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence. This experience, combined with my work at Cribl, uniquely positioned me for my current role at Observo AI.
Why I Chose Observo AI: A Perfect Convergence of Market Need, Personal Background, and Great Storytelling Material
Joining Observo AI as the founding director of product marketing 15 months ago was an exciting opportunity to build something from the ground up once again. It allowed me to combine my deep understanding of telemetry data pipelines for Security and DevOps teams with my AI expertise from Pinecone. The potential for AI to revolutionize data optimization fascinated me, and I saw Observo AI as an ideal application of this technology.
Security and observability data are growing at an unsustainable rate, doubling every two to three years, while budgets remain flat. The challenge for enterprises is clear: they are drowning in data, with noise often overshadowing meaningful insights. Observo AI leverages artificial intelligence to expose patterns that even the most experienced analysts might miss, sending low-value "boring" data to low-cost cloud storage while highlighting anomalies and critical incident patterns. This targeted approach empowers operations teams to focus on the most relevant 10-20% of data, optimizing costs and improving response times.
As a storyteller, this problem truly excites me. It's a massive challenge faced by almost every large organization, and I get to craft a narrative where Observo AI is the hero—transforming data operations and making security and DevOps teams far more effective.
Competing Differently: The Observo AI Advantage
One of the most rewarding aspects of my role is seeing customers' reactions during demos—those "wow" moments when they realize the power of our solution. Competing against my former company, I enjoy showing how Observo AI takes a different approach. Instead of manually writing a long list of rules and filters to reduce data volume, we automate the optimization and transformation of data in our unique drag-and-drop interface with curated recommendations. This helps customers build a pipeline in minutes and lets them see value immediately. We have turbo-charged this process with our new AI assistant, Observo Orion, which acts like an experienced data engineer on demand. Customers can ask Orion questions like, "What optimizations can I apply?" and receive AI-driven recommendations that leverage pattern recognition and anomaly detection. This can typically reduce noisy data by 80% or more for far better optimizations than our competitors.
Our approach isn’t about replacing human expertise; it’s about enhancing it. AI identifies patterns in data that would otherwise go unnoticed, while Security and DevOps professionals provide the critical context to determine what matters most. This collaboration is where I see the true power of AI in observability and security operations.
I recently explored this idea in my blog post, "Without AI, Your Telemetry Data Pipeline Sucks," drawing inspiration from the American folk tale of John Henry. Unlike John Henry, who battled against a machine, I believe we should work with machines or at least machine learning for far better outcomes. Being able to relate stories from my childhood or everyday life experiences to the work we are doing at Observo AI is a thrilling combination of my skillset and profession.
Why You Should Choose Observo AI
Observo AI tackles the exponential growth of security and observability data with an intelligent approach. By combining advanced machine learning with agentic AI that dynamically responds to changing data environments, our platform optimizes data pipelines to process the explosion of telemetry (accelerated by AI-generated data) more efficiently. Our AI and machine learning models identify and separate the vital 20% of data containing actionable insights from the routine 80% that slows down crucial functions like threat hunting. This enables enterprises to:
- Transform Data Operations
Accelerate critical incident resolution by 40% or more through AI-powered prioritization and automated routing of critical security threats. By focusing on what’s important you can identify and resolve critical incidents before they spiral out of control and negatively impact your environment. - Optimize Costs
Reduce SIEM and observability tool costs by over 50% while expanding data coverage and eliminating blind spots. Analyze more types of data , but pay to analyze a much smaller volume of data sent to expensive tools. - Enhance Decision-Making
Deliver high-value data to security and DevOps teams without the noise of routine telemetry.
Our AI-driven approach enables organizations to keep up with the exponential growth of telemetry data while staying within budget, ensuring they can focus on what truly matters.
Join Us by Sharing Our Story
Storytelling is at the heart of my long career in marketing, and I invite you to be a part of it. Follow Observo AI on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with our latest product innovations and use cases for security and DevOps teams. Want to see our technology in action? Try our product for free in our new sandbox environment or request a demo to see how easily Observo AI can optimize your data pipelines with the power of AI.