Why Should CEOs Seek an AI-First Chief Marketing Officer?

With the increasing use of AI in C-suite roles, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) says that this is repositioning Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) as a ‘Chief Growth Architect’.

Marketing can be used as the first step in experimentation as a customer facing and heavily digital department, laying the groundwork for the introduction of AI and machine learning technologies.

AI can heighten the increasing analytical reasoning in marketing. The profession is changing from a heavily creative and storytelling role, says BCG, explaining how it has transitioned in the past decade towards harnessing data to finalise campaigns and deliver measurable return on investment.

Jessica Apotheker, Managing Director & Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group, and Janet Balis, Managing Director and Partner produced the report. They say that thinking of an AI-first CMO as a ‘Chief Growth Officer’ will “design martech data flows and strategies that tear down silos and connect demand signals rapidly and seamlessly”.

If CMOs work alongside their Chief Technology Officer (CTO), they will “connect demand signals rapidly and seamlessly to an integrated growth agenda”.

Value creating CMOs

BCG research shows that the top 5% of companies deriving significant bottom-line value from AI are 50% more likely to have shared business-IT ownership of AI operating models that give each clear decision rights and accountability.

BCG's report highlights that CMOs have almost blended creativity with science-based thinking, but in recent years this has shifted more towards science. This is largely as a result of increased use of AI, which enables marketing chiefs to act on changing demand in real time.

Jessica and Janet write: “CMOs will own the data inputs, commercial growth platforms and measurement models that form a state-of-the-art martech stack.”

However, this is not to say that the challenge of aligning fragmented systems has gone. For example, marketing platforms such as paid, owned and earned media were not initially designed to work together.

As a result, the CMO and CTO will need to work together to combine their knowledge across sectors. This helps to optimise performance and aids negotiation with external partners to harmonise different incentive and measurement systems.

The report highlights that this will yield measurable results, as the marketing department will eventually become an invaluable source of real-time customer behaviour signals that can “inform branding, media and creative strategies, product innovations, pricing and discounting decisions and resource allocation”.

What makes an AI-first CMO?

With marketing evolving dramatically over the last five years, CMOs should be thinking one step ahead to make sure they are ready for the next changes. BCG has outlined five ways that CEOs can check if their marketing exec is prepared.

1. CMOs need to work with the CTO to build an AI and data backbone as they don’t just deploy tools but they design the infrastructure. BCG says the most savvy CMOs will partner with IT to build a small team of tech experts.

2. Although CMOs will still need to hire tech specialists, they’ll also need to reskill generalists, elevate strategic capabilities and redesign incentives around human-to-agentic workflow management. This will require the creation of structured training and certification programmes.

3. CEOs should be able to grill their CMOs on the tiny details of how data flows through the organisation and what’s being done to improve ROI in every platform, taking a high level of AI curiosity and technical fluency.

4. With these developments, it could be perceived that the CMO is stepping outside their lane, so the CEO should expect resistance from other C-suite execs. However, this should be seen as a sign of progress.

5. AI is an excellent tool for personalising and predicting but it is missing the human capability of emotion. An AI-first CMO should never lose sight of this and ensure human-driven storytelling remains at the centre.

The BCG report shows that marketing can be the department where CEOs will start their company’s AI experimentation and can therefore be where transformation begins.