Is the CMO Role Dead? The Future of Marketing Leadership in the AI Era
Is the CMO role truly on the verge of fading out? There's a lot of chatter right now about the need for this role and how marketing leadership is being diluted, especially as AI and new functions take ownership of various marketing functions. As someone who's spent half my career in marketing, I think the issue is not that the title is obsolete, but that it may not be well-suited for success in many organisations.
I sometimes joke that a CMO is like a Chief Magic Officer because companies often expect miracles without precise alignment on the role, KPIs, and budgets. And frequently, that falls on the CMO because they don’t build role clarity and stakeholder consensus. The reality is that marketing as a function covers a vast range of functions [brand strategy, partner marketing, growth marketing, customer experience, marketing ops/agency management, digital activation and presence, social media, MarTech, AdTech, Agentic AI marketing for marketing workflows, Marketing analytics and much more]. And not all of these necessarily sit neatly under one roof.
So, the future isn't about the title itself, but how organisations align these
pieces and which clusters they put together as highly dependent adjacent
Organisations with cross-functional accountability. Whether it means the CMO role evolves into something like a Chief Growth Officer or another title, or marketing becomes more integrated with revenue and digital teams. What matters is cross-functional accountability and ensuring marketing has the appropriate budget, KPIs, and alignment at the C-level. By the way, budget calibration and prioritisation are a MMM (marketing mix model) exercise, not a spreadsheet of money to be spent. Perhaps a topic for another post.
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