A few months ago, I wrote about how AI problems are human orchestration problems. Given how quickly tools are evolving, looking at you, Fable 5, leadership that prioritizes the orchestration of modern work and is acutely attuned to how people leverage AI tools and agentic workflows are the ones that will keep pace and eventually win.
It’s not about one tool versus another. It’s about having a workflow, a test-and-learning mindset, and then embedding this way of thinking both within and across multi-disciplinary teams. The most successful CMOs are like band leaders that can take what is often a cacophony of divergent needs and priorities and transform them into a cohesive composition that produces forward momentum.
Translation of these AI-driven orchestration principles and priorities into the marketing function represents a source of increasing tension for the CMO. Lippincott and Bloomberg Media’s CMO Outlook 2026 is a great distillation of the many challenges CMOs are facing. The short answer is what most of us already know: they must drive growth while having too few people, too much red tape, too much data to justify results, while maintaining cultural relevance, customer loyalty, and speed to market.
Instead of trying to tackle each of these challenges in isolation, it is the orchestration of how work is strategically framed, developed, executed, syndicated, and measured that matters most. CMOs need to have a command over each of these interconnections.
I cannot imagine any modern CMO that has the intellectual, business, creative, interpersonal, and technical ability to bring all these together knowing that there is no singular solution that will fit every business’s unique circumstances.
If I had to solve this kind of problem, I’d first get everything in a shared collaborative tool like FigJam and draft a group facing experience map of what is going on. Because every employee has a different degree of knowledge and unique methods of working, the CMO cannot be the singular hero to solve every problem. First, CMOs must reorient leadership’s understanding of the orchestration layer. That will set the foundation of a successful growth strategy. CMOs are not damage controllers; they are growth architects and successful orchestration requires a team of full-stack creatives to collaborate so that leadership gets it and workers embrace it.
I like thinking of the ideal team as specialists that work in concert with the CMOs like how Danny Ocean worked with the team in the movie Ocean’s Eleven. Transformation is a team sport. Full stop. That operating model treats specific functions as accountability nodes, not silos to be managed top-down.
Human capital, bureaucracy, tech, data, culture, and the customer are all specific accountability nodes with corresponding experts who a CMO relies on to self-solve, and do what is needed to collaborate so that the modern orchestration layer is being optimized moment by moment. This means the death of siloed delegation and buck-passing, and the birth of co-ownership of the tangible processes and outcomes needed to succeed.
The key for a CMO to ensure all these new ways of working are succeeding throughout their domain is by acting. More Slack messages or more alignment meetings are likely what’s slowing progress. Instead, the individual actioning of specific steps or sequences by the CMO make it possible for a workforce to remain focused on higher level goals and execute consistently. This results in outcomes that a CMO can experience for themselves end-to-end and more definitively validate as demonstrable growth metrics when presenting to leadership.
Until the day AI eliminates a widely shared misconception that enterprise growth and competitive success (or the equivalent failure) in the market most often involves individual corporate heroics that place C-Suite executives on media and shareholder-designed pedestals—or chopping blocks.
There are three critical must-haves to ensure this emerging era of AI orchestration that a CMO can deliver on.
1. Move away from experimentation and work on solving specific real-world blockers with AI as a native part of the solution.
2. Make data around customer engagement and impact widely accessible and shared so that it can be ingested into a larger intelligence engine to inform iterative work. At the CMO level, hard interdependent work needs to be done to mitigate fragmentation, break silos, and foster understanding to better translate creative decisions in the language of revenue.
3. Build an orchestration engine that makes sense, is both repeatable and refinable, and is not in the brain of one person, or a select few, to support, maintain, and optimize. Gabriel Bridger’s article,* From stack to sync: The rise of the marketing operating system, *touches on many of these ideas.
None of this is glamorous and you won’t win any awards for the effort. But for the CMOs that can shake off the old baggage of what their role used to be and embrace this new orchestration-first mindset and mandate, I believe that the era of team-first organizational heroics is upon us.
The businesses that will be the powerhouses of the next decade will be the system thinkers with the courage to act and make it so that people, process, insight, and intelligence work together in fundamentally new and exciting ways.
Matt Owens is chief design and innovation officer at Athletics.