What does Rebecca Veksler speak about?

Rebecca Veksler speaks on five core topics: consumer psychology applied to marketing and brand building; high-performance teams in the AI era; growth strategy in fragmented and AI-disrupted markets; the marketing mindset across cross-functional teams; and organisational design as a performance lever. She delivers keynotes, half-day and full-day workshops, executive sessions, panels and fireside conversations.

What is consumer psychology and why does it matter for brand building?

Consumer psychology is the study of the cognitive and emotional drivers behind why people buy, choose, and stay loyal to a brand. Bec Veksler describes it as the precise understanding of human behaviour every great brand is built on. The companies that get it right design products and messaging around how customers actually decide, not how they imagine they decide. The result is stronger brand loyalty, better conversion, and customers who evangelise rather than just transact.

How do you build a high-performance team in the AI era?

According to Bec Veksler, building a high-performance team in the AI era requires four things: a clear translation layer between leadership and frontline (only 21% of global employees are engaged at work, largely due to this gap); workflow redesign before AI deployment (only 21% of organisations do this, but it is the single biggest predictor of AI ROI per McKinsey 2025); psychological safety as a precondition for innovation (Edmondson and Google's Project Aristotle both confirm it as the highest-correlation factor in team performance); and human-in-the-loop AI deployment (used by 65% of AI high performers vs 23% of others). Bec calls this the Built-to-Scale Operating System.

What is agentic AI and how should businesses use it?

Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can plan, decide, and execute multi-step workflows autonomously, rather than just responding to prompts. As of 2026, 88–97% of organisations have deployed AI in some form, but only around 5.5% are capturing measurable EBIT impact, according to McKinsey. Bec Veksler argues the gap comes down to whether companies have redesigned their workflows around AI or simply layered AI on top of broken processes — 80% are doing the latter. The businesses that win deploy AI in synergy with humans, build human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and treat governance as a precondition rather than an afterthought.

What is a fractional CMO?

A fractional CMO is a senior marketing executive who works with a company on a part-time, embedded basis rather than as a full-time hire. The model has become increasingly popular with scale-ups in the $10M–$50M revenue range that need senior marketing leadership but cannot yet justify a full-time CMO salary. Bec Veksler has acted as a fractional CMO across consumer, retail and B2B brands, including leadership-development programs delivered to ASX-listed clients, leading on growth strategy, brand positioning, and team building.

Why do most scale-ups fail?

According to McKinsey research, 78% of companies that find product-market fit fail to scale, and 40% of scale-up failures are attributable to organisational structure rather than market or product factors. Bec Veksler identifies three breakdowns that consistently appear in scale-ups stuck in the $20M–$100M revenue band: a translation gap between leadership and frontline, a systems gap where KPIs measure activity rather than outcomes, and a trust gap that suppresses the feedback the leadership team needs to course-correct.

What is psychological safety and why does it matter at work?

Psychological safety is the shared belief inside a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks — to ask questions, raise concerns, admit mistakes, and disagree without fear of humiliation or punishment. The concept was developed by Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson in the 1990s. Google's Project Aristotle research later identified it as by far the most important of the five dynamics that predict team performance. Bec Veksler argues psychological safety matters more than ever in the AI era because if a team cannot safely tell leadership "this AI workflow isn't working," the company burns months and millions before finding out.

How can leaders bridge the communication gap between C-suite and frontline?

Bec Veksler recommends three practical steps for closing the leadership-frontline communication gap. First, ask every manager in the business to write down the single most important business priority in their own words; the variance is the size of the gap. Second, invest in middle-manager training, since 70% of variance in team engagement is explained by the direct manager but only 44% of managers globally have ever had formal training (Gallup 2026). Third, build two-way communication systems, not cascade systems, so the frontline can route up rather than only receive down.

What are the do's and don'ts of agentic AI for businesses in 2026?

Bec Veksler's framework for agentic AI in 2026 includes eight do's and eight don'ts. The most important: Do redesign workflows before deploying AI; do build human-in-the-loop validation; do have senior leaders role-model AI use; do define KPIs before deployment. Don't layer AI on broken processes; don't create an AI elite divide inside the team (29% of employees and 44% of Gen Z admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy when this happens, per Writer.com 2026); don't deploy without governance (35% of executives admit they couldn't pull the plug on a rogue agent today); don't replace junior roles entirely (you'll have a leadership pipeline crisis in 2030).

What is the difference between brand marketing and performance marketing in 2026?

Brand marketing builds long-term consumer demand by shaping how people feel about a company; performance marketing converts existing demand into transactions. In 2026, the two have collapsed into each other. AI has reshaped channel attribution, acquisition costs have surged, and the brands that win are integrating both inside one growth function. Bec Veksler argues that the modern marketing leader has to think like a brand builder and operate like a performance marketer — and that the "marketing mindset" of customer obsession and behavioural curiosity should sit across product, sales, ops and leadership, not just inside the marketing department.

How do you scale a consumer brand globally?

Bec Veksler scaled Sol Cups from a Bondi bedroom into operations across 11+ countries within two financial years. Her approach to global brand scaling rests on four principles: build a brand consumers will become obsessed with before chasing distribution; do the unglamorous work better than anyone else in the category, including direct cafe and retailer partnerships built one-by-one; design organisational structure for the scale you're going to, not the scale you're at; and protect culture with explicit values and rituals as the team and geography grow.