Co-founder & Chief Data Scientist, Trust Insights · Co-host, Marketing Over Coffee
Christopher S. Penn is the rare figure in this field who is a practising data scientist and a marketer at the same time, and the combination is the point. He is co-founder and Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights, a marketing analytics and AI consultancy, and has been recognised as an IBM Champion in Data and AI eight times.
He co-hosts the long-running Marketing Over Coffee podcast, writes the weekly Almost Timely newsletter, and has published more than two dozen books, including Almost Timeless: 48 Foundation Principles of Generative AI. His speaker biography states a newsletter list above 294,000 and client work delivering double-digit ROI for brands including Cisco, T-Mobile and McDonald's — both are his own published figures, not independently audited, and should be read as such.
What gets cited about Penn publicly is specificity: he tends to publish the prompt, the data and the method rather than the conclusion alone, which makes his material unusually easy to check and to reuse. That is also the fairest test to apply to him — read a recent issue of the newsletter and see whether you could reproduce what he did. If you can, the claim is doing its own work.
Everything above is drawn from these public sources. Last reviewed 8 August 2026. Links open on the publisher's own site.
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