Crystal Black

About Crystal

Crys Black is a fractional CMO and AI enablement leader who helps B2B technology companies cut through AI hype and put it to work. Over more than 20 years she has led growth, positioning, and go-to-market at startups and growth-stage companies including Origin AI, Aizon, and Saama, moving fluidly between strategy and execution. She started out programming in the early days of the web, and that technical foundation still shapes how she thinks. She looks for patterns, systems, and friction, then makes complex ideas clear and human. Her work sits at the intersection of strategy, marketing, operations, and practical AI adoption. She is less interested in AI for the sake of saying you use it, and more interested in AI that helps teams think better, move faster, and communicate more clearly, from executive training and custom GPT workflows to RevOps dashboards, agentic automation, and responsible AI governance. Clarity over jargon. Progress over posturing. Crys is also a builder of communities. She serves on the Board of Directors and as Treasurer of the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group, sits on the Strategic Advisory Board of Women in AI Labs, and teaches in Pavilion's AI & GTM School. She writes the Human Input column for Colorado AI News, exploring the human side of AI, ethics, creativity, and the future of work. On stage, whether keynote, panel, fireside, or hands-on workshop, she treats every audience as smart peers and sends them home with something they can use on Monday. She holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Virginia Tech and a leadership certificate from UC Berkeley, and works from Colorado.

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