AI is not making the CMO role more relevant. It is making the absence of genuine systems thinking at the top of the marketing function more expensive faster.
Every AI tool your marketing function deploys operates on the commercial logic the function has already built. The attribution assumptions, the segmentation logic, the optimisation objectives, the creative brief, the measurement framework, all of these are inputs that the AI tool amplifies rather than corrects. If the logic is sound, AI makes it faster and more precise. If the logic is compromised, AI makes it faster and more precisely wrong.
The CMO who implements AI into a commercial system they have not examined is accelerating the system. Whether that system is heading in the right direction is a question the AI implementation does not answer and the CMO, inside the system, is structurally least positioned to answer it.
The question that AI raises for CMO effectiveness is not whether the CMO can use AI tools competently. It is whether the commercial system the CMO is accelerating with AI has the structural soundness to benefit from the acceleration. In a business where the answer to that question is uncertain, the AI investment is a commercial risk multiplier rather than a performance lever.
Examine the system before you accelerate it.
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