
Marketing leaders are being handed powerful AI machinery with no instruction manual. The CMO's job is shifting — from channel operator to product leader — without any diminished expectation to deliver business outcomes along the way.

Earlier this week, Lauren Evans and I stood in front of a room full of in-house agency leaders at the ANA In-House Agency Conference in Huntington Beach (where the sunsets are so pretty they make it into blog posts) and made a promise right in the title of our talk: AI is a friend, not a foe. You could feel the room wanting it to be true.

What happens when one of the most decorated CMOs in tech admits she's terrified? Tara Sharp showed up to our Futureproof Project session and told us anyway.

Every marketing leader we talk to right now is somewhere on the same journey — past the hype, over the demos, and into the harder questions. How can AI Agents actually deliver business outcomes? And for many marketers — where do we even begin?