Sit in enough board meetings and executive offsites right now and you'll hear some version of the same question, usually asked a little too casually. If AI can write the content, build the campaigns, run the targeting, and generate the reporting, what exactly are we paying the CMO for? Most marketers hear that as an insult. I think it's the most honest question anyone has asked about the role in twenty years, and the marketing leaders who get defensive about it are the ones most likely to lose the argument.

The traditional CMO was built around production and orchestration. You owned the brand, you owned the agencies, and you owned a team that turned strategy into a steady stream of output. A meaningful part of your value was simply that you knew how to make that machine run. It was expensive and slow and it took real expertise to manage, which made the person managing it hard to replace. AI has taken most of the cost and time out of that machine. Work that used to require a team, an agency, and six weeks can now be drafted by one capable operator in an afternoon. When the machine gets cheap, the person whose value was running the machine gets questioned.

what the CEO is actually seeing

CEOs have always had a slightly uneasy relationship with marketing, because it's the function that's hardest to tie cleanly to the number. Sales has a quota, finance has a close, product has a roadmap, and marketing has a dashboard full of leading indicators that everyone agrees matter and nobody fully trusts. For years that ambiguity was tolerated because the work itself felt specialized. Now a CEO can open a tool before lunch and generate a campaign concept, a positioning draft, and a competitive summary that are good enough to make them wonder. They aren't good enough to replace real judgment, but they're good enough to make the output feel like a commodity, and once the output feels like a commodity, the CEO starts looking for what's left.

what the board is asking

Boards are asking a sharper version of the same question. They're watching every other function get pushed to show AI-driven efficiency, and they're noticing that marketing headcount and program spend look about the same as they did three years ago. When the CFO presents productivity gains and the marketing budget hasn't moved, the board doesn't need anyone to connect the dots for them. The question underneath all of it is whether marketing is a strategic function or a cost center that got very good at describing itself as strategic. Most CMOs aren't ready for how directly that question is about to be asked.

what the rest of the table wants

The executive peers want something different, and it's worth paying attention to because it's where the answer lives. The CRO wants pipeline they actually believe. The CFO wants spend they can defend line by line. The product leader wants someone who understands the customer as deeply as they do. Not one of them is asking for more content. What they've always wanted is someone who can tell them where growth is going to come from, why, and what it will cost, and then be accountable for it. AI didn't create that expectation. It just removed the volume of activity that used to make it easy to avoid.

the role that survives

The CMO isn't going away entirely, but the version built on production is. What survives looks a lot more like a commercial strategist who happens to own marketing. That person defines the market and picks the segment. They shape the pricing narrative and build the go-to-market motion alongside sales, not downstream of it. They use AI to run execution with a fraction of the team the old model needed. The org gets smaller and the mandate gets bigger.

Some companies will stop hiring a CMO altogether. They'll hire a growth leader, bring in a fractional strategist, or fold marketing under the CRO, and for plenty of them that will be the right call. The mistake is hiring for the old job out of habit, writing a job description that asks one person to lead strategy, run six disciplines, and personally produce the work, when the business actually needs something far more specific. That mismatch is the reason I built the Marketing Leadership Diagnostic. Most companies need to figure out what problem they're hiring for before they worry about the title.

if you're the one in the seat

If you're a CMO right now, stop defending the org chart and start doing what the board wishes you would. Walk into the next meeting knowing the revenue model as well as the CFO does and holding a real point of view on where the next dollar of growth comes from. Use AI visibly to take cost out of your own function before somebody else does it for you. And ask the question about your own role before anyone else in the room gets the chance, because the leaders who answer it first are the ones who get to shape the answer.

The title will probably survive. Whether the person holding it does depends on whether they noticed the job changed before the board did.