alec foster

I'm the Chief Agent Officer and Responsible AI Lead at the Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA), the global nonprofit community of CMOs and senior marketing leaders serving 825+ enterprise brands. I own MMA's AI infrastructure, governance, and transformation across a 90-person team in 19 countries, and I design, code, and train the AI systems we run on.

Much of the job is executive work. I co-lead MMA's AI Leadership Think Tank, 300+ marketing and AI leaders from 180+ brands, with CMOs from GM, AT&T, Adobe, and Walmart on our boards, and I design and facilitate the rooms where they make decisions: the CMO AI Transformation Summit, the CEO + CMO Summit, and the working groups in between. What surfaces there turns into published research, an experiment inside a live campaign, or somebody's roadmap. I've trained more than 1,000 marketing leaders and advise member CMOs on their own AI strategy.

The rest is building. I built Marketing Truths, an evidence platform where a strategy question gets answered from 200+ empirical generalizations distilled from 10,000+ peer-reviewed studies instead of conventional wisdom. I built MAVEN, an AI chief of staff wired into our systems of record. I run the AI Agent Foundry, where every employee spends 10% of their time building with AI: participation is company-wide, and 95% of staff are certified. And I set the decision rights for what agents do without a human, which is also the charter of RAIL, our Responsible AI Innovation Lab, whose eight published frameworks are in use inside Fortune 500 marketing teams.

Before MMA: product policy at Google, where I led the AdX policy support team and worked on public policy / government relations. Before that, FairShake, Jumbo Privacy (product/UX), and a 2012 internship at the White House Presidential Personnel Office. I co-founded Student Net Alliance and sat on the board of Students for Sensible Drug Policy.

The think tank's Future Labs has run 75+ AI studies inside live campaigns, with advertising experiments averaging a 160% lift over baseline. My M.St. in AI Ethics & Society from the University of Cambridge came out of the same problem: the dissertation, Protocols of Power: Ethical Governance for Enterprise Multi-Agent Systems, examined how to govern agent-to-agent protocols like MCP and A2A. I hold a bachelor's from NYU in Media, Culture & Communication and Political Science, and I'm CIPP/US certified. I speak at AI4, POSSIBLE, MAICON, Copyleaks, TEDxNYU, and MMA's panels.

I write The Eval, a weekly newsletter on AI agents in production. I ship open-source Claude skills and agent toolkits on the side, and my full portfolio tracks what I've built. Outside work: immersive art, electric hydrofoiling, and boxing.

Get in touch if you want me to speak at your event, advise on your AI rollout, run a workshop for your team, or just talk through a problem.