Mary E. Shea, PhD

Mary E. Shea, PhD, is Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Meerkat, where she helps define the future of relationship intelligence through Meerkat OS, the relationship intelligence layer for agentic AI. Meerkat transforms an organization’s collective knowledge into trusted relationship intelligence, giving professionals and AI agents the context they need to build trust, uncover opportunity, and make better decisions.

A former Forrester analyst and revenue executive, Mary has spent more than two decades helping organizations navigate technology disruption and rethink how they build, sell, grow, and compete. Her work is grounded in a simple belief: AI can write, reason, and retrieve information at scale, but it can’t know who trusts whom. As AI becomes ubiquitous, trust becomes one of the few enduring competitive advantages.

Before co-founding Meerkat, Mary served as Co-CEO of Mediafly, Chief Evangelist at Outreach, and Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester. She has advised business and technology leaders around the world, helped define multiple B2B technology categories, and led growth at some of the industry’s most influential technology companies. That combination of experience gives her a distinctive perspective that bridges market research, executive leadership, and commercial execution.

Through her research, writing, and keynote presentations, Mary explores how agentic AI is reshaping leadership, go-to-market strategy, customer engagement, and the future of work. She challenges leaders to build organizations where human judgment, trusted relationships, and AI work together to create lasting competitive advantage.

Mary believes AI creates abundance. Trust creates advantage.