There’s no shortage of apocalyptic articles baiting CMOs into believing AI will make their role irrelevant: “Will the CMO exist in 2030?” “The CMO role, as we know it, is going extinct,” and “the death of the CMO,” to call out just a few.

Yes, AI is already impacting the CMO role — and it will continue to do so. But strip away the sensationalism, and a very different picture emerges. AI doesn’t signal the end of the CMO role — quite the opposite. It creates an opportunity for CMOs to step into a new level of growth accountability, one that many have been pushing toward for years.

CMO Growth Accountability Shifts From Aspirational To Required

That’s the premise of Forrester’s newly published, no-BS report, The AI CMO. Spanning both B2C and B2B business models, the report examines how AI reshapes the core responsibilities of the chief marketing officer — now and in the future. This includes which CMO responsibilities will expand, which will diminish, and which will change dramatically.

We believe, as a result of AI:

  1. The CMO will become an enterprise growth orchestrator. As AI agents take over orchestration, execution, and dynamic optimization, the CMO role moves up — not out. The future CMO spends less time managing programs and campaigns and more time making enterprise-level trade-offs: where to invest, where to automate, and where human judgment still matters. It becomes less about running marketing’s day-to-day and more about steering growth strategy.
  2. Growth will get hard‑coded into marketing operations. As customer discovery, evaluation, and conversion become increasingly mediated by AI algorithms and agents, marketing stops acting as a revenue influencer and starts operating as growth driver. Growth is no longer something marketing supports — it’s something marketing is part of designing, measuring, and governing across the enterprise.
  3. Brand stewardship will expand beyond human control. When machines increasingly represent your brand — in search results, recommendations, content, and conversations CMOs can’t directly see — brand governance changes fundamentally. The CMO’s remit expands from shaping messages to governing how answer engines and agents interpret, surface, and speak on the brand’s behalf. Trust, consistency, and reputation now live as much in the AI layer as they do in creative output.

Ultimately, the impact of AI is determined by whether the CMO leads the change that drives growth … or not.

Forrester clients: You can download our full report on the AI CMO starting today. And be sure to join us at B2B Summit (April 26–29) and CX Forum East (June 16–17) or CX Forum West (June 29–30), where we’ll dive more into AI’s impact on marketing.