Donna Dror Of Usercentrics: How AI Is Disrupting Our Industry, and What We Can Do About It

An Interview With Cynthia Corsetti

Be mindful of ethical considerations and establish governance frameworks for responsible AI adoption. Ensure transparency, fairness, and accountability in AI usage, especially concerning customer data privacy and security.

Artificial Intelligence is no longer the future; it is the present. It’s reshaping landscapes, altering industries, and transforming the way we live and work. With its rapid advancement, AI is causing disruption — for better or worse — in every field imaginable. While it promises efficiency and growth, it also brings challenges and uncertainties that professionals and businesses must navigate. What can one do to pivot if AI is disrupting their industry? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Donna Dror.

Donna Dror is the CEO at Usercentrics, the global market leader in the Consent and Preference Management space. She has been with the company since January 2022.

Donna is Israeli, and has also lived in South Africa and England. She has been in NYC since 2015, but now spends 6 months of the year in Europe, alternating bimonthly among Usercentrics’ offices.

Donna has also been an Advisor at Full In Venture Partners, a software-focused early growth investment fund, since May 2019. There she’s been working with a variety of businesses, helping them form functional orgs, processes for scale, GTM strategies, and operational excellence.

Fun fact: one of the businesses she advised through Full In was actually Usercentrics!

Before joining Usercentrics, Donna was the GM/SVP at Similarweb (NYSE:SMWB). During her 8 years with the company, Donna helped Similarweb grow from $10M ARR to $150M ARR, and was also part of the team that took the company public in 2021.

Donna is passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion; people management; efficient operational scale and how technology can drive positive impact in the world we live in.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

I “stumbled” into Tech after trying my hand at Real Estate and Event Production. Someone I had worked with told me my talents would best be utilised in Tech Sales, and subsequently introduced me to my first Tech role in 2011. It was the first time that I felt “at home” professionally and that feeling was further amplified when I expanded into a broader role and entered management. The rest, as they say, is history.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

I hope this is not too much of a cliché, but I really believe that it is our people that make us succeed. This year we decided to launch a growth project we fondly named “Project 2X”, because the intention behind it was to double our efficiency. In order to make this ambitious idea a reality, we needed people all across the org to come together, on top of the regular workload, and really make the impossible possible, and in quite a short amount of time! I was so proud to see how superstars from each department came together to make this happen. It required agility, hustle, creativity and a ton of hard work — and it got done. This is the kind of energy we have within the company, and we feel it with our products and innovation, with the customer experience we provide, and it’s why we are the market leader in our space.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. I play to my strengths, and create my own definition of success. It’s important to realise that what you are good at is often invisible to you, since it comes so easily. A good way to test what you are good at is to find work that energises you, and that you like. An example for this is my ability to focus on my job, even when other seemingly amazing opportunities came knocking. I’ve known that if I enjoyed my job, and was paid well, there was no need to constantly have a “wandering eye”. I believe it’s enabled me to build the career that I’ve had, which has been quite stable overall.
2. I cultivate confidence and make my accomplishments visible. Don’t be your own best kept secret — share it and take pride in it. And in line with that thinking, believe the positive feedback you get! It’s natural to focus on what you should improve, but know that equal focus is required on what you are already doing well. In addition, a big part of confidence is clear communication. Communicate powerfully, and say what you mean always. An example of this is from early on in my career when a male colleague tried to take credit for work I did. I realised then that I had a responsibility to myself to be my own best advocate.
3. Feedback can be tough, but it’s still a gift. I take the critical part seriously, but never personally. It also helps me to embrace and accept failure. Failures and disappointments are going to happen, no matter who you are and what role you are in. Sometimes these will be your fault, and sometimes they won’t. The one thing that all failures have in common is that you can move on from them. Being comfortable with making mistakes and receiving feedback means you’ll learn much faster. An example for this is the work I’ve done with career coaches, which include pretty brutal 360 reviews. I’m a better professional (and person) as a result.

Let’s now move to the main point of our discussion about AI. Can you explain how AI is disrupting your industry? Is this disruption hurting or helping your bottom line?

The recent boost of generative AI has been less of an evolution of AI itself and more an evolution of accessibility, since it is now accessible to everyone. Every business is now evaluating how they can leverage this, us included. The short answer is that AI can help us become more efficient, automate more and even enhance the product itself.

AI can help businesses and users alike understand their rights as they relate to data privacy, data processing and regulation in the space. Information around this, e.g. within privacy policies, is usually crafted by legal teams, and is not easily understandable to a general audience. Here AI has great potential to summarise information in a more digestible way that can be tailored to each audience.

In addition, I would say that one thing that AI has done for our industry is put data access and data rights at the forefront of people’s minds. Now that AI is dominating headlines, many are learning how it leverages data without explicit user consent. Perhaps selfishly for us, given that we are in the business of consent management, this is a welcome development.

Which specific AI technology has had the most significant impact on your industry?

AI has been in use and in place for a while. Audience modelling is an example that helps with better targeting and increasing the reach of targeting campaigns. This has a major impact on the efficiency of our marketing spend. In addition, since we serve over a million businesses, our Customer Success and Support teams are looking into tools to help improve the quality and response time of customer requests. We expect meaningful results in this area to help us scale as a business.

We also deploy chatbots in our lead generation process to help visitors to our site to get in touch and ask questions early on, rather than just leaving them to read website content.

Finally, content generation is another area that is benefiting greatly from the capabilities of generative AI. The editorial processes are more scalable than ever.

Can you share a pivotal moment when you recognized the profound impact AI would have on your sector?

I don’t know that I had a true pivotal moment personally, but I can share that it feels like one day I woke up and AI was “everywhere” I looked: product roadmap discussions, questions in BOD meetings, discussions with engineers, reviews with our content team, or requests from individuals working in support. It’s like the Hemingway quote, “gradually and then suddenly.”

How are you preparing your workforce for the integration of AI, and what skills do you believe will be most valuable in an AI-enhanced future?

For us, how AI tools are applied is the most important skill. You need to know how lookalike modelling roughly works or how to interact with relevant tools (e.g. ChatGPT). This will soon be as basic a requirement as Excel formulas. Today, we are focusing the support of our workforce around those specific applications with training and education.

What are the biggest challenges in upskilling your workforce for an AI-centric future?

For our workforce, specifically, I think there is a challenge when it comes to evolving day to day practices in the most impactful way.

In addition, when you hear stories about engineers copy/pasting proprietary code into an AI tool, it’s easy to realise that there is a challenge of how to ensure a privacy-compliant and IP-secure AI-centric future. We need to think not just about AI but responsible application of AI, with all the considerations of compliance, biases, monitoring, etc.

What ethical considerations does AI introduce into your industry, and how are you tackling these concerns?

Businesses always look for efficiencies, and this sometimes means making certain functions or roles redundant. That is a broad challenge that will affect a number of job areas, so younger generations need to be educated on how their career choices may be disrupted by AI.

Our industry is centred around data and privacy compliance, so I have to flag that there will also need to be more transparency around how AI uses data, which it is tuned to collect and learn from. For example, if I interact with ChatGPT, how do I know what personal data the tool derives from my interactions, and how do I control the use of that data? These tools must build capabilities to respect privacy rights — and there is a huge gap there today. This is exactly how our industry was founded and why we exist. Technological advancements require a compliance framework that thinks of — and protects — the users.

What are your “Five Things You Need To Do, If AI Is Disrupting Your Industry”?

1. Educate yourself and your team about AI and its specific impacts on your industry. Then identify areas where AI can bring improvements or efficiencies.
2. Embrace AI as a tool for innovation rather than viewing it as a threat. Foster a culture of innovation within your organisation that encourages experimentation and exploration of AI.
3. Recognize the need to reskill or upskill your workforce to leverage AI effectively. Identify skill gaps and provide training programs to equip employees with the necessary AI-related skills.
4. Consider collaboration with AI experts, startups, or technology companies. Partnering with AI specialists can provide insights, tools, or solutions tailored to your industry’s needs.
5. Be mindful of ethical considerations and establish governance frameworks for responsible AI adoption. Ensure transparency, fairness, and accountability in AI usage, especially concerning customer data privacy and security.

What are the most common misconceptions about AI within your industry, and how do you address them?

AI can’t be applied without risk. The market and investors are hyped about the trend, and this reduces attention paid to the real dangers. For us being in an industry that addresses risk, we are probably a bit more cautious in our approach to adoption and application of AI.

After all, in the area of data privacy, such opportunistic behaviour led to the need for solutions like ours.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think that as a female professional who has dealt with some level of “imposter syndrome” in her past, it’s always been important for me to remember that I choose who I am, and who I want to be. A story where this was relevant was when I decided to leave Similarweb after eight years with the company. It was initially daunting, since it is comforting being somewhere so familiar, and now two years on, I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

Off-topic, but I’m curious. As someone steering the ship, what thoughts or concerns often keep you awake at night? How do those thoughts influence your daily decision-making process?

Scale, scale, scale and further scale. How to maintain quality, the right systems, ensure resource allocation, operational excellence, streamlined processes, organisational design, great customer experience and the best culture possible. All of these are tougher the bigger we grow.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Living in the United States has helped me think about education differently, so probably a movement surrounding education equity, equality and access in the US.

It would be aimed at ensuring equal access to quality education for all individuals, regardless of their socioeconomic background, ethnicity, or geographic location. It would focus on improving educational infrastructure, increasing access to educational resources, and promoting education as a fundamental human right, instead of a for-profit industry that leaves 60% of graduates with heavy student debt for many, many years to follow.

How can our readers further follow you online?

On my LinkedIn! https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnadror/

Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!

About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.