AI is not just another wave of digital transformation, it’s a systemic shift that threatens to hollow out the marketing function or elevate it into the enterprise’s growth engine. For CMOs, that’s the choice they are facing today. And that choice is existential.
CMOs Face Internal and External Disruption
Marketing is being disrupted on two fronts simultaneously. Externally, AI agents are collapsing traditional consumer journeys into single, agentic flows. Discovery, evaluation, and transaction now happen in minutes, mediated by intelligent assistants. Brands lose prominence. Campaigns lose relevance. Revenue flows shift from impressions to transactions.
Internally, functions like campaign planning, content creation, and media setup - once tightly packaged into specialist roles - are being ‘unbundled’. They are pulled apart into separate tasks and redistributed across the enterprise. As AI reduces the time, skill, and cost required to execute these tasks, they lose their coherence as standalone jobs. Instead, they’re absorbed into adjacent functions (for marketing, these are mostly product, finance, and supply chain) where they’re executed faster, cheaper, and often with more direct impact on growth. This redistribution is not theoretical. It’s already happening.
When CMOs Focus on AI-driven Automation
When CMOs pursue short-term automation with AI, their marketing department risks becoming a relic: important for identity, but peripheral to value creation. In other words: if CMOs chase speed and scale over value, they risk being reduced to curators of brand identity. As they are busy working on making the KPIs of their next quarterly report look good, the real value drivers migrate elsewhere:
- Product teams shape discoverability through metadata.
- Finance controls dynamic pricing models.
- Supply chain manages availability and fulfillment logic.
These are the levers that drive growth in an AI-mediated world. If the CMO and their marketing team don’t claim them, someone else in their organisation will.
“The fastest way to put yourself out of work as a CMO, is by using AI for automation instead of value creation.” David Billings
David Billings
To make things worse, there’s an even deeper risk than the rather obvious redistribution of tasks. As AI agents become the default interface for discovery and decision-making, the GEO race is on. CMOs are made responsible for ensuring their brands are discoverable, their data structured, and their content machine-readable. But they must realise that they should simultaneously protect what makes marketing irreplaceable: its ability to build emotional connection and override algorithmic logic. When an AI agent recommends Reebok, it’s brand affinity that makes a consumer say “I’m a Nike person.” Only brand has the power to overrule logic.
Clearly, brand won’t become less important, it will become the only thing that can resist commoditisation. That’s why CMOs must defend the role of their marketing department and reassert its strategic value. GenAI tools are great for efficiency, and they are also very useful for storytelling at scale. Only the CMO can orchestrate that. When product, finance, and supply chain optimise for margin, they aren’t concerned with building meaning. If CMOs don’t make this case, if they don’t lead the transformation, don’t embed themselves at the centre of enterprise growth, it won’t happen. The CEO and CFO won’t do it for them. And marketing will drift away from influence, but also from impact.
When CMOs Choose Intelligent Orchestration
The alternative is bold, proactive leadership. CMOs must evolve into Intelligent Growth Orchestrators. Not preserve their relevance of today, but redefine it for tomorrow.
This means that CMOs must stop defending legacy roles. Instead, they should claim a new mandate. In a landscape where AI agents mediate demand and internal workflows are increasingly automated, the CMO’s power lies in their ability to unify fragmented systems, align cross-functional teams, and embed empathy into every decision. Orchestration is not a metaphor, it’s a new operating model. And the leaders who embrace it will not only protect marketing’s seat at the table, they’ll redesign the table itself by focusing on:
The New CMO Mandate
Core Focus Areas
Understanding
the customer and business through unified data models.
Reasoning
toward growth outcomes using simulations and causal measurement.
Executing
across disconnected systems using agentic workflows.
Governing
with empathy, trust, and brand integrity at the core.
At Empathy Lab, we support CMOs as they navigate disruption by offering the tools, thinking, and partnership needed to reimagine the role of marketing in the enterprise, while keeping human connection at the heart of every transformation.
The CMO’s Choice
This is not a future problem. It’s a now problem. The market is already shifting. Agentic commerce is real. Functional drift is happening. The funnel is collapsing. CMOs must act now to audit their orchestration readiness, build cross-functional pods with shared KPIs, and embed empathy into every AI-driven decision.
Because of AI, marketing can either be automated and unbundled to be absorbed by other functions, or it can be orchestrated to become the biggest value orchestrator of the company. As a CMO, that choice is yours.
EPAM are Partners of The Marketing Society.
