Talking Headless Recap
A nalyst relations directors and industry analysts want the same thing, and it isn't a better slide deck. On a recent episode of Talking Headless Live, I sat down with Ashley Chabot, who leads analyst relations (AR) at Miro, and Jon Reed, co-founder of Diginomica and a veteran enterprise analyst. Neither of them talked about mentions or share of voice. They talked about relationships and judgment, and about the difference between briefing an analyst and listening to one.
A Custom AR Program Beats a Template Every Time
Ashley has built AR functions inside large enterprises with multiple business units and as a solo AR lead at a faster-moving mid-size company. Her answer to what makes a program work has nothing to do with headcount or process maturity. It starts with the business.
She maps her program to two things: what the business needs right now, and who inside the company wants the insight. Most AR programs stop at the first one. Ashley looks for stakeholders tucked into parts of the organization a typical AR program never touches, then treats them the way she treats external analysts.
On winning over a skeptical executive, her advice is simple. Find a quick win, then build the case with a paper trail. A briefing, an analyst summit, and two years of engagement eventually add up to a business outcome. She goes back and shows the executive exactly which pieces of groundwork led there.
Treating Analysts Like a Marketing Channel Is the Mistake
Companies that view analysts as an extension of marketing, a channel to push message and hope it echoes back into the market, get worse outcomes than companies that treat analysts as a source of feedback. That's the failure mode Jon named on the show.
Jon traced part of the shift to a structural change he has watched over the past five years: AR directors losing a direct line to the CEO and reporting instead into marketing organizations that treat briefings as promotional sessions. Programs stop being about dialogue. They become talking points.
He also flagged the industry's obsession with measurement. Chasing key performance indicators (KPIs) pushes teams toward what is easy to count and away from what matters.
His example: an analyst pulling a vendor aside at an event to flag a customer problem with cloud infrastructure. Moments like that have changed how a company goes to market. None of it shows up on a dashboard.
Artificial Intelligence Should Buy Back Thinking Time, Not Replace Judgment
Both guests use artificial intelligence (AI) daily, and both drew the same line. AI can absorb the execution work that keeps AR teams, especially teams of one, stuck at the ground level instead of operating strategically.
A corporate value at Miro shapes how Ashley approaches it.
She is a self-described perfectionist who is training herself out of polishing a process to completion before sharing it, because AI tools change fast enough that a finished workflow can go stale in a month. Getting to roughly 80 percent and shipping beats perfecting something that will need to be rebuilt anyway.
Jon pushed back on one idea gaining ground in the analyst community: that a large language model (LLM) can function as the expert.
His test for whether AI threatens an analyst's relevance: if you're producing generic research, AI already does that job as well as you do. AI can't replicate the judgment built from a career of hallway conversations and customer pushback, or the pattern recognition that comes from sitting across from executives who are wrong and need to hear it.
Scripted Panels Signal Insecurity, Not Confidence
Jon's target on live events: vendors who build a 25-slide deck and insist on covering all of it instead of opening the floor.
An ask-me-anything session with leadership, or a customer panel with no vendor moderator on stage, tells the room a company trusts its own story. Jon's fix for the over-scripted panel: keep the slides, but use them as a reference to pull up when a real question calls for one, not a script to march through.
Ashley is running a live version of the same idea at Miro: an asynchronous board where analysts collaborate outside the scheduled briefing cycle, since getting time on an analyst's calendar can take weeks depending on the firm.
What to Do Monday
- Pull your AR reporting line. If AR reports into a marketing function that treats briefings as promotional, flag it to leadership before the next briefing cycle.
- Map your internal stakeholders beyond the obvious executives. Find the person tucked in an adjacent team who is hungry for analyst insight and add them to your distribution.
- Cut your next analyst briefing deck by a third and build in open Q&A time instead. Keep the slides as backup, not as the agenda.
- Pick one AI-assisted workflow you're currently perfecting and ship it at 80 percent done. Iterate after stakeholders use it.
Works Cited
Chabot, Ashley, and Jon Reed. Talking Headless Live with Ashley Chabot and Jon Reed. Hosted by Shashi Bellamkonda, Playaz Productions Network, LinkedIn Live. [Air date pending confirmation.]