Jennifer Roebuck

Chief Marketing & Digital Officer / NED - Innovation / Ecommerce / Retail / Consumer / Top 100 Fashion Tech. Web3 - CPG 🎈 Mentor | Blox Mentor | FWB Member | Real Vision Member - JROE.ETH

Part strategist, part technical marketer, part growth hacker, part creative. I've scaled businesses from zero to $100M+, led brand transformations, and managed over £300M in marketing investment. I'm comfortable in ambiguity and at board level.

For the past five years, I've been focused on AI and crypto, where I still advise and offer fractional leadership. Before that, I was deep in consumer growth, mostly in tech-enabled roles within lifestyle led organizations and brands. I’m typically responsible for large P&Ls over £100M or growth from a very early stage.

The leading women’s community in Europe driving success for women in the workplace.

This will go viral today... and it should. Makes the entire positioning behind AI even more absurd. How tired are we of hearing that we will have no purpose and no opportunities. Very. What part of the hype cycle are we in now?

 Jennifer Stephens

CMO | AI Strategy & Transformation | Fintech - DeFi & Digital Assets | Consumer - D2C | Hospitality

👋🏻

I’m a Brand & Commerce Innovator. I write about emerging brand strategies, digital commerce, business strategy and emerging technology. 

I have been in digital since 1998 and have 25 years of consumer marketing and digital growth experience. 

My superpower is the combination of deep digital and deep brand experience - it is possible to be creative and understand technology while trading a business. As a result, I have worked on many consumer brand transformations, turnarounds and early stage growth businesses. 

If something has the potential to impact brand experience, brand development or media - I am probably researching it and experimenting with it.

More detail on my experience -
Consumer Innovation and Brand Strategy across fashion, hospitality, tech and consumer goods. 
Voted one of the top digital leaders in the UK & Top 100 tech leaders in fashion. 
Launched some of the most innovative digital fashion experiences from the first social commerce experience online to digital x physical campaigns before Web3 was a common term in the fashion industry. 

I have been a co-founder twice - in hospitality and tech. One of those businesses is the largest mexican food chain in the EU -Tortilla Mexican Grill.

I am currently working in venture capital as a value creation CMO + offer board advisory for consumer and enterprise facing businesses on brand, customer experience and growth.

There are a few gems in the land of AI slop 😊

I’ve met quite a few women recently who said they were rejected for a promotion or opportunity because they were / are too strong or opinionated. People want to hire conformists versus someone who is brave or outspoken. 

The “too opinionated” thing is a fascinating excuse though. It almost never means what it says. It usually means the opinions were inconvenient - too accurate, too early, etc. 

The women who get passed over for it tend to be the ones who were comfortable speaking openly. Which means the organisation just told you exactly who it is and what it values. 

The long term impact of this is forced adjustment. Softening delivery, hedging - which view do you share or hide, preemptively translating yourself into something more palatable. You lose the edge that made you valuable in the first place.

Staying sharp and staying ambitious aren’t compatible with shrinking to fit. The ambition comes with the opinions and bravery. 

Don’t shrink to fit. Reject it. You don’t want to be somewhere that forces you to change who you are.

To all the ageist employers out there - this is what 52 looks like.

Why are people still talking about taste? 

By now - most people are aware you can build a company using AI, agents and a single entrepreneur. I think some people are suggesting the agent can build the business on their own entirely. Who knows - there are a few on record. 

Either way - distribution and "taste" have been declared as the moat. If you are thinking about starting a company - those are the two things that apparently = survival. 

However, the repeated use of "taste" started to get on my nerves because it is an incomplete solution and most of this rhetoric is coming from the tech ecosystem who don't have the patience or bravery to pursue what it takes to bring award winning ( moat creating ) taste to the masses. 

This colour map is a great example of how our subconscious feels colour before we even decide what our preference is. A group of colours tells a subconscious story. That is one of many "taste" related decisions a team or CEO has to make in the world where businesses can be made in a matter of hours. 

If you are curious about what taste actually is - I wrote about it this week. 

🔗 in comments.

There will be no “jobs apocalypse” due to AI — but there will be job chaos.
 
Our 2025 AI Job Impacts Analysis found that starting in 2028-2029, AI will create more jobs than it eliminates. Yet, each year, over 32 million jobs will be significantly transformed.

Credit: Gartner

CMO | AI Strategy & Transformation | Fintech & Digital Assets | Consumer - D2C | Hospitality

Four years of using AI every day = four years of pattern recognition across LLMs, four years of observing every bad habit AI creates.

We are at the stage where everyone is using the same descriptions for AI's impact on us. 

Taste. 
Judgement. 
Agentic vs. Human

If you believe the nonsense X throws at you, you'll become the underclass if you don't learn to build agents.

I'm going to share some thoughts as an actual AI Native user. What does that mean? 

I do most of my work using a terminal versus a prompt window. I program documents using MCP plugins. I automate everything I can - mainly low value work and I try to reduce context switching by limiting the number of tools I use by embedding as much as possible into Claude. 

Let's start with judgement.

Here's a sample brief (I made it up). You're asked to create a brand for a new skincare range that ignores all the slop on Instagram. No lying, no deepfakes, no inaccessible beauty standards. Just a high quality product sold honestly.

As a CMO, you can hire an agency and the best work is still done by agencies IMO. A good strategist is worth the cost. The best brands in the world sit in your subconscious. That output does not come from an LLM. It's a human either prompting an LLM or using good old creative thinking. Anthropic use an agency and developers for that matter. 

But if you're in a start-up and need a positioning statement or a communications platform, there are things you can do with an LLM to produce this thinking in-house. This is one of many tricks I have as a CMO trained in brand strategy. I cut a few corners here but this is a great example of "Judgement." AI speeds up the process. It does not produce this for you out of the box. Most people prompt "write me an opening line" and pick one. That is not how marketing works. AI is nowhere near replacing marketing. Ignore Anthropic when they tell you they have marketing skills - they do not. I would refer to them as task management tools. 

So what is this doc? (Zoom in.) 

These are the top 20 creative writing frameworks. If you have a clear product brief and you know your target customer, you can use these with AI to develop your own positioning statement and potentially a communication framework. I consider these outputs a V1 in terms of quality. 

I named the brand STATED. Why? It states what it does instead of hiding behind AI slop advertising. 

Despite what people say - education matters. Experience matters. You can't skip that phase of your career or the work - but you can learn some new ways to work faster when you need to. That is how judgement is developed - obvious statement but I think the internet forgot.

Save these frameworks for later - they might come in handy ✍🏻

Wouldn't it be nice if your customers paid you for market research?
990,000 fans do exactly that in Korea.

While the West wrote off blockchain and NFTs, Korean brands quietly built something different. A trust layer where fans pay to co-create products, revenue sharing is transparent, and every interaction generates intelligence at a fraction of the cost of market research. 

AI dominates every conversation right now. But in a world of fake reviews, AI slop, and empty brand promises, blockchain might be the most important trust infrastructure a brand can have. 

My latest article breaks down the playbook. Link in comments.

The amazing thing about vibe coding is you can build three things at once, build agents that can build in parallel and more / less run everything you do via a terminal. 

I see more marketing teams work this way - believe it or not - highly visual, strategic materials emerge from terminal usage. Store your work in GitHub and then output to Claude via MCP connections into Monday or elsewhere. 

Terminals aren’t not the sexiest UI - but the simplicity of text and markdown files is kind of helpful. We just aren’t accustomed to it outside of development roles - that’s changing. MD files also allow you to store your strategic info and use AI to ask questions about it or look for documents. 

When Claude crashed yesterday - the terminal was still working. You also feel less dependent on AI UI and account based organisation this way - it’s all on your machine. This is why “on prem” is making a comeback. Host your own model and upgrade when new models emerge. 

The hard part is testing all your product in staging and perfecting the UI. The patience required is 🫠

If I was GP at a PE fund in 2026, I would restructure my entire fund.

Not the portfolio. The fund itself.

I built an industry research agent this weekend and dug into how PE firms are hiring right now - turnarounds, investing, strategy roles. The most sought-after credential is still management consulting. McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc.

That made sense when value creation meant identifying efficiency levers and managing execution against a three-year roadmap. Consultants are exceptional at that.

We are 24-36 months away from AI fundamentally reshaping entire industries ( longer for physical / infrastructure ). And the value creation playbook at most funds is still focused on cost savings, expansion, and efficiency.

Replacing people with AI isn't a value creation plan. It's table stakes. Every fund can do it. So now you have 10 portfolio companies all operating with more profit and lower headcount and no differentiation between any of them.

The real opportunity is something different entirely - sectors about to be disrupted by challengers who have completely reinvented their category. You don't find that opportunity looking at management consultanting frameworks. You find it with entrepreneurs. 

That is a deeply uncomfortable proposition for PE. The entire talent model, the diligence model, the deal sourcing, it was all built around a buy, squeeze and sell model in maybe three years but usually five. Five years in AI is like two decades in PE investment. What does a value creation plan actually look like in an AI-first world?

The latest agentic commerce ecosystem 🔎

ok - I am kind of in love with this... 

An agent skills market place.... I bet there are some awesome skill files in here. 
I know mine are completely useless ( no pun intended ) and Claude forgets to use them... 

https://skillsmp.com/

One of my favourite newsletters bringing the energy this week.

“Make something interesting or get out of the way.” 👏🏻

There’s something emerging in response to AI - not fear. It’s agency.

More people are finding their footing.

The more the media tells us it’s over, the more we push back. 

We’re reading the doom narratives and deciding for ourselves.

There is more bland, average stuff on the internet than ever. And simultaneously, more creative freedom than ever.

Anyway.. time to rearrange some new furniture 🪑☕️

Yesterday I shared a case study about trust layers and brand growth. 

This is one of the frameworks that is worth referencing. 

Think about Mid Journey - their entire product was co-created and offered an in product creation experience - inside Discord. 

Many of us are obsessed with Claude right now - why? Sure - the model is good. The UX is just as good - these intangible things matter - it gives you the feeling of creating, of empowerment. 

Name some other brands that do this well... I think Lego follows some of these. 

With new technology - we are closer to being able to stitch all this together and mange the complexity - smart contracts are for a lot more than programmable money. `:)

The tech industry doesn't have the stomach for taste -  to be at the top of the leaderboard on taste - you need a long term system. 

Everything that tech represents is shifting and short-term. 

Doesn't mean it is wrong - it is just not aligned with things that take time unless patient capital is backing the founding team. 

This is a snapshot of an interview that was published in HBR a long time ago - the LVMH system is iconic. 

If you are looking at applying "taste" theories to your technology business - you can borrow from this and translate for 2026. 

Creative freedom
Someone with "brand" in their bones
Setting a bible that can't be mass produced by AI
Leveraging scarcity
Owning your own stack and story
Automate low value stuff - retain high value creativity

Taste = philosophy. 

More on that tmrw.

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