For years, marketing chiefs were expected to shape perception, build brands and support growth from a comfortable distance. But with LLMs becoming the first stop for search, shopping and product discovery, CMOs are pushed closer to commercial accountability. That is the crux of Forrester’s latest report, The AI CMO: Growth Accountability Gets Next-Level, which finds that AI is not shrinking the CMO role so much as stripping away its insulation.
“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,” say Mike Proulx and Matthew Selheimer, VPs and research directors at Forrester.
The change comes on the back of consumer behaviour. Among those surveyed and in the younger cohort, 32% of millennials and 35% of Gen Z say they have used ChatGPT to search for products they are considering buying. In B2B, 94% of buyers say they now use generative AI or conversational search tools during the buying process, which reduces marketers’ visibility into decision‑making.
Campaign previously reported over 70% of consumer ChatGPT messages are now non‑work related, indicating that people are increasingly using large language models for everyday personal tasks, including purchases. In APAC markets like Singapore, nearly three in four consumers say they use AI tools during peak shopping seasons, with 69% turning to AI specifically for price comparison.
The majority (80%) of B2C marketing executives surveyed believe their 2026 corporate profits will largely come from organic business growth, compared with just 9% who expect cost‑cutting to dominate.
“AI is turning the CMO into a growth leader that brings together data, technology, and talent to deliver maximum impact on the business,” PetSmart SVP of marketing Bradley Breuer said in the report.
The report also warns that AI is rapidly becoming a new audience in its own right. As answer engines such as reshape how buyers discover, evaluate and commit to products through conversational, zero‑click experiences, CMOs must win a share of voice in a dialogue they can’t see or control.
Forrester finds that 88% of B2B decision‑makers say their organisations are adopting or planning to adopt AI agents, while 43% of US consumers and 35% in the UK already believe brands will market directly to their AI agents rather than to them.
“Brand stewardship will expand beyond human control,” Proulx and Selheimer write. "When machines increasingly represent your brand — in search results, recommendations, content, and conversations CMOs can’t directly see — brand governance changes fundamentally."
The pair note the CMO remit now extends from shaping messages to governing how answer engines and agents interpret, surface and speak on the brand’s behalf.
AI is also shifting marketing from headcount‑constrained to systems‑scaled. Forrester’s earlier advertising outlook projected that 7.5% of advertising agency jobs, or around 33,000 roles, will be automated by 2030, which suggests the influence of agentic AI in restructuring marketing departments.
Forrester notes that 39% of B2C marketing decision‑makers plan to increase tech spending by 5% or more, versus 28% planning similar increases in headcount, and 63% of C‑level B2B marketing decision‑makers have slowed hiring until they better understand AI’s organisational impact.
Meanwhile, the report also finds that marketing capacity will increasingly be driven by technology rather than hiring. “Over time, I expect setting up and running our campaigns will be more and more agent based, with fewer humans turning all the knobs," said Casey Cary, CMO at TCP Software in the report.
Ultimately, Forrester positions AI as a forcing a more defined function for CMOs’ leadership. The report urges CMOs to ground their AI leadership in firsthand use, continuously reallocate their own time away from tasks AI can handle, and treat AI learning as an ongoing discipline rather than a one‑off training project.
“Growth will get hard‑coded into marketing operations,” Proulx and Selheimer write. They observe that as customer discovery, evaluation and conversion become increasingly mediated by algorithms, marketers need to own how growth is built across the business.
“Ultimately, the impact of AI is determined by whether the CMO leads the change that drives growth … or not,” they add.
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
