Guest · Brand building
Ruslan Tovbulatov
Head of AI Center of Action for MarCom, ServiceNow
Ruslan Tovbulatov was CMO of Gloat, the AI-powered work orchestration platform, and is now Head of the AI Center of Action for MarCom at ServiceNow. A founding member of Google BrandLab, one of the first hires at Thrive Global, and a decade in the startup ecosystem, his thesis is that AI has eroded every traditional competitive moat except one: brand.
About
Ruslan Tovbulatov is Head of the AI Center of Action for MarCom at ServiceNow, having served as CMO of Gloat from January 2024 to December 2025 and VP of Global Marketing from December 2020. At Gloat, he led the marketing function for the work orchestration platform used by Mastercard, Spotify, Novartis, Standard Chartered, and Nestle.
Ruslan came to marketing via consumer research at Kantar Retail. He joined Google through a friend’s recommendation and became a Founding Member of Google BrandLab, helping 250 of the world’s leading brands make the shift to mobile and video. He was then hired as employee 17 at Thrive Global, Arianna Huffington’s behaviour change and wellbeing company, where he grew to CMO.
Ruslan’s brand moat thesis argues that in an era when AI can replicate technical products overnight, and data is pooled in large language models that all competitors access equally, the only durable competitive advantage is the relationship a company has built with its customers. He operationalises this through the brand-demand-expand flywheel: brand for the 95% not yet in market, demand to convert the 5% who are, and expand to grow and retain the customers already won.
Career17 years
- 2026 to now ServiceNow Head of AI Center of Action for MarCom
- 2024 to 2025 Gloat Chief Marketing Officer
- 2020 to 2024 Gloat VP, Global Marketing
- 2016 to 2020 Thrive Global Director of Product through to CMO
Show earlier roles: Google/YouTube, Kantar Retail
- 2012 to 2016 Google/YouTube Founding Member, Google BrandLab; Global Innovation Lead
- 2009 to 2010 Kantar Retail Senior Research Associate
How Ruslan thinks3 convictions
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Brand is the only durable moat in the AI era
Ruslan’s brand moat thesis is a direct response to what he observed as AI tools made product differentiation increasingly temporary. Lovable is his most-cited example: dozens of similar vibe-coded products exist, but Lovable has built a community of passionate users who identify with the brand at a level no competitor can replicate overnight. The investment required to build that relationship is long and consistent. But in a world where the LLMs have levelled the data playing field, it is the only competitive advantage that takes time to copy.
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The CMO role is brand plus demand plus expand, equally
Ruslan’s brand-demand-expand framework is a direct critique of the pipeline-obsessed CMO role. Demand generation is necessary but not sufficient. The CMO who only manages demand is managing a shrinking pipeline because they are not priming the 95% who will become buyers over the next 12 to 24 months, and they are not building the customer base that generates the advocacy that makes demand generation more efficient.
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Customer marketing and community building drive the flywheel
Ruslan’s flywheel model runs from customer success to brand advocacy to demand generation and back. When a customer becomes a success story and gets on stage to tell it, they are simultaneously building their own brand and building Gloat’s. The community they create around that storytelling primes future buyers before any demand generation campaign reaches them. Provide value first: the community grows because it is genuinely useful to its members, and that utility creates the trust that makes brand marketing effective.
