CMOs: Change Agents of the AI Revolution

Key Takeaways

CMOs Must Evolve into Change Management Officers: The CMO's primary role is now to lead organizational transformation by restructuring teams, breaking down silos, and driving AI adoption, even if it means taking calculated risks to bypass internal roadblocks.

The New Battlefield is Connected Commerce: Marketers must shift focus from traditional channels to the "four S's" of modern consumer behavior: searching, scrolling, streaming, and shopping. Winning requires using AI to understand customer intent rather than just chasing attention.

Agentic AI Is Redefining Teamwork: AI is moving beyond simple tools to become "digital coworkers" that can reason, collaborate, and act independently. This evolution augments marketers and will enable hyper-individualized experiences through direct agent-to-agent communication.

We extend our sincere gratitude to Zeta Global for sponsoring this vital conversation and for their continued commitment to advancing marketing from theoretical discussions into practical applications that drive real results.

The New CMO: Change Management Officers

The conversation opened with a rallying cry from Traction consultant, Babs Rangaiah: CMOs must evolve into Change Management Officers. AI is reshaping marketing the same way the internet did — only faster, louder, and with a hell of a lot more code.

This transformation isn't optional—it's imperative. Today's CMOs face the challenge of not just implementing AI tools but fundamentally restructuring how marketing operates within their organizations. This means:

Unfortunately, roadblocks often emerge from IT and legal departments in conservative enterprises. One leading marketer at our dinner confessed she "goes rogue" with external partners to leverage AI effectively. "I'm asking forgiveness, not permission to make sure I deliver the results my company needs," she shared. Her career is skyrocketing because of this bold approach—highlighting that change management sometimes requires calculated risk-taking.

Connected Commerce: The New Battlefield

The biggest shift no one's talking enough about: consumer behavior has exploded beyond the confines of channels. We're not allocating budgets by media line-items anymore — because that model is dead.

Today, the real game is happening across what we're calling the four S's: searching, scrolling, streaming, and shopping. These aren't channels. They're how people live. How they discover, explore, experience, and buy from brands.

The Four S's of Connected Commerce

This is connected commerce—and it's the challenge marketers need to solve if they want to stay relevant. AI may be the accelerant, but connected behavior is the battlefield.

Understanding Intent: The Evolution of Search

What AI offers now isn't just another buzzword. It's a seismic shift from chasing attention to understanding intent—and responding with personalization that actually works.

In the connected commerce world, search is evolving dramatically. It's no longer just about keywords and rankings—it's about comprehending the underlying reasons and contexts behind consumer actions. Intent is becoming the currency of marketing effectiveness.

Consider how:

Want a case study? Think about Target knowing a shopper was pregnant before her family did. Creepy? Maybe. Powerful? Absolutely. That's the holy grail—recognizing life stage, context, and emotional need before your customer asks.

AI Agents: From Tools to Coworkers

The word of the night? Agents. Not the Hollywood kind—the kind that shows up to your meeting already briefed on your calendar, your contacts, and your talking points. That's not science fiction. That's now.

Amit Shah, the CEO of Instalily.ai, an innovative agentic platform, shared fascinating insights about agents as coworkers rather than mere tools. He highlighted how these agents reason independently and work collaboratively with each other, often making decisions on our behalf.

This raises important considerations about agent hierarchy and oversight. As he explained, "When multiple agents collaborate on complex tasks, we need to think about governance structures—which agent has final decision authority? How do we ensure alignment with brand values and business objectives?"

Agentic AI is flipping the script from "tools" to "digital teammates." These AI-powered agents can prep, create, decide, and even act. We're talking about moving from systems of record to systems of action. Not just supporting marketers—augmenting them.

And here's the kicker: soon your brand's agent will be talking to your customer's agent. This isn't personalization. This is hyper-individualization at scale.

AI is a Team Sport

AI doesn't just touch the edges—it demands full-funnel transformation. That means:

Marketing can't silo itself anymore. AI needs to be baked into the DNA—from content creation to media buying to customer service. This is a full-stack sport, and marketers are expected to lead the playbook.

From "Make It Pretty" to "Make It Work"

Someone said it best at the dinner: "Expertise is a commodity now." That's a scary line—unless you're the kind of marketer who leans into the chaos. The future belongs to those who can ask better questions, learn faster, and act decisively.

Yes, GenAI can draft your blog post. But who's designing the campaign, training the model, measuring the ROI, and aligning it to business goals? That's where your value lives.

Five Moves to Futureproof Now

Here's your to-do list coming out of this dinner:

If you walked away from this dinner thinking "that was interesting," you missed the point. This wasn't interesting. This was urgent.

Because the future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we shape—one smart decision, one AI model, one strategy at a time.

Let's build it.

Special thanks again to Zeta Global for making this important conversation possible and for their continued leadership in advancing marketing innovation.

Frequently Asked Questions About AI's Impact on Marketing

Q1: How is AI changing the role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)?

A1: The role of the CMO is evolving into that of a "Change Management Officer". This transformation is essential for leading the AI revolution, which is reshaping marketing faster than the internet did. The new CMO role involves fundamentally restructuring marketing departments by breaking down silos between marketing, IT, data science, and customer experience teams; redefining roles and workflows; and building internal support for transformative change.

Q2: What are the biggest challenges marketers face when adopting AI?

A2: A significant challenge is navigating internal roadblocks, particularly from IT and legal departments in conservative enterprises. These hurdles can slow down or block AI adoption. As a result, some marketing leaders find they must "go rogue" by working with external partners and asking for forgiveness rather than permission to effectively leverage AI and deliver results.

Q3: What is "connected commerce"?

A3: Connected commerce is a new marketing paradigm that recognizes consumer behavior has "exploded beyond the confines of channels". Instead of focusing on traditional media line items, marketers must now engage consumers across the "four S's": searching, scrolling, streaming, and shopping. These behaviors represent how people now live, discover, and buy from brands in a non-linear journey. The sources call this the new "battlefield" for marketers.

Q4: How does AI help marketers understand customer intent?

A4: AI facilitates a crucial shift from simply chasing customer attention to understanding and acting on customer intent. It allows marketers to comprehend the reasons and contexts behind consumer actions, making personalization more effective. Search is evolving beyond keywords to include visual, voice, predictive, and multimodal forms, which help anticipate customer needs even before they are explicitly stated.

Q5: What are AI agents and how will they impact marketing teams?

A5: AI agents are being redefined from simple "tools" into "digital teammates" or "coworkers". These agents can reason independently, collaborate with each other, and make decisions on a marketer's behalf. They augment marketers by preparing for meetings, creating content, and taking action, shifting the focus from systems of record to systems of action. This will eventually lead to a world where a brand's AI agent communicates directly with a customer's AI agent to create hyper-individualized experiences at scale.

Q6: What practical steps can marketing leaders take to futureproof their organization for AI?

A6: The sources recommend five immediate actions for CMOs and marketing leaders:
Audit your tech stack to identify gaps and opportunities.
Upskill your team because AI fluency is now mandatory.
Deploy agentic AI by starting with small projects and scaling quickly.
Create a measurement framework to prove the value of AI initiatives early on.
Align AI strategy with core business goals, treating it as a central part of the business, not a side project.