AI Is Changing the CMO's Role

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the chief marketing officer's job faster than most teams can handle, new data from Forrester Research suggests.

For CMOs, AI isn't changing the mandate to drive growth, but it is radically changing their roles, Forrester noted in a new report.

In the report, Forrester vice presidents and research directors Mike Proulx and Matthew Selheimer stated that as a result of AI, CMO's roles will change in the following ways:

• The CMO will become an enterprise growth orchestrator. As AI agents take over orchestration, execution, and dynamic optimization, the CMO role moves up, not out. The future CMO spends less time managing programs and campaigns and more time making enterprise-level trade-offs: where to invest, where to automate, and where human judgment still matters. It becomes less about running marketing’s day-to-day and more about steering growth strategy.
• Growth will get hard-coded into marketing operations. As customer discovery, evaluation, and conversion become increasingly mediated by AI algorithms and agents, marketing stops acting as a revenue influencer and starts operating as growth driver. Growth is no longer something marketing supports — it’s something marketing is part of designing, measuring, and governing across the enterprise.
• Brand stewardship will expand beyond human control. When machines increasingly represent your brand — in search results, recommendations, content, and conversations CMOs can’t directly see — brand governance changes fundamentally. The CMO’s remit expands from shaping messages to governing how answer engines and agents interpret, surface, and speak on the brand’s behalf. Trust, consistency, and reputation now live as much in the AI layer as they do in creative output.

As answer engines reshape brand discovery and AI agents enter buying journeys, technology, not headcount, will scale marketing capacity, the report said, noting that nearly 40 percent of B2C marketing leaders plan to increase technology spending, while 63 percent of B2B CMOs have slowed hiring as they reassess talent needs in an AI-driven function. 

Forrester also found that the CMOs pulling ahead are customer-obsessed change leaders. Customer-obsessed companies are 67 percent more likely to outperform their peers, and they adopt AI earlier and more aggressively to drive differentiated customer value, not just efficiency. 

But, doing so requires CMOs to constantly strike the right balance between AI automation and the human touch, it said further.