Tricia Gellman on AI strategy
From Building C-Suite Buy-In & Selling The Brand Story with Tricia Gellman, CMO of Box · · B2B CMO Project
“Aaron made two really foundational decisions before I got to Box and I think they are 100% the foundation of what we are building off of and seeing success from. One was they're not going to build their own LLM. They're not going to partner with one partner. They basically that this was going to change so fast that they just needed to build a platform where they could basically offer or we could offer at any platform, any LLM that anybody wanted. And so we have renegotiated deals that go out two and three years with OpenAI, with Google and Gemini, with Anthropic and with others. And we also have a platform that allows you to bring your own.”
On , Tricia Gellman, Chief Marketing Officer at BOX INC, spoke about AI strategy during Building C-Suite Buy-In & Selling The Brand Story with Tricia Gellman, CMO of Box on B2B CMO Project.
About Tricia Gellman
Tricia Gellman, Chief Marketing Officer at Box, appeared on the B2B CMO podcast on April 25, 2026. She discussed her approach to building C-suite buy-in and selling the brand story, noting that Box CEO Aaron Levie made two foundational decisions before she joined: not building their own large language model and not partnering with a single AI partner, and prioritizing getting users to try AI even if it meant losing money in some cases. Gellman said she moved 30% of Box's budget into awareness and pitched working with an agency to measure it, but Levie told her it was a waste of money because "we would know if we had awareness based on the vibe." Gellman also reflected on her previous roles. She described her time as CMO of Salesforce Canada as "not viewed as strategic" and "not viewed as necessary at all," stating that she left as a result. She recounted an experience at Adobe where a new C-suite was brought in to take the company to the next level but was fired within six months after the team "was falling apart."