By Zunaira Omar
CEO/Founder The SquarePeg|CMOntheGO
“I can’t do much. I am just a home baker”.
“I don’t have any talent except for crocheting sweaters”.
I hear these and many other such statements whenever I interact with women – amazing women who think that not having a “corporate job” makes them somehow lesser.
I have been a marketer for more than 20 years – my last job was as Head of Digital in a North American healthtech company – so I lived the corporate dream before starting my own marketing agency called The SquarePeg. It started out with a simple vision – to implement the best practices I learnt from the global marketplace, in my bid to make Pakistan a quality differentiator and not merely a low cost labour market. As I started building my team, I realized that there was a massive dormant workforce in Pakistan – highly educated women who could not pursue a 9-5 job within traditional family setups. That’s why The SquarePeg became a remote first company with more than 50% of the team consisting of women working from cities like Karachi, Hyderabad, Islamabad, Quetta, Mirpur and even Istanbul. These women not only delivered, they outperformed their male colleagues, and The SquarePeg grew to be a team of around 30 people. We even started a mentorship and training program called The SquarePact where we upskilled Pakistani youth and women free of cost. It proved one thing: when women are given access, they don’t just participate – they lead.
Later, I joined the Islamabad Women Chamber of Commerce with the same vision – to help spread digital literacy and create social impact for a massively underserved community in Pakistan. In the course of my journey, I met so many women-preneurs with exceptional products and services who simply did not know how to market themselves. While most of them had set up social media pages, they were randomly posting and boosting posts with no strategy in place. Hiring an agency or a senior marketing resource was beyond their budget. And while I tried my best to help them out on a pro-bono basis, there was a limit to how much I could actively support them since I was bound by human capacity. AI, thus became the equalizing factor, and the idea of an AI-powered senior marketing resource that provides strategy and continuous guidance at a rate that small businesses can afford, was born.
CMOontheGO (Chief Marketing Officer on the GO) is a multi-agentic AI platform that helps small businesses evaluate their key issues, understand how it is affects their bottom line, identify their competitors and benchmark their performance against them, then creates a marketing strategy and plan and continuously monitors their data streams to ensure all campaigns are running smoothly; essentially everything a CMO does for the price of a cup of coffee (For reference: a human fractional CMO costs start at $150 per hour). The goal of this platform is to help businesses DIY their marketing by providing them pro-level strategies and serve as a marketing brain that continuously learns and adapts the marketing strategy to business goals and changes.
There is a lot of resistance around AI and how it will take away jobs; my opinion is that AI is the greatest democratizing factor in a long time that can help every community access resources that were previously only available to a select few. Only by designing AI with women’s realities at the center, especially those coming from societies where they are marginalized, can we ensure that they have a place in the digital future and for me that’s the main driving force behind CMOontheGO – not just marketing automation, not just AI hype but a way to ensure that the next generation of women entrepreneurs – whether they are bakers, crocheters, or coders – know that they do matter.