Ambitions Realised Or Not?
David Keene, formerly CMO at Wipro and now Co-Founder and CRO at Agentive, brings a career that spans Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Google, and large-deal enterprise marketing to the challenge of how B2B organisations move beyond personas and campaigns into something more complex and more honest: the influence map.
“Do your clicks and views turn into something real? We need to think about the balance of demand and brand across the whole funnel.”
David Keene is Co-Founder and CRO at Agentive, an AI-native go-to-market orchestration platform for B2B. He was previously CMO at Wipro’s European Strategic Market Unit, responsible for a $4bn P&L across six regions, where he delivered 35% year-on-year growth in marketing-influenced pipeline and led the pursuit marketing for a 500M, ten-year partnership win. A former engineer, he spent over a decade at Oracle before building his marketing career at SAP, Salesforce, and Google.
David began his career as an engineer at Oracle, where he spent twelve years moving from product management for Oracle Designer and JDeveloper to founding the commercial function for Oracle Fusion Middleware. At SAP he led a 200-person extended marketing team globally, ran the integration of the Business Objects acquisition, and built the global competitive intelligence function. At Salesforce he was VP Marketing UK and Ireland during a hypergrowth phase, contributing to European revenue acceleration with 40% CAGR. At Google he was a founding member of the European marketing organisation for what became Google Cloud, contributing to growth from early stage to $8.9bn global revenue.
He went on to CMO roles at Funding Options, Speechmatics, and Wipro before co-founding Agentive in 2025. He spoke during this episode from his perspective as CMO of Wipro, where his conviction was that most B2B marketing is structured around the organisation’s products rather than the customer’s buying reality. The fix, in his view, is to think in programmes not campaigns, in influence maps not personas, and in outcomes not activities.
“Marketing can be lazy. lift is harder to see but it is what actually matters.”
Marketers think in personas. But in complex buying decisions you have to figure out how all those personas fit together.
The persona is a simplification that made sense when marketing targeted individuals. In complex B2B, every deal involves sponsors, detractors, coaches, budget holders, and influencers who may never have a direct conversation with the sales team. David’s view is that the buying committee is not new, but the tools and discipline to actually map it, track it, and activate against it are now within reach. Programmes, not campaigns, are the unit of work.
Your brand standards must be built around your values. That is what makes it genuine.
When Wipro considered Formula One sponsorship, David said no. The association with fossil fuels conflicted with the company’s sustainability values and its tagline, ambitions realised. Instead, they sponsored the Jules Verne sailing race, the first attempt by an all-female crew, because it connected diversity, record-breaking, and ambition in a way that felt true. The lesson: brand decisions made without reference to values are just spending. Brand decisions made from values are investments.
I’m excited about the death of third-party data. Third-party data is the worst thing in the world.
David has a straightforward position: selling people’s data without their knowledge is wrong, the accept-all cookie click is meaningless, and the entire ecosystem of third-party data vendors should be replaced by a permission-based model where the quality of what you offer earns the right to communicate. He is impatient for Google to stop delaying the deprecation of the third-party cookie and frustrated that the industry remains in limbo. First-party data earned through genuine value exchange is the only sustainable foundation.
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