The New AI-Enabled Chief Marketing Officer
By Keri Tomsic, PR and Content Lead for the Marketing AI Pulse community
The CMO's advantage is not using more AI. It is becoming better at designing the system in which AI, people, data, brand and technology work together.
Who is the new AI-enabled CMO?
The chief marketing officer’s (CMO) artificial intelligence (AI) mandate is evolving faster than the org chart. An AI-enabled CMO is a growth leader who redesigns how people, technology, data and AI work together while staying accountable for business outcomes, brand trust and human judgment. As chief executive officers (CEOs) push for growth, chief financial officers (CFOs) demand evidence, chief information officers (CIOs) drive integration, and chief communications officers (CCOs) take on a larger role in AI-era narrative, trust and transformation, the CMO is being pulled further into enterprise leadership. Forrester calls this the “enterprise growth orchestrator”: a leader spending less time managing campaigns and more time deciding where to invest, automate and apply human judgment. [1]
The CMO has an AI leadership mandate. Now what?
Marketing now leads roughly half of AI investment decisions within the function, while 72% of CEOs still describe themselves as the primary enterprise AI decision-maker. [2] Rather than competing mandates, those findings show how AI leadership is becoming distributed across the C-suite. AI is broadening the CMO's mandate from marketing leadership to enterprise growth across technology, finance, communications, data, and customer experience.
The mandate comes with higher expectations: 94% of CMOs say CEO expectations have increased significantly, while 43% report AI marketing investment above $15 million, up from 28% last year. [2]
BCG suggests that CMOs must convert AI optimism into measurable enterprise impact before CFO patience runs out. [2] At the same time, Lippincott finds only 28% of CMOs describe their organizational influence as very high, while pressure for short-term performance is crowding out long-term brand building. [3]
The CMO-CIO relationship is another critical dependency. Forrester argues AI raises the stakes for CMO-CIO collaboration, since scaling AI tools depends on integrating them with enterprise data. [4] Infrastructure remains a barrier: 81% of IT leaders cite data silos as blocking digital transformation, and 62% point to fragmented tools and data as limiting AI. [5]
Automating tasks vs. redesigning operating models
This year's most actionable research finding is often overlooked: 96% of CMOs say AI is transforming marketing end to end. Yet 42% still use generative AI only for isolated tasks in a handful of workflows. Fewer than a third have adopted agent-led workflows, and just 8% run fully autonomous, multi-agent campaigns. [2]
What are the three levels of change for effective AI-era marketing teams?
Automating tasks speeds up existing steps, such as drafting briefs or versioning assets, without changing the process.
Redesigning workflows changes the sequence itself. Reckitt cut time spent on everyday marketing tasks by as much as 70% after reinventing how its teams and AI systems work together. [6]
Redesigning the operating model changes how marketing works end to end. Instead of a linear process from research through measurement, the AI-enabled model becomes a continuous loop of customer intelligence, AI-assisted strategy, modular content, governed activation, and learning.
BCG points out that leaders no longer ask which tool to buy. They ask which operating system will let their tools, agents, and workflows work together. [2] Most CMOs are still focused on tools, even as they describe themselves as operating at the system level.
What happens to the AI-enabled marketing team?
Research is clearer about capability investment than about exactly how teams will change. Roughly 80% of CMOs are investing heavily in AI upskilling at every level, and just as many are rolling out responsible AI and ethics training. That number is up 10 points from 2025. [2]
The real question is not which jobs go away, but which types of work gain or lose value. Tasks focused on execution, like versioning, adaptation, production, and campaign management, are getting faster and more automated. Meanwhile, work that relies on insight, narrative, creative judgment, systems thinking, and decision-making is becoming increasingly important. Forrester points out that AI is sharpening the value of creative work, not erasing it. [7]
Research shows rising demand for skills in AI product and agent ownership, governance, responsible use, AI visibility, answer-engine optimization, marketing science, measurement, and collaboration between marketing and technical teams. [2] These needs are creating new roles and expanding existing ones.
Titles will vary, but the direction is consistent: less repeatable execution, more direction, evaluation, and system oversight. [2]
How is the AI-enabled CMO measured?
If the CFO wants proof, the next question is: proof of what?
According to Gartner's data, only one in three CMOs see the AI returns they expect. Organizations that automate more marketing work are about twice as likely to see ROI, but only if they measure business outcomes, not just time saved. [8] Efficiency metrics are a trap: easy to generate, but they won't survive a budget review.
A defensible AI scorecard generally spans four categories:
Growth. Revenue contribution, pipeline, customer acquisition efficiency, conversion, customer lifetime value, brand preference.
Visibility. Share of answer in AI-generated results, citation and mention frequency, agent-referred traffic, alongside traditional search performance.
Velocity and cost. Time to market, cost per asset, content reuse rates, experimentation velocity: useful as supporting evidence, insufficient as headline proof.
Risk and governance. Disclosure compliance, brand-safety and accuracy incidents, audit trail completeness.
It's critical that today's AI-enabled CMOs align with executive leaders and their teams to define a scorecard before asking for more investment, not after.
Brand, discovery and trust in the AI layer
91% of B2C CMOs and 76% of B2B CMOs say AI-moderated, no-click discovery is already reshaping their funnels. [2]
This shift redefines brand stewardship. Forrester said: "Brand stewardship will expand beyond human control." [1] When machines represent your brand in results, recommendations, and conversations you never see, your responsibility grows: from shaping messages to governing how answer engines and agents interpret and speak for your brand.
Semrush's 2026 AI Visibility Index, analyzing 126 million AI search prompts, found the top three brands captured 82.9% of category visibility in news and media and 76.9% in consumer electronics. [9]
Who owns this? Muck Rack's May 2026 study of more than 25 million cited links found that earned media accounts for 84% of AI citations, while paid and advertorial content accounts for 0.3%. [10] PRWeek has argued that communications teams are well positioned to influence how AI systems interpret brand narratives. [11]
The evidence strengthens the case for integrated marketing communications, but the executive question isn't PR versus SEO. AI discoverability spans PR, search, content, brand, digital, product marketing, web, and analytics. The practical model is one accountable owner with cross-functional execution. [12]
Governance is broader than disclosure, and it helps to separate three layers:
Responsible use: how the organization handles data, consent, bias, hallucination, brand safety, synthetic likenesses and employee AI use.
Regulatory disclosure: the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency obligations began applying Aug. 2, with limited transition provisions for certain pre-existing systems, and IAB published its AI Transparency & Disclosure Framework V2 on Aug. 18. [13]
Enterprise governance covers vendor and model risk, intellectual property, approval authority, auditability, and sign-off responsibilities.
The CMO may not own all three layers, but can't treat any of them as someone else's problem. As Gartner's Lizzy Foo Kune says, CMOs can't treat AI as "something the team 'uses' while leadership stays on the sidelines." [14] By 2027, Gartner expects weak AI literacy to be a top reason CMOs are replaced at large enterprises. [14]
And then there's the customer. Most research focuses on what AI lets marketers do, with less attention to how customers experience it. Eighty-nine percent of marketers call personalization essential, but only about 60% of customers feel they receive it. [5] AI may help close that gap, but more personalization does not automatically mean a better experience. Relevance can become repetition, over-targeting, or interaction that feels automated rather than personal.
As AI-generated content and automated decision-making expand, trust, privacy, transparency, and authenticity become marketing issues, not merely legal ones. For CMOs, AI maturity increasingly means knowing where automation improves the customer experience, where human judgment still matters, and where personalization becomes intrusive rather than valuable.
The AI-enabled CMO agenda
Five things worth doing in the next two quarters:
Identify three to five workflows to redesign, not just automate. Focus on those where the process itself is the bottleneck.
Build your AI scorecard with the CFO before your next investment request. Lead with business outcomes; use efficiency metrics as supporting evidence.
Settle data, integration, vendor, and governance ownership with the CIO, in writing, with a regular review schedule.
Assign a single accountable owner for AI discoverability, with clear contributing roles across PR, search, content, and brand.
Define the AI literacy required at every level, including your own, and fund it.
Where does the AI-enabled CMO role go from here?
The consequences of missing this are concrete. Budgets move to functions that prove returns. Brand decisions happen inside systems no one is monitoring. The new AI-enabled CMO needs to connect AI investment to business outcomes.
Experimentation still matters, but disconnected pilots are no longer a substitute for a real AI strategy.
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Frequently asked questions
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Marketing now leads roughly half of AI investment decisions within its own function, but enterprise strategy and architecture generally remain CEO-, CIO-, or cross-functional responsibilities.
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Prioritize growth and business outcomes, followed by AI visibility, velocity and cost, and governance measures.
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Automation speeds up existing steps; workflow redesign changes the sequence; operating-model redesign changes how the organization itself works.
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Execution-scaling work compresses: versioning, adaptation, campaign management. Work that compounds expands: insight, narrative, creative judgment, systems design, measurement, AI governance and AI-visibility capability.
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One accountable owner with cross-functional execution across PR, search, content, brand and analytics. Earned media drives 84% of AI citations, which strengthens the communications case.
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Three layers: responsible use (data, consent, bias, brand safety), regulatory disclosure (EU AI Act Article 50, IAB’s framework), and enterprise governance (vendor and model risk, IP, approval authorities, auditability).
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Personalization expectations already outpace delivery: 89% of marketers call it essential, while only about 60% of customers feel they receive it. As marketing becomes more automated, trust and authenticity become CMO-level concerns.
This piece was written by the contributor, with AI assistance during research, editing, fact-checking, and refinement. Final wording and judgment are the contributor's own.
Sources
Forrester, "The AI CMO," Mike Proulx and Matthew Selheimer, April 2026; and Forrester blog, "The AI CMO: Growth Accountability Gets Next-Level."
Forrester, "How AI Raises The Stakes For CMO-CIO Collaboration," Thomas Husson, January 2026; and Forrester, "Five Strategic CMO Moves Heading Into 2026."
EY, "How AI is reshaping the future of marketing," May 2026.
Boston Consulting Group, "BCG in Cannes," Cannes Lions 2026.
Forrester, "CMOs' 'AI Creative Leap': From Making Ads To Designing Meaning," August 2026.
Gartner, "AI in Marketing: How CMOs Can Drive Real Business Value," May 2026.
Muck Rack, "What Is AI Reading?" Generative Pulse, May 2026 edition.
Inc., "Everyone's Obsessed With AI Search," 2026, reporting Muck Rack 2026 State of PR.
IAB, "AI Transparency & Disclosure Framework V2," Aug. 18, 2026; European Union AI Act, Article 50.
Gartner, "CMO 'AI Blind Spot'" survey release, February 2026.
