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Mark Leiter
Chief Digital Strategy Officer at Boeing | Board Member | Jazz Musician
Mark Leiter is a seasoned expert in helping global business-to-business (B2B) corporations optimize their performance through strategic counsel.
With a rich background in consulting, executive leadership, and board memberships, he has influenced over 150 organizations including Fortune 500 corporations.
As the former Chief Digital Strategy Officer at Boeing, Mark focused on leveraging digital strategies to drive productivity and creativity across the enterprise.
Previously, he held top-tier positions at Nielsen Holdings, where he played a pivotal role in the company's IPO, S&P 500 inclusion, and a significant rise in enterprise value.
Having contributed to renowned consultancy firms like Bain, McKinsey, and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (CGEY), Mark possesses a wealth of experience in advising CEOs and senior executives.
He co-founded McKinsey's B2B Marketing and Branding practices and played leadership roles in strategy, transformation, and marketing at CGEY.
Beyond his corporate roles, Mark is actively involved in strategic think tanks like The Conference Board and serves on the board of organizations like InMoment.
A proficient author, he has shared his strategic insights in publications like Business Strategy Review and the McKinsey Quarterly.
Mark's impressive educational background includes a Master's degree from Harvard University and a Bachelor's degree from the State University of New York at Albany.
Highlights
We will know within five years if I am right or wrong in this assertion:
▶️ AI is not driving a bubble* in the traditional sense of the concept.
Instead, I predict we are witnessing a huge transition in AI akin to the shift from basic mobile phones to smartphones circa 2007.
That seminal shift set in motion $Trillions to build out high speed wireless networks around the world to activate mobile smart devices that are now woven into the fabric of our lives.
However, you wouldn't recognize this analogy from recent articles that are now questioning massive AI infrastructure investments.
It is equally surprising that Wall Street analysts are implying AI is "new" in this article from The Washington Post (and elsewhere).
In fact, AI has been around for decades in service of making decisions.
For example, AI enables search engines, GPS navigation, fraud detection, automated trading, autonomous vehicles, and social media feeds (AI decided if you saw my LinkedIn post!).
What’s truly new? The recent rise of advanced Conversational AI plus Generative AI capability.
Taken together, AI continuously scaling in all variations requires more chips, more data storage, more electricity consumption, etc.
Now, are big technology companies as well as VC and PE firms over- or under-investing in this next era of AI innovation? I do not know…
…but recent AI advancements are impressive, and I anticipate that we are closer than most imagine to far more powerful AI capabilities—which in turn will drive the next wave of economic value creation.
It is a bubble? I do not think so based on where I believe AI is headed in the coming years, but we shall see.
Stay tuned!
- An economic “bubble” is traditionally a period in time when current asset prices irrationally exceed their intrinsic valuation.
[Link to article in comments]
#AI #Innovation #Infrastructure
Boeing is not new to #AI. For example, Artificial Intelligence capabilities enable:
• Autonomous air and space flight • Satellites circling our planet • Advanced military weapons • Digital design tools • Factory automation • Image diagnostics • Cybersecurity systems • Enterprise solutions that enhance employee creativity and productivity.
Against this backdrop, I was excited to deliver the opening keynote at our inaugural Boeing AI Summit this week. My remarks reflected how our Corporate, Digital, and Artificial Intelligence strategies are connected.
Our 3-day AI summit convened over 3,500 colleagues—joining in-person or virtually—who are passionate about our AI innovation agenda.
Our Boeing Conversational AI (BcAI) platform was a featured highlight. Launched in Q4 2023 and co-created with Microsoft and McKinsey & Company’s Digital practice, BcAI provides our 170,000 employees access to a scalable Generative AI thought partner that safely handles proprietary and confidential data.
In just a matter of months our employees collectively completed their first 1,500,000 prompts on BcAI—with adoption and usage growing each week!
This is just one of many new AI-enabled products that build upon decades of innovation in the use of intelligent software to drive value.
Kudos to the Boeing leaders driving our AI capabilities, with a big shout out to Abhi Seth and Vishwajeet Uddanwadiker for respectively leading our global Enterprise AI and Engineering AI technology investments—and designing this fantastic summit.
A special note of appreciation to our amazing global AI expert community! Our worldwide team has a rich history to leverage coupled with an exciting future of possibilities.
Full speed ahead!
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Mesh is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Mesh centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.