Last month I wrote on LinkedIn (in French, sorry) that CMOs almost never get fired for bad marketing.
They get fired for missing numbers they only half control. Marketing owns the pipeline target. Everyone else owns marketing’s to-do list:
CEO: “I want to launch a new initiative.”
Sales: “We need a one-pager.”
Product: “Where’s our launch campaign?”
CS: “Can we do a customer event?”
Board: “We need more pipeline.”
Marketing says yes to every one of them and turns into an order-taker for the rest of the company. Six months later, the exec team wants to know why the numbers haven’t moved.
This fall, the list got a new line:
Board: “We need an AI plan.”
On paper, that’s great news! A board asking for AI means budget, and a seat at the exec table.
Then look at who’s calling us. Of the 40 or so first meetings we’ve had since September, one CMO in four wanted the same thing: roll out AI across the marketing team.
And to pay for it, they’re cutting their own budget 😬
So here’s my bet for 2027. The CMOs who get fired will all have done AI. Lots of it.
They’ll get fired because none of it moved the numbers they’re measured on.
I see five of them coming. You’ll recognize at least one.
1. The collector
What they show the exec team: everything they’ve rolled out.
Skills for the team. An “SEO brief” agent. A brand-voice GPT. Forty Copilot seats. The AI SDR tool everyone was raving about in June.
In the exec meeting, the list goes up on screen. It’s long, and the board loves it.
What the slide leaves out is usage. Nobody’s using any of it, or close to nobody.
The team works exactly the way it did last year, and pipeline hasn’t moved by a single deal.
(Why usage stays at zero: “Your team doesn’t need AI training”.)
Next year, the CFO adds up the invoices. Then asks what they paid for.
2. The delegator
What they show the exec team: the org chart of their AI task force.
This CMO knows tools aren’t enough, so they hired. A GTM engineer, an AI Ops lead, a growth manager who builds automations on weekends. Sometimes a full task force, with a code name and its own Slack channel.
It’s the collector again, with headcount instead of licenses.
And it’s my LinkedIn point in miniature: they’re accountable for the result, and someone else holds the lever.
They’ve never built anything themselves, so they can’t tell a good build from a bad one. They can’t make the call, and they can’t say no.
Give it six months and the AI team is taking orders like everyone else 🌀
3. The CMO who cuts first
What they show the exec team: the savings.
I’m meeting more of these every month.
The board is leaning on them. And every morning, LinkedIn serves up another demo: a full campaign in three prompts, or a founder who “fired the agency and runs everything on Claude now.”
So they do the math and cut first. Two roles, the agency retainer, the freelance budget. AI will cover the rest!
Six months later, nobody has picked up the tools. Not one process has been rebuilt.
The requests haven’t gone anywhere. There are just two fewer people to handle them.
That’s the one-in-four from earlier. They’ll regret it.
4. The tinkerer
What they show the exec team: hours saved per person.
Credit where it’s due: the tinkerer got the whole team using AI. The content manager has a prompt for LinkedIn posts. The paid manager has a script for the weekly report.
Everyone got a power drill. Nobody touched the assembly line.
The gains stay with each person. Two hours here, an hour there, and new requests eat them by Friday (more order-taking).
When the content manager quits, her prompts walk out the door with her.
How the team works together hasn’t changed. So the numbers haven’t either!
5. The one-man band
What they show the exec team: the agents they built last weekend.
I know this one well. I almost became one 😅
The one-man band gets AI better than anyone in the building. One-pagers in ten minutes with Claude, agents coded at night. On this topic, they’re the sharpest CMO in their industry.
And because everything is fast, they say yes to everything.
Sales one-pager? Ten minutes.
The board’s AI plan? They’ll write it themselves on Saturday.
Meanwhile, the team hasn’t seen any of it. Every request goes through one person, and that person is now the bottleneck of the whole department.
It’s the order-taker from my post, running faster. The numbers move exactly as much as before.
Fair objection: no study shows a CMO fired because of AI. The forecasts going around come from firms that sell AI consulting. And in real life, a CMO usually leaves when the CEO who hired them does.
All true, and it changes nothing. The official reason will still be the numbers.
They’ll just be the numbers from the year the board paid for AI to move them.
What saves them: focus
My LinkedIn post said a CMO’s first job is protecting the team’s focus. AI makes that harder: once everything is possible, everyone asks for everything.
Here’s what I’d do in their seat:
1. Pick one or two processes that bring in revenue.
Processes, not tasks. Take SEO content: keyword research, brief, draft, and the article lands in your CMS formatted and ready to publish.
2. Automate that process end to end.
Who does what, in what order, and where a human signs off. It has to keep running the day someone leaves.
3. Build something yourself.
Enough to judge what your team brings you. Not so much that everything runs through you.
4. Don’t cut until the new process runs.
The savings come after. By then, you’ll know where they are.
5. Say no to everything else.
Including the board’s AI ideas that don’t serve those two processes. Every yes costs you something somewhere else.
That’s the work we’re doing with Doctolib right now. Julie Touyarot, their VP Marketing & Growth, and I are showing it on stage on November 17 at Rise in Paris.
The 2027 question
This year, your board asks: “Where are we on AI?”
Next year, it’ll ask: “What did it move?”
You can answer with the list of everything you rolled out. Or with two processes that run, and what they did to pipeline.
Protect your team’s focus. Even from AI.
If you’re in Paris on November 17, come see it live at Rise.
Let’s grow 👊
Jordan