Pencil ✏️
Ali Shepherd is an experienced HR professional currently serving as the Head of People & Talent at Pencil since March 2025. Previously, Shepherd held the position of Global Head of People & Talent at Omnipresent from October 2021 to November 2024, leading global teams in People Partnering, Operations, Learning and Development, and Talent Acquisition across over 50 countries. Prior roles include Senior Talent Partner at Elliptic, where leadership of a talent team focused on hiring for commercial and technical roles globally, and Head of Talent at BlackCat Technology Solutions Ltd, overseeing talent acquisition and development. Beginning a career at Monarch Recruitment Ltd as Senior Account Director, Shepherd specialized in recruiting IT professionals while managing and training a team of Consultants. Educational qualifications include a Level 5 CIPD from Avado and a Bachelor's Degree in Economics from The University of Sheffield.
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Pencil ✏️
Pencil is a end-to-end platform designed to scale GenAI assets for enterprise marketing teams. What sets it apart is its ability to bring together the industry’s top AI models under a unified framework for highest asset creation results. Unlike others, Pencil focuses on generating complete ads—not just text or images—while providing tools for templates, image and video editing, and more. It also stands out by automatically applying brand guidelines to ad production, using ingested brand documents. Pencil connects directly to media accounts, delivering AI-driven insights and predictions, backed by over $1B in media spend. With a client-first approach, it empowers brands to equip their teams and agencies with an AI platform that adheres to brand standards, sparking ideas predicted to perform and enabling creative teams to produce their best work. Pencil was founded in 2018 with a team from Google, Facebook and Uber with backing from Sequoia and Entrepreneur First. We were acquired by The Brandtech Group in 2023 to pursue a shared vision of bringing GenAI to the Fortune 500.