The CMO’s existential choice

AI is not just another wave of digital transformation, it’s a systemic shift that threatens to hollow out the marketing function or elevate it into the enterprise’s growth engine. For CMOs, that’s the choice they are facing today. And that choice is existential.

CMOs Face Internal and External Disruption

Marketing is being disrupted on two fronts simultaneously. Externally, AI agents are collapsing traditional consumer journeys into single, agentic flows. Discovery, evaluation, and transaction now happen in minutes, mediated by intelligent assistants. Brands lose prominence. Campaigns lose relevance. Revenue flows shift from impressions to transactions.

Internally, functions like campaign planning, content creation, and media setup - once tightly packaged into specialist roles - are being ‘unbundled’. They are pulled apart into separate tasks and redistributed across the enterprise. As AI reduces the time, skill, and cost required to execute these tasks, they lose their coherence as standalone jobs. Instead, they’re absorbed into adjacent functions (for marketing, these are mostly product, finance, and supply chain) where they’re executed faster, cheaper, and often with more direct impact on growth. This redistribution is not theoretical. It’s already happening.

But what does it mean for your brand? Read the full article on The Marketing Society.