174: Joshua Kanter: A 4-time CMO on the case against data democratization

Episode notes

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Joshua Kanter, Co-Founder & Chief Data & Analytics Officer at ConvertML. Summary : Joshua spent the earliest parts of his career buried in SQL, only to watch companies hand out dashboards and call it strategy. Teams skim charts to confirm hunches while ignoring what the data actually says. He believes access means nothing without translation. You need people who can turn vague business prompts into clear, interpretable answers. He built ConvertML to guide those decisions. GenAI only raises the stakes. Without structure and fluency, it becomes easier to sound confident and still be completely wrong. That risk scales fast. About Joshua Joshua started in data analytics at First Manhattan Consulting, then co-founded two ventures; Mindswift, focused on marketing experimentation, and Novantas, a consulting firm for financial services. From there, he rose to Associate Principal at McKinsey, where he helped companies make real decisions with messy data and imperfect information. Then he crossed into operating roles, leading marketing at Caesars Entertainment as SVP of Marketing, where budgets were wild.