The CMO is not disappearing. But the old version of the role might be.

I have spent more than 25 years in marketing, and for most of that time, the function has been expanding.

We added digital. Then social. Then automation, customer experience, content, commerce, MarTech, analytics and, most recently, AI. Each addition brought new expertise, new tools, new partners and, usually, a few more dashboards.

Marketing became more sophisticated. It also became more fragmented.

The strategy sat with one team. The campaign was developed by another. Content moved somewhere else. Media had its own agency. Technology belonged to IT. Leads were passed to sales. Customer experience was discussed by everyone and fully owned by almost no one.

And slowly, almost without us noticing, the thinking moved further away from the doing.

That is why I do not believe the real question is whether the CMO role will survive. The more useful question is: what kind of CMO will a business still need?

You can distribute the work. You cannot distribute accountability.

There is a reasonable argument that many activities traditionally housed within marketing can now sit elsewhere.

Demand generation can move closer to sales. Product marketing can report into product. Corporate communications can work directly with the CEO. Customer success can own retention. AI can take on a growing share of content production, campaign execution, research and reporting.

On an organisation chart, this may look efficient. But customers do not experience organisation charts. They experience the combined consequence of what the company promises, what sales says, what the product delivers, how service responds and whether any of it feels like it came from the same organisation.

Someone still has to connect those parts.

Because while marketing activities can be distributed, accountability for the market and the customer cannot be divided into six boxes and expected to reassemble itself at the quarterly review.

The future CMO, therefore, cannot simply be the custodian of the brand or the person responsible for filling the top of the funnel. The role has to become the connective tissue across customer, product, sales, experience, data, technology and growth.

That is not a smaller mandate. It is a much bigger one.

I have seen where the chain breaks

Across Tata Teleservices, Reliance Jio and later while leading CMO advisory and AI marketing work at Wipro, I have had the opportunity to build marketing teams, manage large budgets and work with more than 40 CMOs and senior leaders across markets.

The business contexts were different, but the underlying frustrations were remarkably familiar.

The CMO had a strategy but not enough bandwidth to drive it. The internal team was consumed by the demands of the day. Agencies were executing fragments of a plan without always seeing the whole. Sales wanted stronger pipeline contribution. The CEO wanted speed. Finance wanted clearer returns.

And the CMO was left carrying the growth expectation while coordinating a small ecosystem of people who each owned an activity, but not necessarily the outcome.

This is where the real cost enters marketing. It appears in every handoff — the additional briefing, the reinterpretation, the follow-up meeting, the work that must be redone and the campaign that launches slightly later and slightly further away from the original intent. I have written about that cost in more detail in the most expensive line item in marketing.

The strategy may be sound. The execution may be competent. Yet the space between them keeps absorbing time, money and accountability.

That space is orchestration — and it is increasingly the most important part of the CMO's job.

AI will make execution faster. It will not make disconnected organisations coherent.

AI has already made it possible to research markets, generate content, build campaign variants, analyse customer behaviour and personalise journeys at a speed that would have seemed improbable only a few years ago.

But speed is not the same as direction.

In fact, AI can make a fragmented marketing organisation more fragmented — only faster. It can multiply content before the positioning is clear, automate journeys before the customer problem is understood and produce dashboards without resolving which decisions the data is meant to inform. That argument, at length, is here.

I remain an optimist about AI. I have built AI-enabled marketing capabilities and continue to use AI in real content, campaign and demand-generation work. But the more capable the technology becomes, the more valuable human judgment becomes.

Someone still has to decide which market to pursue, what promise the business can credibly make, which customer problem matters, what not to automate and how marketing activity connects to commercial outcomes.

AI can clone output. It cannot assume ownership.

This is why the future CMO will need to be an AI orchestrator, not merely an AI adopter. The role is not to introduce more tools into the system. It is to redesign the system — the workflows, decision rights, shared context, governance and measures that allow people and technology to work towards the same outcome.

The missing middle of marketing

For a long time, we have treated marketing as two broad layers: strategy and execution. A senior leader creates the direction. A team or agency delivers the campaigns.

But there is a critical layer between the two — orchestration.

Orchestration turns an ambition into priorities, priorities into a roadmap, a roadmap into briefs, briefs into coordinated action and activity into measurable business progress. It keeps the person making the strategic decision close enough to the people executing it that context is not lost along the way.

This is also the thinking behind CMO++.

We built it around a simple observation: growing businesses often do not need more advice sitting in a presentation. Nor do they simply need another execution vendor waiting for a brief. They need senior marketing judgment and an embedded team that can carry that judgment through to execution — with shared context, measurable outcomes and one accountability line. The three-layer operating model is how we structure it.

It is not about replacing headcount. It is about multiplying the capability already inside the business.

More importantly, it reflects where I believe the CMO role itself is heading.

The future CMO may not own every team, channel or technology budget. But they must be able to connect them. They must move comfortably between the boardroom and the campaign room, between the customer story and the pipeline number, and between long-term brand value and this quarter's commercial reality.

The role is not shrinking. It is moving closer to the business.

The version of the CMO role built primarily around communications, campaigns and brand stewardship may well become more vulnerable. Those activities can be redistributed, automated or purchased separately.

But a CMO who understands the market, represents the customer, shapes the proposition, connects the growth system and remains accountable for turning strategy into action is difficult to fragment.

Perhaps the future does not belong to the brand CMO or the performance CMO. Perhaps it belongs to the Enterprise CMO — part market maker, part experience architect, part commercial operator and part AI orchestrator.

A leader who does not simply ask, "What should marketing produce?"

But instead asks: what must the business understand, decide and do differently to create growth — and who will ensure that it actually happens?

The CMO role is not disappearing.

But it is being asked to grow up, cross a few organisational boundaries and finally close the distance between thinking and doing.

From where I sit, that feels less like the end of the role — and more like the role becoming what it was always meant to be.

FAQs

Is the CMO role disappearing?

No. The version of the role built around campaigns, communications and brand stewardship is vulnerable, because those activities can be redistributed or automated. A CMO accountable for the market, the customer and the growth system is not.

What is an Enterprise CMO?

A leader who is part market maker, part experience architect, part commercial operator and part AI orchestrator — accountable for connecting customer, product, sales, data and growth rather than owning a single channel.

Does AI replace marketing teams?

AI accelerates execution. It does not create coherence. A fragmented marketing organisation using AI simply fragments faster.

How does CMO++ fit this shift?

CMO++ supplies senior marketing judgment plus the embedded team that carries it into execution, with one accountability line — the orchestration layer most businesses are missing.

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If this is the room you are in, book a consultation or read more about what CMO++ is.