Brandon Ratliffe, Head of Marketing Technologies and Operations at Qualcomm, explores how enterprise-scale marketing operations teams can harness AI strategically, govern complex MarTech stacks, and stay grounded in people-first leadership during a period of rapid technological change.
Brandon brings a rare combination of deep technical expertise and human-centered leadership to one of the world’s most influential semiconductor companies, a Fortune 100 organization powering everything from smartphones and AI-enabled laptops to data centers, IoT devices, and autonomous vehicles. With years of experience evaluating, implementing, and scaling enterprise-grade marketing technologies at Qualcomm, Brandon has earned a reputation for knowing when to embrace a new tool and when to walk away.
His approach is anything but reactive: it is surgical, strategic, and always anchored to measurable business value.
The conversation dives into how Brandon’s team approached AI adoption, not as a shiny object experiment but as a deliberate, governance-led initiative. Brandon shares how Qualcomm enabled AI features across tools like Sixth Sense and Qualtrics, how his team evaluates new technology against strategic priorities, and why clean, well-structured data is the non-negotiable foundation that separates useful AI from “garbage in, garbage out.” He also addresses one of the hardest challenges in B2B marketing: attribution, and how his team chose to double down on execution and education rather than get lost in an unwinnable debate.
What You’ll Hear:
• How Qualcomm’s marketing operations team approached AI adoption with a “surgical, not shotgun” philosophy and what that meant in practice across tools like Sixth Sense and Qualtrics
• Why data quality is the single most important factor before layering AI onto your MarTech stack: structured, clean, and richly governed data is the only foundation that makes AI valuable
• How to prioritize MarTech investments at a Fortune 100 company: how strategic planning at the C-level waterfalls down into Martech stack decisions and campaign operations
• The governance framework that keeps large MOPs teams aligned, including common data taxonomies, naming standards, and proactive correction practices that prevent costly downstream confusion
• Why people come first: how Brandon keeps his team challenged, incentivized, and clear on their role to prevent burnout and maintain momentum through organizational change
• How to evaluate MarTech tools like an expert, distinguishing enterprise-grade solutions from “cool whiz bang” products that look impressive but fail to solve a real business problem
