Why your head of marketing should be your head of AI
With so much of AI adoption linking to foundational IT infrastructure, and making AI accessible to the organisation, chief information or technology officers are often in the hot seat for making that happen. But according to Steffen Drucks, consulting director at Intermedia Global, since AI’s key business offering is about boosting customer experience, perhaps marketing – as the driver of CX – should take the lead.
Above the foundational layer of automation and background process sits the app layer, where technology – and thus, AI - actually touches the customer. That’s where there is greater scrutiny and zero room for failure. That AI chatbot or website video or email campaign is where the spotlight falls, and where the brand (and bottom line) will be damaged if something goes wrong.
Background automation is obviously incredibly significant, and an important use case for AI, but the real stressor is where customers are watching and marketing has taken over the hot seat.
Marketing is where the martech stack lives, and that’s where AI is really put to the test. As a result, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a lot of questions about AI from the board seem to cross the CMO’s desk.
On the one hand, that’s because in many businesses marketing is still seen as a cost centre and the CFO is keen to squeeze costs – say by using AI agents instead of expensive designers. On the other, if nothing else, because people still assume that AI = pretty pictures or lovely content written by ChatGPT = marketing.
Marketing leaders who can’t answer their questions - from the prospect of customers using agentic AI, to streamlining internal workflows - are going to be in for a rough time.
Marketing is home to business-critical data
The CMO is also often the first to have to justify their use of AI to the finance department – and customer data is likely to be a big part of that conversation.
The martech stack is where much of the organisation’s most important data lives, and AI tools live or die by the quality of the data flow that underpins them. AI needs repeatable processes and accurate data. Another reason why marketing is often called upon to lead on AI is because that’s where a lot of the data to support it resides.
There’s also an argument for marketing having at least some level of responsibility even over the background automation part of the AI ecosystem.
After all, marketing automation and personalisation is hardly new – but is often a key area where AI tools can make lives easier. CFOs and CEOs may well want AI because of the perceived benefits in terms of speeding up processes, lowering costs and removing inefficiencies, which means marketing is often the testbed.
The theory is that well-implemented AI will create a comparable or better customer experience at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.
If it works, it offers significant lessons for other departments that will address some of the operational risk questions central to growth - notably if and where AI can outperform humans: for instance, could sales use AI agents instead of staff to manage their prospect emails?
But the learnings don’t always have to be quite so big-picture; there’s equally cross-departmental value to be found in day-to-day AI-driven automation. Auto-filling in a form and doing a predetermined sequence of actions more efficiently is something that works in HR and finance as well as in marketing.
But again, marketing is a special case. It’s the only team where the CFO’s pressure to create efficiencies is also matched by customer expectations for smarter, faster CX. That tension from both sides means the CMO and any AI tool they use has to get it right.
Requiring a new breed of CMO
The turning point in marketing leading on AI integration is when it takes a more structured and deliberate approach. Rather than testing a single feature or a ‘scattergun’ of use cases, it has a plan and has guardrails in place to ensure any risk is minimised.
That means businesses are going to need a new cadre of CMOs. People who are tech-savvy, so they know where AI tools will be most effective and valuable, and commercially savvy, so that they can answer their CFO’s queries about why this investment is worth the cost.
That’s not to say that creative strategists are no longer needed – far from it. But they will need to surround themselves with the right people and partners to ensure that they can introduce AI in a way that meets the needs of the business and the expectations of customers.
We’re already seeing skill sets among marketing leaders starting to evolve, and this is likely only going to continue. Marketing is on the front line, where AI touches customers, and their role will be to ensure that its impact is always a positive one.
