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In an unpredictable economy and fractured media landscape, marketing leaders are navigating a period of profound transformation and disruption — and as AI technologies evolve, the pace of change will only increase. In response, the highest priorities of chief marketing officers today are shifting, and understanding their concerns is essential to addressing the most pressing growth challenges companies face.
Marketing is at an inflection point. The structures, talent models, measurement frameworks, and influence mechanisms that will define the function for the next decade are being established right now. CMOs who move with intention — building the function, proving its value, leading effectively through disruption — will define what marketing becomes. Those who wait may find that it has already been defined for them.
Recently, I conducted 15 in-depth interviews with global CMOs from a range of industries to identify their most urgent priorities and challenges. I heard five main concerns:
- Embedding marketing as an executive-level growth function
- Transforming with and for artificial intelligence
- Hiring to defuse the talent time bomb
- Reaching consumers across a fragmented media system
- Developing new metrics for zero-click AI platforms
Compared with other business functions, marketing as a whole, along with even the most granular of measurement tasks, is perhaps being transformed most deeply by the rise of AI. While some sectors are establishing new AI workflows to speed up whatever they already do, marketing is working to harness AI not just as an efficiency tool but as a fundamental reinvention of the function.
In some ways, its very task has changed. Zero-click platforms have upended the meaning of what was, until recently, the web’s most basic metric: clicks. Meanwhile, the media landscape is growing ever more fractionalized, rewriting the rules of attention as consumers encounter individualized feeds algorithmically tailored to them. Function leaders face the challenge of developing talent for a future where the skills that mattered yesterday are being rapidly displaced. An additional challenge is to elevate the role and importance of marketing as a company’s growth engine, which will require tomorrow’s CMOs to develop new skills, lead an effective organization, transform the work, and create more pronounced value. This isn’t about learning new tools; it’s about designing more effective work in a more effective organization.
Together, these five priorities describe a function at a critical point — where marketing leaders are clear-eyed about the challenges ahead and increasingly convinced that marketing’s moment to shape enterprise strategy has arrived.
Evolving From Marketing to Growth
CMOs who operate as marketing specialists rather than general managers are often excluded from upstream product and business decisions — a marginalization that keeps them from delivering the impact that marketing should have. “If marketing isn’t involved when a company is identifying new products and services and isn’t helping bring insights to the table about what customers and future customers want or don’t want, then you end up getting a product that you can’t sell,” Amy Martin Ziegenfuss, CMO of Six Flags Entertainment Corporation, said.
CMOs must be part of higher-level conversations to drive their companies’ success and increase their own influence, and to shift the perception of marketing from a cost center to a growth driver. Julie Nestor, executive vice president of marketing and communications for Mastercard Asia Pacific, described a previous employer’s “investment optimization tool that calculated the ROI for every marketing request before it was approved. It removed subjectivity entirely and created a shared language between marketing and finance. Marketing was no longer asking for [a] budget; it was presenting a business case with a projected return.”
As John Costello, a former board member of Ring Inc. and president of global marketing and innovation at Dunkin’ Brands said, “Changing the title from chief marketing officer to chief growth officer would help all the constituents understand what the role is actually for.”
Implementing AI or Altering the Function?
Nearly every CMO holds a dual view on AI: enthusiasm about its potential, and genuine anxiety about their organization’s ability to capitalize on it. Experimentation is ongoing, but effective scaling of AI has so far remained elusive. CMOs pinpoint two primary internal challenges of AI implementation: identifying the tools that can drive efficiency, speed content production, and improve personalization; and getting teams to adopt them.
Sara Mendez, formerly CMO of SC Johnson Lifestyle Brands, said that marketing is the function to be “most transformed by AI, because it is the most complex, the most connected to every other part of the organization, and AI is simultaneously transforming every individual discipline within it.”
Another CMO mapped over 700 marketing tasks and found that more than 80% could be AI-led. But the limits of what AI can do are unknown and constantly changing as AI tools evolve. A financial services CMO put it bluntly: “Execution, machines can do. Creative thinking — yet to be proven.”
The implication is not just greater efficiency but a full reinvention of how marketing functions are organized, staffed, and run. One CMO reduced a 50-step campaign process to nine steps by mapping AI across her organization’s workflows and rewriting every job description accordingly, yet she still pondered what the “right” organizational design would be in 2030.
Transforming Talent Priorities
The skills AI demands don’t yet match the pipeline — a talent time bomb spanning industries and professions. One CMO asked, “Who am I going to hire on my marketing team — HTML coders, content writers, creative designers, copywriters, media planners? Or do I need people who know how to think?”
Teresa Barreira, global CMO of Publicis Sapient, noted, “When we mapped what only humans could do, we landed on soft skills: plasticity, storytelling, being a great spotter of things. Then the question is, how do you teach young people that?”
CMOs in particular are caught in a three-way bind as they confront skill obsolescence, as the channel-specialist model is displaced by AI and demand shifts toward judgment and critical thinking; pipeline anxiety, as execution-level work is commoditized and marketing risks losing its appeal to the best young talent; and the build-for-today paradox, where CMOs are making staffing decisions now without knowing what their organization will need in two or three years.
“CMOs will have to figure out how to manage hybrid teams — human and AI working together. And, critically, how do you manage AI when your people haven’t done it themselves?” asked Michelle Froah, former global chief marketing and innovation officer at ETS. One CMO noted that young marketers can now gain years of experience faster through AI agents but lack the judgment to lead them, because they haven’t learned what “good” looks like.
Reaching Consumers in a Fragmented Media World
The old model of reaching a broad audience efficiently is gone. CMOs are navigating a splintered media landscape — one that includes connected TV, retail media networks, podcasts, influencer ecosystems, and AI-powered search — and face the ongoing challenge of keepi
