Coming back to a CRO role after maternity leave
Coming back from maternity leave is one of those transitions nobody can fully prepare you for. Your days suddenly have a hard stop, your head is in two places at once, and the industry you left behind has kept moving. In tech, six months away can feel like a lifetime, and in AI it practically is one.
Florence Broderick made that return as CRO of General Index, a commodities pricing data business. A CMO turned CRO, she leads marketing, sales, revenue operations, and customer success. A new baby at home, a CRO role in a scaling business, and four functions to lead: on paper, that’s a recipe for overwhelm.
Tamar, who sat down with Florence for Airspeed and has made the same return to a startup herself, said as much at the start of their conversation. It could feel overwhelming. Yet when Florence wrote about coming back on LinkedIn, she said something that made us want to hear the whole story: it had turned out to be far more manageable than she expected.
The world kept moving, and this time it moved in her favor
For a lot of returning parents, the quiet fear is that everything will have changed while they were away. For Florence, it had, and that turned out to be the good news.
“One of the huge advantages was that during the six months that I was out on maternity leave, AI massively accelerated,” she told us.
Before her leave, she was using AI the way most of us were: ad hoc, in siloed tools, copying documents and transcripts from one window into the next. By the time she came back, MCPs had arrived and everything could be connected in one place. Today she works in Claude with HubSpot, Airspeed, and General Index’s own data plugged in, a combination she called a “magnificent trio” in her post.
“Coming back, I would estimate that maybe 30 or 40% of the jobs that I would do before going out on mat leave, I can now automate,” she said.
To be clear, that isn’t 30 to 40% of what makes Florence good at her role. It’s the report building, the hunting through the CRM for evidence, and the slide edits that used to crowd out what only she can do: building relationships with customers, partners, and her team.
Letting go of the grunt work
Florence is clear-eyed about how much of a CRO’s week used to disappear into admin. “There’s just so much grunt work and nitty gritty jobs that I used to have to do that I can just now do via Claude, HubSpot, and Airspeed,” she said.
Pulling together HubSpot reports to understand a trend used to be a struggle; now it’s one prompt and about three minutes. When a customer recently pushed back on one of General Index’s datasets, she asked Airspeed what other customers had said about a competitor’s data quality, found six relevant conversations within a couple of minutes, and had a reply back to that customer within ten. Personalized follow-up decks, built around the exact pains a prospect raised on the call, now take four to five minutes rather than a rep rebuilding slides by hand. Win/loss analysis that used to take a couple of days comes together quickly.
“It’s essentially the best analyst I’ve ever had working for me,” she said.
More time for the relationships
What Florence does with that time is the heart of her story, and the part she says she’s obsessed with. “Now that certain skills have been commoditized by AI, the human component, your ability to deal with people and interact with people, is really very important,” she explained.
We’ve all received AI slop emails that make it obvious someone leaned on a tool instead of thinking about the problem, and Florence sees the same risk in how we show up for people. So the hours she’s won back go to customers, partners, and events, where she picks up insight no prompt can give her, and to working through deal strategy with her sellers. In a scaling business where resources are always tight, that’s where a CRO’s time counts most.
It showed, too. As our conversation wrapped up, Florence was glad of a five-minute gap, because she had a customer to get to.
And as Tamar put it at the end of the call, giving people time back isn’t only about work. It’s about having room for what matters most, inside work and outside it, family and kids included.
Her advice for leaders in the same seat
Florence’s advice to other revenue leaders is refreshingly practical. It’s tempting, she said, to think you could do everything in Claude by uploading transcripts yourself, but copying and pasting between tools gets painful fast. The real value comes from having everything stitched together by MCPs, and from tools built by people who understand go to market. When she wrote a simple prompt for a CRO coaching agent in Airspeed, it came back as a far more sophisticated one, and her reps now get structured feedback by email shortly after each call.
Speed matters too. “I don’t necessarily always want to step away from my laptop for 15 minutes to grab a coffee while Claude thinks,” she said. When your days have a hard stop, a quarter of an hour spent waiting on an answer is time you feel.
And she’d ask any vendor one simple question: was this built before the AI explosion, or after it? In her experience, AI patched onto an older platform shows in the customer experience, while a platform designed for what AI can do today lets her ask anything across her entire call database, not one account at a time.
The bigger story
Florence’s return is really a story about where the hours go. The tools take care of the reports, the research, and the slide edits that used to pull her away from people, and she puts that time into the relationships no tool can build for her: with customers, with partners, and with her team.
Watch the full conversation above, read the General Index customer story for every workflow Florence runs, see how Airspeed connects to Claude through MCP, or book a demo to see it on your own calls.
Frequently asked questions
How much of a CRO's work can AI automate?
Florence Broderick, CRO at General Index, estimates that 30 to 40% of the jobs she did before maternity leave are now automated with Claude, HubSpot, and Airspeed. That is the report building, CRM research, and slide edits, not the customer and team relationships that make her good at the role.
What AI stack does General Index's CRO use?
Claude, connected through MCP to HubSpot for CRM data, Airspeed for everything customers have said on calls, and General Index's own MCP for its datasets. Florence calls the combination a magnificent trio.
Why not just upload call transcripts into Claude?
Copying and pasting between tools gets painful fast. Florence's advice is to connect everything through MCP and use tools built by people who understand go to market, so you can ask questions across your entire call database instead of one account at a time.
