At the intersection of advertising and AI, arguably, no role seems more precarious than the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) – a role notorious for its limited “shelf-life.”

Today, I asked OpenAI’s chatgpt (using the GPT-4o LLM) for some help on behalf of the CMO.

It turns out the CMO will become an “architect” courtesy of AI. Read on…

prompt – future of the CMO

How is artificial intelligence going to affect the role of Chief Marketing Officer in 5 years?

1. Data-Driven Decision Making

AI will enable CMOs to analyze vast amounts of customer data in real time, allowing for hyper-personalized marketing strategies. CMOs will be expected to lead with metrics and performance insights, requiring fluency in AI tools, analytics platforms, and customer data platforms (CDPs).

2. Customer Experience Personalization

AI will power personalization at scale. CMOs will increasingly oversee AI-driven customer journeys that adapt in real time based on behavior, context, and sentiment. This means owning the full customer lifecycle, not just top-of-funnel brand awareness.

3. Content Creation and Automation

Generative AI tools (like ChatGPT or Midjourney) will automate much of the content production process. CMOs will shift from overseeing creative development to orchestrating AI-human collaboration—curating, editing, and strategically deploying content across platforms.

4. Real-Time Market Responsiveness

AI will allow marketing teams to respond in near-real time to trends, competitor moves, and consumer sentiment shifts. CMOs will be tasked with building agile organizations capable of leveraging these insights quickly.

5. Martech Integration and Oversight

The marketing tech stack will become increasingly complex and AI-infused. CMOs will need to lead cross-functional efforts with IT, data, and product teams to integrate AI tools, ensure data governance, and manage ethical considerations around algorithmic decision-making.

6. Ethics, Trust, and Brand Responsibility

With AI automating customer interactions and decision-making, CMOs will be on the front lines of managing brand trust and AI ethics—particularly around data privacy, algorithmic bias, and transparency.

7. Strategic Leadership in Growth

CMOs will evolve into Chief Growth Officers, using AI to identify new market opportunities, test go-to-market strategies rapidly, and drive business expansion through smarter customer acquisition and retention strategies.

In short, AI will elevate the CMO’s role from brand steward to tech-savvy growth architect who leads through insight, agility, and innovation.

Chatgpt did not offer sources for these insights.

AI CMO

The CMO is fired once and for all?

On LinkedIn, Kennan Davis claims his new company, Icon, is “the world’s first AI CMO (Chief Marketing Officer): it can plan, create, & run 1000s of winning ads end-to-end.” Read Davis’ pitch from last week.

Targeting ecommerce retailers, Icon is not a pitch for to replace big brand CMOs -yet.

video

Over the last year +, former Moat CEO and co-founder Jonah Goodhart has been slowly removing the veil on his latest startup, Mobian. From his LinkedIn redoubt yesterday, Mr. Goodhart wrote: “Nvidia says agentic AI uses ‘sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems.’ At the Association of National Advertisers I had the chance to showcase Mobian AI Personas — a product we built for the agentic AI era.” – Read more.

And, see the ANA prezo.

podcast tip

Published last week, “The P&G Alumni Podcast” hosted an hour-long discussion with former Kellogg’s digital marketer Bob Arnold, who spent a decade at Procter & Gamble and was one of the first to preach the programmatic “gospel.”

Today, Mr. Arnold is the Media Innovation lead for Media Lab, Google marketing’s internal media team. In the podcast, he reveals a bit about how AI and media intersect from his purview: “So one of the things that we’re really trying to do here is help educate people that when we build a model and it doesn’t work,

– we didn’t build the model right, or we didn’t do something right there – that basically missed the mark.”

Arnold continues, “And that has been an adjustment because, I think, with digital growing so much, especially in digital media… Meta/Facebook or Google will release a product and you just sort of flip a switch and then you get better results all of a sudden. And now we’re sort of going into this new phase of how do we use these models to build new creative or whatever. And it’s just not always going to work.” Listen to the podcast.

articles

• Introducing the Meta AI App: A New Way to Access Your AI Assistant (today) – Meta

• Will The Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? (April 26) – The New Yorker

• 80% of CMOs concerned about ‘AI skills gap’ (April 8) – Marketing Week