The Future CMO: Who - or What - Leads Marketing in 2030?
By 2030, much of what marketing teams do today - from research and production to media buying, optimisation and personalisation - will sit with machines. The teams that remain are likely to be smaller, flatter and hybrid. So what happens to the person in charge?
Louise Cummins, CEO, Global Centre for AI in Marketing/Australian Centre for AI in Marketing; Bronwyn Heys, CMO, Zambrero; Aaron Michie, Director, Global Marketing Operations & Strategic Programs, DAZN Media
AI is scrambling the boundaries of marketing. Work that once had a clear owner now cuts across product, PR, content, customer service, corporate affairs, technology and data. AI visibility requires the whole organisation to contribute, while Marketing still carries the consequences of an inefficient acquisition cost. Personalisation increasingly depends on taxonomies, ontologies and agents connected directly to organisational data, collapsing the old divisions between marketing, product and technology.
As those boundaries dissolve, who owns the strategy, the technology - and the result? What should organisations build themselves, what should they buy, and which capabilities should remain with agencies and specialist partners? How should CMOs measure the return on an expanding AI stack when the value may appear across productivity, customer experience, brand visibility and commercial growth? And when AI dramatically reduces the cost of research, production and optimisation, who captures the savings - and what should agencies be paid for?
Three marketing leaders talk honestly about where their own jobs are heading. Does the CMO expand into a broader commercial and customer mandate? Become an orchestrator of people, agents, technology and external capability? Take ownership of the systems through which the brand now behaves? Or turn into something we do not yet have a name for?
Drawing on ACAM’s Benchmark and Marketing Team of the Future research, the panel will examine how the CMO’s remit, skillset, investment decisions and commercial accountability are changing, and what leaders should be building now, when fluency with AI is table stakes and the real differentiators are judgement, creativity, empathy, governance and trust.