Five Urgent Priorities for CMOs in 2027
MIT Sloan Management Review ·
Matt Harrison Clough/Ikon Images In an unpredictable economy and fractured media landscape, marketing leaders are navigating a period of profound transformation and disruption — and as AI technologies evolve, the pace of change will only increase. In response, the highest priorities of chief marketing officers today are shifting, and understanding their concerns is essential to […]
Matt Harrison Clough/Ikon Images
In an unpredictable economy and fractured media landscape, marketing leaders are navigating a period of profound transformation and disruption — and as AI technologies evolve, the pace of change will only increase. In response, the highest priorities of chief marketing officers today are shifting, and understanding their concerns is essential to addressing the most pressing growth challenges companies face.
Marketing is at an inflection point. The structures, talent models, measurement frameworks, and influence mechanisms that will define the function for the next decade are being established right now. CMOs who move with intention — building the function, proving its value, leading effectively through disruption — will define what marketing becomes. Those who wait may find that it has already been defined for them.
Recently, I conducted 15 in-depth interviews with global CMOs from a range of industries to identify their most urgent priorities and challenges. I heard five main concerns:
Compared with other business functions, marketing as a whole, along with even the most granular of measurement tasks, is perhaps being transformed most deeply by the rise of AI. While some sectors are establishing new AI workflows to speed up whatever they already do, marketing is working to harness AI not just as an efficiency tool but as a fundamental reinvention of the function.
In some ways, its very task has changed. Zero-click platforms have upended the meaning of what was, until recently, the web’s most basic metric: clicks. Meanwhile, the media landscape is growing ever more fractionalized, rewriting the rules of attention as consumers encounter individualized feeds algorithmically tailored to them. Function leaders face the challenge of developing talent for a future where the skills that mattered yesterday are being rapidly displaced. An additional challenge is to elevate the role and importance of marketing as a company’s growth engine, which will require tomorrow’s CMOs to develop new skills, lead an effective organization, transform the work, and create more pronounced value. This isn’t about learning new tools; it’s about designing more effective work in a more effective organization.
Together, these five priorities describe a function at a critical point — where marketing leaders are clear-eyed about the challenges ahead and increasingly convinced that marketing’s moment to shape enterprise strategy has arrived.
CMOs who operate as marketing specialists rather than general managers are often excluded from upstream product and business decisions — a marginalization that keeps them from delivering the impact that marketing should have. “If marketing isn’t involved when a company is identifying new products and services and isn’t helping bring insights to the table about what customers and future customers want or don’t want, then you end up getting a product that you can’t sell,” Amy Martin Ziegenfuss, CMO of Six Flags Entertainment Corporation, said.
CMOs must be part of higher-level conversations to drive their companies’ success and increase their own influence, and to shift the perception of marketing from a cost center to a growth driver. Julie Nestor, executive vice president of marketing and communications for Mastercard Asia Pacific, described a previous employer’s “investment optimization tool that calculated the ROI for every marketing request before it was approved. It removed subjectivity entirely and created a shared language between marketing and finance. Marketing was no longer asking for [a] budget; it was presenting a business case with a projected return.”
As John Costello, a former board member of Ring Inc. and president of global marketing and innovation at Dunkin’ Brands said, “Changing the title from chief marketing officer to chief growth officer would help all the constituents understand what the role is actually for.”
Nearly every CMO holds a dual view on AI: enthusiasm about its potential, and genuine anxiety about their organization’s ability to capitalize on it. Experimentation is ongoing, but effective scaling of AI has so far remained elusive. CMOs pinpoint two primary internal challenges of AI implementation: identifying the tools that can drive efficiency, speed content production, and improve personalization; and getting teams to adopt them.
Sara Mendez, formerly CMO of SC Johnson Lifestyle Brands, said that marketing is the function to be “most transformed by AI, because it is the most complex, the most connected to every other part of the organization, and AI is simultaneously transforming every individual discipline within it.”
Another CMO mapped over 700 marketing tasks and found that more than 80% could be AI-led. But the limits of what AI can do are unknown and constantly changing as AI tools evolve. A financial services CMO put it bluntly: “Execution, machines can do. Creative thinking — yet to be proven.”
The implication is not just greater efficiency but a full reinvention of how marketing functions are organized, staffed, and run. One CMO reduced a 50-step campaign process to nine steps by mapping AI across her organization’s workflows and rewriting every job description accordingly, yet she still pondered what the “right” organizational design would be in 2030.
The skills AI demands don’t yet match the pipeline — a talent time bomb spanning industries and professions. One CMO asked, “Who am I going to hire on my marketing team — HTML coders, content writers, creative designers, copywriters, media planners? Or do I need people who know how to think?”
Teresa Barreira, global CMO of Publicis Sapient, noted, “When we mapped what only humans could do, we landed on soft skills: plasticity, storytelling, being a great spotter of things. Then the question is, how do you teach young people that?”
CMOs in particular are caught in a three-way bind as they confront skill obsolescence , as the channel-specialist model is displaced by AI and demand shifts toward judgment and critical thinking; pipeline anxiety , as execution-level work is commoditized and marketing risks losing its appeal to the best young talent; and the build-for-today paradox , where CMOs are making staffing decisions now without knowing what their organization will need in two or three years.
“CMOs will have to figure out how to manage hybrid teams — human and AI working together. And, critically, how do you manage AI when your people haven’t done it themselves?” asked Michelle Froah, former global chief marketing and innovation officer at ETS. One CMO noted that young marketers can now gain years of experience faster through AI agents but lack the judgment to lead them, because they haven’t learned what “good” looks like.
The old model of reaching a broad audience efficiently is gone. CMOs are navigating a splintered media landscape — one that includes connected TV, retail media networks, podcasts, influencer ecosystems, and AI-powered search — and face the ongoing challenge of keeping up with new platforms as they emerge. Each platform grabs further attention with individualized feeds algorithmically tailored for each audience member. And integrating the disparate media to provide a superior consumer experience is becoming increasingly challenging.
“Creating a seamless and frictionless and integrated experience for a consumer is one of the biggest challenges. Companies stitch the pieces of communications, commerce, and marketing together and try to portray one single, seamless experience, but it does not look like Michelangelo’s David. It looks much more like Frankenstein,” suggested Luis Di Como, former executive vice president of global media at Unilever.
The emergence of AI agents making purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers compounds the problem and raises a fundamental question: Who, exactly, is the marketer marketing to? As Noha Abdalla, CMO of Choice Hotels, said, “[AI] agents don’t watch TV, so maybe it doesn’t matter anymore, if the agent is picking for you. Are the end consumers part of the loyalty program, or are the agents part of the loyalty program?”
The dissolution of a clear audience, in conjunction with a shifting set of platforms with obscure priorities, has created a pressure chamber for marketers. Abdalla suggested that an unclear media system greatly broadens marketing’s remit. “How, as a marketer, can I influence what is shown to consumers in their agent and LLM interactions? It used to be, I had to create a breakthrough ad campaign. But now maybe my job is to make sure that the product experience, the customer experience, and the reviews are the best they possibly can be, because that’s what’s going to influence the [AI’s] decision-making.”
Measurement challenges are nothing new to marketers. Even before AI, the ROI on social media was difficult to calculate. Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is a statistical technique for estimating how much each marketing input — TV, digital, social, promotions, pricing, and so on — contributes to a business outcome, such as sales or revenue, while also accounting for external factors, such as seasonality, competitor activity, or macroeconomic conditions.
Andrea Zaretsky, CMO of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, suggested, “If I could wave a magic wand, I would take away the walled gardens so we can understand the return of our dollars on social media as well as receive comparable measurement and methodology from across the key platforms. Further, MMM takes three months to assess performance — three months in today’s real-time world. There really hasn’t been enough innovation in this area in many years.”
A major lag in the availability of this data dramatically slows decision-making around how a marketing function should adapt its approach. And beyond the perennial marketing measurement question, identifying the ROI of AI is a much tougher challenge. In a zero-click AI landscape, what, exactly, is to be measured, and how? As the field works to establish a meaningful mechanism to measure the reach of AI, marketers must synthesize inconsistent data and standardize measurements — a seemingly impossible task, given AI models’ dynamic black-box algorithms.
Today’s CMOs are building organizations in a dramatically changing business environment and developing talent for a future moving faster than the hiring process. As Greg Stuart, CEO of the Marketing + Media Alliance, said, “They are navigating a world being reshaped by AI, political polarization, and media fragmentation at a speed that makes last year’s playbook obsolete.”
But these CMOs are not waiting for clarity before acting. They can’t afford to. They are experimenting, iterating, and embracing change as an operating condition rather than an obstacle. The ones moving fastest are those who have accepted that speed itself is a competitive advantage — and moving forward imperfectly is better than planning perfectly.