The AI Is Teaching You to Be Laser Focused - A Conversation with Ziv Peled, Chief AI Officer at AppsFlyer
There's something quietly poetic about reconnecting with someone who believed in you before you fully believed in yourself.
Ziv Peled hired me at AppsFlyer back in 2014. At the time, he was a seasoned commercial leader with sharp instincts and an uncanny ability to spot the people who'd figure things out — even when those people were still figuring themselves out. More than a decade later, we sat back down together, and I quickly realized: Ziv is still very much ahead of the curve.
On top of being CCO, he's now Chief AI Officer at AppsFlyer — one of the most Advanced Modern Marketing Cloud in the world. And the way he talks about AI, it's immediately clear this isn't a title change. It's a complete rewiring of how he leads, thinks, and operates.
This is his story.
A Chief Customer Officer focusing on his function of Chief AI Officer
The transition didn't happen overnight, but it accelerated fast. Ziv was one of the earliest adopters of Base44, a platform for building apps and AI-powered super agents, jumping on it a year and a half ago when most executives were still in "wait and see" mode. That early bet gave him a head start — not just in tooling, but in mindset.
"I wanted to understand this from the inside," he told me. "Not just delegate it. Understand it."
That instinct — to go hands-on, to build, to iterate — shapes everything in how he runs his operation today.
A Personal Operating System, Powered by AI
Ziv has built what amounts to a personal AI-powered command center. His agents run on Slack and Telegram, and they're woven into the rhythm of his day.
Morning and evening: An agent surfaces email recommendations and audience segmentations — not a raw inbox dump, but curated, prioritized intelligence delivered at the moments that matter.
Accountability without the awkward: One agent does something particularly clever. It tracks commitments Ziv made — things he promised to deliver that haven't been delivered yet — and sends him a daily summary. Not just the task, but the source of the promise. The original message, the thread, the context. It's like having a chief of staff who forgets nothing and judges no one.
Email triage on autopilot: Another agent classifies incoming emails into three buckets — urgent, spam, newsletter — before Ziv ever lays eyes on them. Clean signal, less noise.
Curating a world of information: Ziv follows around 40 highly influential figures in the worlds of tech and AI. Rather than drowning in their output, he has an agent that scores each piece of content against his own profile and priorities. The result? He reads what actually matters to him — and skips the rest without guilt. As he put it: "It helps me eliminate the noise."
Context as infrastructure: Underneath all of this is a habit that quietly makes everything else work better. Ziv uses structured Markdown files to give his AI rich, persistent context — the history of a project, where a conversation left off, what the goal is, what matters most. The AI doesn't start from zero every time. It starts from where things actually are.
It sounds like a small operational detail. It's actually a fundamental shift in how you relate to AI. Most people treat every session as a blank slate. Ziv treats context as something worth building and maintaining — and the compounding effect is that his AI gets more useful over time, not just faster. It transforms AI from a generic assistant into something closer to institutional memory.
Inside AppsFlyer: When AI Becomes a GTM Weapon
The personal story is compelling enough. But Ziv also gave me a window into what AppsFlyer is building for its entire go-to-market organization.
The centerpiece is a tool called KYC — Know Your Customer — an in-house platform. It integrates data from across AppsFlyer's full tech stack: Slack, Gong, Salesforce, Gmail, and more. The output isn't just a dashboard. It's tailor-made, laser-focused, actionable summaries, commercial quotes ready to use for account executives, recommendations grounded in real data, context pulled from every touchpoint in the customer relationship.
Ziv walked me through a real example. He personally ran a sales call. It lasted 20 minutes. Within less than 2 minutes of hanging up, he'd generated a comprehensive, action-oriented Slack message — ready to send to the sales exec and team lead — built on everything KYC had synthesized from that conversation and the full account history.
Twenty minutes of conversation. Two minutes to debrief an entire team. That's not a productivity hack. That's a structural advantage.
For Customer Success in Enterprise, KYC goes even further. It layers in public information about the customer's business alongside internal data — so AppsFlyer teams can walk into conversations knowing their customers' goals, challenges, and priorities. Sometimes, Ziv said, they understand the customer's strategy better than the customer's own point of contact does.
What It Takes to Actually Use AI Well
I asked Ziv what qualities someone needs to truly leverage AI as a professional. His answer was direct:
Patience. You have to come with an open mind and be willing to test and compare tools. The first result is rarely the best one.
Curiosity. You need to want to understand why something works or doesn't — not just copy-paste and move on.
Skill. Prompting is a craft. Knowing how to describe your role, your task, your context, and your end goal — clearly and specifically — is the skill that separates people who get great outputs from those who get mediocre ones.
Quality. Don't settle. Don't ship the first draft. Iterate until it earns your name.
Did AI Change Us?
I couldn't resist asking the big question.
"Do you think AI has changed us?"
"Definitely yes," he said, without hesitation. "The same way mobile phones changed the way we communicate and consume information. We don't even notice it anymore — it's just how we live. AI is doing the same thing. The people who adapt early will set the pace. The rest will be catching up."
What I Took Away
Spending an hour with Ziv reminded me of something I'd half-forgotten: the most effective leaders don't wait for a technology to be mainstream before they engage with it. They get in early, get their hands dirty, and build instincts that no one else has yet.
He's not using AI to replace his judgment. He's using it to extend it — to operate at a speed and depth that wouldn't be possible otherwise. And he's building an organization where the entire GTM team can do the same.
In a world full of AI noise, Ziv Peled is one of the signals worth following.
Want to share how AI is reshaping your professional life? Reach out — you might be the next voice in this series.
Sarah Rolland is the founder of Operato AI, an AI automation agency helping businesses build smarter workflows. Follow the conversation on operato-ai.com/blog.