Most marketing organisations are stuck in pilot purgatory. A content tool here, a personalisation experiment there, a pilot with the analytics team that nobody on the brand side has seen. The activity is real. The posture is not.
The CMOs I see actually moving the needle have made three structural moves, and none of them are about choosing a tool.
One — they have named the operating model
They have decided, on paper, what AI is for inside their function. Is it a productivity layer underneath every team? Is it a centre of excellence that other teams pull from? Is it a capability embedded in specific workflows like brief writing, segmentation, or post-campaign analysis? The answer matters less than the fact that there is one. Without it, every team makes its own assumption and the function fragments.
Two — they have re-written the briefs
Briefs were designed for a world where humans did all the production. In an AI-augmented function, the brief is the most leveraged artefact in the building. The leaders I respect have re-written what a brief contains: the brand guardrails the model must respect, the prohibited inputs, the required citations, the human review gates. The brief has become governance.
Three — they have moved the metric
If the only metric that changed when AI arrived was 'pieces of content produced per week,' the function has not transformed. It has accelerated the old game. The CMOs who have made the leap are measuring something different: time from insight to market, percentage of campaigns informed by structured customer signal, share of decisions made with documented evidence. Those metrics force the operating model to mature.
The quiet pattern
None of these moves require a new vendor. All of them require executive conviction and the willingness to be specific in writing.
The CMOs stuck in pilot purgatory share a different pattern: they have outsourced the operating-model question to a consultancy, the brief question to an agency, and the metric question to whichever dashboard the marketing-ops team already had. Each of those choices feels like delegation. In aggregate, it is abdication. The function ends up with three different definitions of what AI is for and no shared standard for what good output looks like.
Where to start this quarter
Pick one workflow — brief writing, segmentation, post-campaign analysis — and rebuild it end to end with AI as a structural input rather than a bolt-on. Document the new operating standard. Train the team against it. Measure the change in cycle time and decision quality, not in volume. That single workflow becomes the template the rest of the function adopts.
That is the work. The tools will keep changing. The posture is what compounds, and the CMOs who treat it that way will have built something durable by the time the next wave of capability lands.
By Nichole Brackett Walters
Caribbean CMO and advisor on marketing transformation, AI leadership, and reputation strategy. Writing from the field.
