For CEOs and boards, this raises the question of whether their organisation has the necessary CMO profile, the right operating model and a strong, future-ready talent pipeline for turning AI and data into sustainable growth. The issue is not simply how marketing uses new tools, but whether the business possesses the leadership capability to combine customer understanding with profitable commercial performance.
To explore how that value is changing, we sat down with a group of cross-industry B2B and B2C CMOs from across EMEA to discuss the skills, experiences and leadership traits that will define the future-ready CMO. Here are five distinctive capabilities that will define successful CMOs of the future.
1. Growth architect
The future-ready CMO is first and foremost a growth architect, a leader who turns brand, demand and customer insight into strong performance across the business.
But with growth harder to find, customer expectations continuing to rise and leadership teams demanding clearer evidence of financial return, the future-ready CMO must protect the brand while also proving marketing’s contribution to short- and long-term commercial performance.
The future-ready CMO is first and foremost a growth architect, a leader who turns brand, demand and customer insight into strong performance across the business.
Volker Tritschler, CMO & MD at Jochen Schweizer mydays Group, believes that the CMO is now something of a growth leader under pressure. “Marketing is no longer just expected to deliver sustainable growth, but to keep the headline numbers stable in the short term,” he says. “That works for a while, but it is not a strategy. Managing the tension between short-term stabilisation and long-term brand building has become my central leadership task.”
The good news is that richer data, more sophisticated measurement and integrated digital ecosystems are giving CMOs a clearer opportunity to demonstrate the extensive heft of their function — a point made by Lex Bradshaw-Zanger, chief marketing and digital officer for L’Oréal South Asia Pacific, Middle East & North Africa (SAPMENA).
“Marketing was historically about growth, but it wasn’t always that easy to measure,” he says. “Then as the web brought more data and measurability some of this became easier, but not all, and in certain places we measured badly. We became obsessed with focusing on the bottom of the funnel and attribution. Now we can see the bigger picture, measure both brand and business impact, and return our focus to growth. The ‘CMO’ is now the ‘CGO’ — which was always the case, it’s just being re-proven.”
Şükrü Dinçer, global commercial director and CMO/EMEA at AkzoNobel, agrees. “Marketers are part of the business and, in a way, marketing is the business,” he says. In other words, marketing is increasingly one of the functions best placed to connect the organisation’s understanding of their customers with the commercial decisions required to win market share.
2. Enterprise orchestrator
The second defining capability is enterprise orchestration. As customers move across apps, social platforms, loyalty programmes, websites, sales teams, events and AI-powered search or recommendation engines, CMOs increasingly need to bring together the wider organisation in order to deliver a consistent customer experience — but they can’t do this alone.
Given that the CMO is unable to personally oversee every single campaign, asset, journey or interaction, their role has become more about telling the story, setting the direction, creating the operating system and empowering teams to turn ideas into impact. For Anja English, commercial and managing director at Stage Entertainment, that means expanding the function’s footprint. “We need to align everything,” she says. “We are not simply doing marketing, but need to build state-of-the-art performance marketing capabilities that were not previously familiar to the organisation.”
This cross-enterprise role helps explain why several of the marketing leaders we spoke to described the future CMO in architectural terms, someone who can coordinate the organisation around customers, markets and growth. “I think a CMO is a bridge builder, a community creator and a growth engine,” says Robert van Geffen, chief marketing officer at Straumann Group.
Johan van der Zanden, chief marketing officer at Albert Heijn, made a similar point about the practical demands of the role. “You need to bring together product management, sales, service, technology and customers,” he says. “A key part of being a CMO is orchestrating those different channels and messages for all target groups. And ensuring the customer experience is consistent.”
Volker Tritschler agrees, and frames customer experience as an organisational redesign challenge. “The pivotal moment in our transformation was when we stopped optimising departments and started optimising journeys,” he says. “That sounds conceptual, but the decision to reorganise IT into cross-functional units was a very concrete, and politically demanding, move.”
3. AI-enabled strategist
The third capability is AI-enabled strategy, which comes down to knowing how to use AI to accelerate insight, execution and decision-making without losing the human judgement that gives marketing its distinctiveness.
While technology can vastly accelerate execution, it can’t fully understand a brand’s emotional resonance with customers and it can’t replace the leadership judgement needed to decide what the organisation should actually stand for.
Şükrü Dinçer frames the opportunity in practical terms. “Can we give time back — the time that usually goes into data assessment and meticulous analysis — and allow people to use that time to make great plans?” It’s a point echoed by Volker Tritschler, who believes that AI needs to help deliver productivity, not just generate experimentation. “With AI in marketing, we are not here to collect pilots,” he says. “We are here to prove real productivity gains. The gap between experimentation and impact is, for me, the decisive yardstick.”
After all, if everyone can produce more content faster, then volume alone will not suffice. While technology can vastly accelerate execution, it can’t fully understand a brand’s emotional resonance with customers and it can’t replace the leadership judgement needed to decide what the organisation should actually stand for.
That’s why Johan van der Zanden argues that AI will make creativity more important, not less. “One of the misconceptions about AI is that it reduces the importance of creativity, but I actually think the opposite is true,” he says. “AI can generate outputs for everyone, but the ability to identify the right consumer insight, develop a distinctive concept, define a compelling story and position a brand in a meaningful way becomes even more valuable.”
4. Data-to-value translator
The fourth capability is translating data into value. When leaders can connect customer behaviour, campaign activity, brand reputation, sales performance and service experience, marketing becomes more clearly viewed as a driver of cross-enterprise value, rather than a discretionary cost.
Several leaders emphasised the importance of using the same dataset. “One source of truth is a major enabler of marketing transformation,” says Şükrü Dinçer. “In large matrix organisations, different teams often rely on different datasets, and valuable time is spent debating whose numbers are correct. If everyone works from the same data foundation, they can spend their time solving problems, identifying growth opportunities and improving performance rather than reconciling information.”
Anja English believes that shared data will help strengthen measurement as well. “We are building a more comprehensive KPI landscape,” she says. “In media, for example, we are moving toward steering by return on ad spend, with attribution modelling and a customer data platform as next steps. We are also mapping KPIs such as relevance and brand awareness through to sales performance.”
And this use of communal data is also the cornerstone of effective AI deployment, according to Robert van Geffen. “AI, if I’m honest, is also a little bit of a hype” he says. “I don’t want to diminish the fact that it’s transformative and that we need to embrace it, but the foundational element underneath the hype is data. Once you put AI on top of high-quality, connected data, the world changes completely. That’s when you move from reporting what happened to actually guiding decisions, coaching teams and anticipating customer needs.”
In that sense, the future of AI-enabled marketing may be less about individual use cases and more about whether organisations have built the wider data, governance and operating infrastructure and processes required to make AI useful — a point made by Jeannette Liendo. “AI accelerates,” she points out. “So if you have great data and great process, it accelerates that, but it can also accelerate things that don’t work.”
5. Talent and transformation builder
Finally, the future-ready CMO must be a builder of talent and transformation by developing the capabilities, confidence and operating model needed for marketers to thrive as technology reshapes the function.
If AI is increasingly relied on for foundational work such as writing briefs, analysing campaigns and learning from customers, how can organisations ensure their marketers develop the right blend of experience, confidence and judgement?
This raises an important question from a talent perspective. If AI is increasingly relied on for foundational work such as writing briefs, analysing campaigns and learning from customers, how can organisations ensure their marketers develop the right blend of experience, confidence and judgement?
Jeannette Liendo, head of corporate marketing and digital customer experience at Siemens Healthineers, has taken practical steps to answer this question. “One thing that we have done is introduce a training programme for future marketers which covers a range of different capabilities,” she says. “I’ve made a very big point to make it role-based. So if I’m a product marketer in diagnostic imaging, I don’t need to code in Python. I need to know customer journey management.”
The talent challenge is increasingly on Lex Bradshaw-Zanger’s mind as well. “Technology has given young people capabilities and hard skills I definitely didn’t have under 30,” he admits. “They can access information instantly and create things faster than ever before. But what they don’t have is the time it takes to acquire experience, wisdom and self-awareness. How do we give people the equivalent of grey hair at 30 so they are ready to lead?”
A key priority for the CMO of 2030 will be ensuring that AI accelerates execution without bypassing the apprenticeship through which judgement, confidence and leadership maturity are formed.
That last point may prove the most important because AI adoption is not simply a technology rollout. “The human element of transformation is by far and away the biggest challenge,” says Lex Bradshaw-Zanger. “Any job that needs to be reinvented needs to be reinvented by people and for people. Most resistance comes from lack of knowledge, fear or simply not having the time to change.”
Jeannette Liendo agrees that human judgement remains critical. “Good digital is expensive and good AI is expensive,” she says. “But you need the human element to make it good. It’s the combination that makes AI sing, it’s not a replacement.”
Becoming future-ready
The future-ready CMO will not succeed by opting for either human creativity or technological capability — the difference will come from combining both.
AI can increase speed, scale and precision; data can improve accountability; and digital ecosystems can create richer customer experiences. But it is human judgement that turns these tools into strategy, human creativity that turns information into meaning, and human leadership that turns organisational complexity into collective action.
So yes, while marketing leaders have indeed been told that technology would transform their role, the future-ready CMO will be defined by how well they transform technology into growth, meaning and competitive advantage.