I was reading Blake J. Lopez’s recent piece on the disappearing CMO, and it hit on a frustration I’ve been feeling for a while. The headlines keep telling us the Chief Marketing Officer is a dying breed, tucked away under sales or operations because it's "easier" to explain to a board.
I don’t buy it for a second.
From where I sit, boards are missing the vital key. They see a way to cut costs drastically because they hear big companies are doing it, but they don’t actually understand the job. Marketing isn't about making assets or moving tasks through a system—it’s about selling the emotion, not the product. It’s about creating the feeling that makes someone care. A product can be copied; an emotional connection cannot.
AI is amazing at organizing, reviewing, and generating data. I use it for that, and most smart leaders should. But AI cannot generate emotion. It can’t create the moments that truly connect a consumer to a brand.
The real problem started long before AI entered the room. Boards and CEOs have spent years misunderstanding what marketing actually is. Now AI gives them a cleaner excuse to cut costs in a function they never fully understood in the first place. The issue is not that the work lost value. The issue is that too many leaders still confuse the engine with the spark, the product with the emotion, and efficiency with connection.
The Cycle of the Four-Year Reset
Data from Spencer Stuart shows that the average tenure for a CMO at an S&P 500 company is now down to 4.1 years. This is the shortest tenure in the entire C-suite. Compare that to 7.6 years for a CEO or nearly five years for a CFO. This gap is not just a statistic. It represents a massive loss of brand equity that never makes it onto a balance sheet.
I have watched this cycle repeat many times. A new leader arrives. They spend the first stretch auditing the last team, recasting the positioning, updating the language, and renaming what probably did not need to be renamed. Everyone calls it progress. Everyone says the brand needs fresh energy. Then just as the market starts to absorb the new direction, the clock runs out. That leader exits. The next one starts over.
I have seen how expensive that reset becomes. Not only in dollars, but in clarity, trust, and momentum. Brand equity compounds over time. Emotional connection compounds over time. Recognition compounds over time. When leadership treats marketing like a short-term production line instead of a long-term act of meaning-making, the company keeps paying to rebuild the same foundation.
That is one reason I push back so hard on the idea that marketing is mostly execution. Execution matters. It always will. Still, the real value sits in the thinking behind it: the judgment to know what people need to feel, what the brand should stand for, and what should stay consistent long enough to matter.
The Architect and the Construction Site
The arrival of AI has given boards a respectable reason to do what they already wanted to do: cut costs in a department they do not fully understand. They hear what the biggest companies are doing, see flashy demos, and decide marketing should now be drastically cheaper, smaller, and faster. That reaction tells me less about AI and more about how little some boards understand the actual job.
Boards are missing the vital key. They assume that if AI can accelerate output, then the work itself must be interchangeable. They hear that large companies are restructuring and think they should follow the same path. They chase the cost story without understanding the role they are cutting.
They see outputs. They do not always see the thinking.
That distinction matters. AI can help with data, organization, production, testing, review, and scale. It can run the engine. It can make a good team faster and more disciplined. What it cannot do is decide what deserves to exist in the first place. It cannot generate emotion. It cannot create the emotional heartbeat of a brand. It cannot sit in the tension of a messy market, read the room, and come up with an idea that feels true, timely, and human.
That is why I keep coming back to balance. We still need human marketing to ideate, create, and shape moments that truly connect with consumers. AI can run the engine and help make those moments real at scale. One without the other either stalls out or turns generic very quickly.
When boards miss that, they reduce marketing to content volume and software efficiency. That is the mistake. Marketing is selling the emotion, not the product. The product is rarely the whole story. People buy what the product means in their life. They buy identity, relief, confidence, belonging, momentum, status, hope, simplicity, delight. They buy emotion. Great marketing knows how to name that emotion, shape it, and deliver it in a way people can actually feel. No tool does that on its own.
The Cost of Ambiguity
The real reason the CMO role is being cut is that it has the least standardized scope in the building. Ask ten CEOs what marketing owns and you will hear ten different answers. That lack of clarity creates the perfect setup for bad decisions at the top.
I think boards are missing the vital key. They hear that large companies are using AI and immediately look for drastic savings. They assume the department can shrink because the tools got better. In many cases, they still do not understand what the job is. They do not see the invisible work of shaping perception, building demand, protecting consistency, reading human behavior, and creating relevance over time. They see activity. They do not always see stewardship. They see a line item. They do not see the human work required to create connection.
That misunderstanding turns ambiguity into a budget problem. Once marketing gets framed as a cost center with unclear ownership, the seat becomes vulnerable. Then the board draws the wrong conclusion. Instead of admitting they never scoped the role properly, they decide the role itself is unnecessary.
That is not a technology issue. That is a leadership issue.
Judgment is the New Differentiator
We are entering an era where execution gets cheaper and more accessible by the day. That does not make leadership less important. It makes judgment more important.
Judgment is knowing which story is worth telling.
Judgment is knowing when the numbers support the wrong idea.
Judgment is recognizing when something is polished, efficient, and completely forgettable.
Judgment is protecting the emotional core of a brand when everyone else wants to flatten it into a set of tasks.
If you are leading through this shift, the job is not to compete with the machine. The job is to direct it well. Bring the human perspective. Bring the taste. Bring the context. Bring the courage to make something that actually connects. Then let AI help execute, refine, organize, and scale that vision.
Building for the Long Term
Look at the history here. McDonald’s, Uber, and Johnson & Johnson all eliminated their CMO roles in 2019, only for McDonald’s to bring it back less than a year later. They ran the experiment of distributing the work among other executives and it failed.
The work of brand building does not go away just because you remove the title. It becomes fragmented. It gets handled by people who are already busy, none of whom own the customer journey, and all of whom optimize their piece at the expense of the whole.
A company without a CMO does not stop marketing. It stops deciding what it means to the world.
Defining the Mandate
If we want to stop the "slow bleed" of marketing leadership, we have to start by fixing the foundation. This requires a shift in how both leaders and boards approach the role.
- Define the mandate before the hire. If you cannot write down exactly what winning looks like in eighteen months, you are not hiring a leader. You are hiring someone to eventually take the fall for a lack of clarity.
- Give the brand time to compound. Stop judging long-term brand equity by quarterly sales cycles. Those two things run on different clocks. You need both, but they cannot be measured by the same ruler.
- Invest in better judgment, not more tools. AI is the tool. The CMO is the hand that guides it. As the tools get more powerful, the person holding them becomes more important, not less.
- Protect the brand from the "four-year reset." Boards should demand continuity in brand strategy. A new leader should be hired to evolve the vision, not to set it on fire and start over.
The CMO is not a cost to trim when a new tool shows up. The role exists to protect the reason people care in the first place. That work gets more valuable, not less, in a world full of fast, cheap, machine-made sameness.
My view is simple: Marketing is selling the emotion. It's not selling the product. We still need humans to ideate and create those moments of connection. AI can run the engine to make those moments a reality, but it’s all about balance.
That is the real leadership test in this moment. Not whether we can automate more, but whether we can hold onto the human core while using AI well enough to scale it.
Stay Visible. Keep Leading.