At MAICON (Marketing AI Conference) last week in Cleveland, a provocative claim was made: that marketing was best suited to be the driver of AI in the enterprise. The rationale is one I want to believe; but I’m curious what you all think!
Here’s the basic argument: Marketing Owns -or should own- AI for two key reasons:
1. We are the first to be truly disrupted by it, so we’re going to learn things we can teach to the rest of the organization 2. We are able to communicate about that experience better than any other function.
So what say you? Is Marketing the driver of AI in the Enterprise? Or only for certain enterprises? If so, which ones? And if it’s not Marketing, who owns it?
From what I've seen in my career, Marketing has always been the ones to pull in new technology, whether IT wants to believe it or not. We're used to evaluating a problem, identifying a possible solution, and figuring out how to implement it. And then how to communicate around it. In addition to Melinda's original reasons above, marketing (at least marketing departments with good people) is the best suited to own AI within enterprise.
You are right, when I think about tools that went big, it was often marketing (and sales) that went first: Dropbox, Canva, CRMs of all kinds.
Ultimately, we're the only function charged with GROWING the the top line (along with our partners in Sales, in B2B Companies.). Literally every other function is a cost center charged with cost reductions. (EDIT, based on feedback below, tI want to be clear: I'm not saying that other functions don't contribute to the top line, it's that marketing is PRIMARILY a top line function. the reason I make this distinction is mindset based, and yes, we're talking generalizations here. If AI is implemented by the bean counters, regardless of function, it's going to get ugly. Who adopts first can influence the course of the tools, because we can literally vote with our dollars).
Ultimately that's why I think Marketing is the leader here, the R in the RACI/RASCI Model. If AI is only used a cost cutting measure; there will not only be enormous missed opportunities, but enormous negative societal impact.
And all the way back to email and marketing automation, lead scoring software, CMS systems, DAM systems, and championing the use of performance metrics for marketing, etc.
Anyway, your last sentence in your reply scare the hell out of me, and I agree completely.
If AI impacts the value that customers receive from the product, then yes, Marketing must be the driver. Who else would own it? Operations? Finance? Sales? Not likely.
It depends on the business and the customer, of course, but because AI is so new, it needs piloting by marketing teams to understand how customers take to it.
the counter argument appears to be that in some, heh or many orgs, marketing simply isn't resourced appropriately.
I can't imagine most CMOs adding ai to their list of responsibilities without adding commensurate headcount. but it's clear that someone in the org has to manage it.
It feels analogous to "Marketing [or any other department] should own data visualization," where the needs are more local and varied. Marketing should be able to visualize data related to marketing, and sales, and have greater awareness of the velocity of tech development within the organization, but their visualization of that will be different from how the CTO will want to be able to visualize the state of various efforts within her domain, and both will be different from how the CFO is visualizing revenue and spend. It may be that some specific department will need to manage AI as a service, for other departments, but I would imagine that more a fit for whatever passes for "corporate IT." But lots of different departments will make use of it, like lots of different departments make use of data visualization tools, and apply them to various (and perhaps overlapping) data domains that may also be owned or shared by other departments.
If the hypothesis is, "marketing was best suited to be the driver of AI in the enterprise," I would say that seems weak, given that it (AI) is applicable widely, will differ in its application, and so is a lot like other phenomena like data visualization. Maybe Marketing will be more impacted sooner, but it's as much like "the second mouse gets the cheese" (i.e, can serve as a cautionary tale), as it is that it ought to confer some sort of lead role.
"Literally every other function is a cost center charged with cost reductions."
Huh. I am one of those other functions (InfoSec), and I don't run it like that. We are absolutely a function seeking *cost avoidance* (e.g., the data breach that sucks a million away from the bottom line), but we also spend much of our time being a business enabler. I've spent half of today helping a Sales colleague with documentation of certs and compliance that will demonstrate to our customer that we're meriting their trust... "InfoSec as Sales Enablement" is a Medium draft I'm incubating at this very moment.
To clarify: the primary purpose of Info sec is cost reduction, in ways that minimize impact on revenue. there's nothing wrong with that. And the primary purpose of marketing is to increase revenue in a cost effective way.
I should have been more clear, and I regret the confusion.
How would you sell that to a c-suite or board who doesn’t see marketing’s current track record with tech to be successful? That sounds like a snarky rhetorical question but we all know that it’s real. So what differentiates Marketing to lead out on AI? Specifically, what are Marketing’s unique skill sets in this regard? What would the cross-business plan look like? How would Marketing lead the process of connecting AI to business outcomes outside its own domain? Mark
I'm so glad you came over to chat! I don't see your comment as snarky at all- we both know this is the reality of the cmo's world today.
I love the question and the opportunity to think throught this out loud.
1. Communication: Marketing knows best how to structure and plan communications, while focusing on the needs of the "customers" - internal and external.
2. It may very well come down to the exact skill set and track record of the CMO(which I use synonymously with head of marketing at any size) in terms of execution. Eg not "does marketing own this but can THIS cmo own it?"this is where the "growth hackers" are not going to look good next to those with strong brand and org behavior chops (maybe I'm huffing my own fumes as an MBA, but that level of thinking does help with so many things to be taken into account.)
3. Let me flip your question on your head. What makes any other function any better, given that (if we are honest) no one really knows, and marketing's profession is being disrupted first?
Awesome because I think there’s a lot of meat here, not just specifically but that is more broadly applicable.
My reference point here is the roughly 300 F1000 CEO and CFO interviews I’ve done this past year about how they see their GTM leadership, what marketers need to change, what the C-suite needs to change, and generally their views on the ongoing dysfunction between marketing, sales and the Business. I’ve heard a lot of honest venting and loads of profanity related to these topics, and a lot of pretty quiet introspection too.
The net net is that if there are two functions that CEOs and CFOs really struggle with, it’s marketing and sales. One CEO said, I have lots of confidence in my sales leaders to achieve their number, and zero trust in how they do it. I have lots of trust in my CMO to always want to do the right thing for the company and it’s customers and zero confidence that s/he knows what that is and how to get to that understanding. This is a F1000 CEO talking.
I asked him to elaborate and it got salty. “Marketers are shit re thinking ahead and assessing potential consequences. They think linearly in a nonlinear world. They don’t try to foresee what’s coming further than 2 quarters and they get that internally. They don’t understand how we make money. They don’t understand the consequences of bad use of tech. Like, do they realize that their overuse of marketing automation pretty much drove EU privacy laws in the past 5-10 years?”
Like a lot of things, a mix of fact and emotion. But that’s the selling environment that this idea will be headed into in more than 60% of major companies.
Right now, it’s the Wild West. But given the broad perception of Marketing generally and martech specifically (fair or not), I think they’d go with technical and compliance rich functions.
this is a freakin' awesome post, Mark. I love its raw honesty and clarity of thought.
(sidebar, I think I'm more different than I realize, though you KNOW I agree marketing has a branding problem).
I've seen so many great cmos-as defined exactly by the people you to defined above- struggling with awful CEOs here in the valley, now I want to see those folks go work with some of these incredible F1000 CEOs outside the valley, it could be a match made in heaven.
Is it a recruiting issue? What is causing this mismatch?
I have so many thoughts, among which is a total abdication here in the valley of strategy from the ceo --relying on marketing to get "growth" without a plan to do so, via produt, geography, and what not.
I will add that non enough cmos are educating the c suite on exactly why stuff can't be tracked the way the've been led to believe in-in short, earning that trust you just talked about. I preach it up an down all my coaching and analytics engagements.
I also have a thought on the quality of people some of these ceos hire-they're all about the flashy madison avenue ads, and not looking deeply enough themselves at people who might challenge their thinking.
tldr; I think I can grok where they're coming from and I believe them, but 2 sides to any argument, no? what do you think?
One thing that’s very very clear in my book research and interviews is that the C-suite and investor base own more than 50% of the dysfunction. Positional power, to start. Nature of VC model for a second. This is a prominent part of my book.
But the other part is equally problematic. And that’s the almost complete lack of intellectual underpinnings for B2B GTM. Almost no real research, no causal analytics, a lot of data viz being called analytics, lots of OJT marketers and sales leaders who know how to execute a process / turn a crank but know next to nothing about how to know if it’s working.
I just keynoted the Marketing Accountability Standards Board summit last week. Mainly B2C, growing B2B presence. Super smart people no exceptions. I got a question after my bit was over, and I mentioned how much value B2B would get from MASB. The reply? “I totally agree, but every time I mention MASB to my CMO, the answer is “we’re too busy.”
Man, I want to work with that one, a CEO who actually wants marketing to understand the business model and look beyond the revenue goal for Q4? Fantastic. I also agree completely that Marketing has an image and branding problem, though I tend to blame the platform people who sold into corporations at the C level with promises of knowing a customer's every thought. Maybe those of us who are business-oriented, strategy-first, tech-obsessed need to split into a new category of marketing.
There’s a lot of responsibility to go around. But we need to remember that for every platform that was sold in above the head of the CMO, marketers bought a lot of applications that were grounded in wishful thinking and, TBH, ignorance. Exhibit A is touch-based “attribution” which never was and won’t ever be a statically valid and rationally rooted approach. It’s not attribution, as causality is inseparable from attribution and touches aren’t evidence of causality. Time lag isn’t addressed either. You can’t optimize spend based on MTA or LT with any legitimacy. But it was easy to extrapolate from the data already in the stack and to visualize across a journey diagram.
I’m writing a book right now on the GTM Revolution that’s being driven by CEOs and CFOs. The two most commonly cited FUBAR moments are the crazy use of MA, ultimately triggering a renewed commitment to GDPR, and the fallacious use of touches to substantiate marketing value. It’s why more and more companies are turning to FP&A teams, not RevOps, to assess, calibrate and optimize GTM spend.
I hear you on attribution models being sketch from the beginning. I think that was a well-meaning attempt to give CEOs and CFOs metrics they could relate to. Marketing-to-sales ratio seems like a better measure, but only if the company is non-combative internally.
The mission of Marketing is to help Sales sell more product to more customers faster and more profitably than Sales could do by itself. This multiplier effect is the net / net expression of the value of Marketing.
Agree it was well intentioned. The problem is that they didn’t know it was fundamentally flawed and didn’t want to find out. It’s a trivial example of the problem, but we will be years reclaiming the word “attribution” from this whole mess.
There is a third leg to the stool, and unfortunately it is the often predatory GTM by many “predictive” apps that were never predictive, and “analytics” apps that were never anything but data viz + extrapolation. My personal view is that many misrepresented the facts and predated on marketing teams who rarely knew up from down in this area of operations.
I think it might be more accurate to say Marketing "could own Generative AI," but all AI? Sorry, narrow AI's been going on for years outside of marketing. And agree that marketing has an image problem when it comes to tech. Also, we're already seeing GAI in use outside of marketing too in areas like finance, legal, and within other datasets across a company.
From what I've seen in my career, Marketing has always been the ones to pull in new technology, whether IT wants to believe it or not. We're used to evaluating a problem, identifying a possible solution, and figuring out how to implement it. And then how to communicate around it. In addition to Melinda's original reasons above, marketing (at least marketing departments with good people) is the best suited to own AI within enterprise.
You are right, when I think about tools that went big, it was often marketing (and sales) that went first: Dropbox, Canva, CRMs of all kinds.
Ultimately, we're the only function charged with GROWING the the top line (along with our partners in Sales, in B2B Companies.). Literally every other function is a cost center charged with cost reductions. (EDIT, based on feedback below, tI want to be clear: I'm not saying that other functions don't contribute to the top line, it's that marketing is PRIMARILY a top line function. the reason I make this distinction is mindset based, and yes, we're talking generalizations here. If AI is implemented by the bean counters, regardless of function, it's going to get ugly. Who adopts first can influence the course of the tools, because we can literally vote with our dollars).
Ultimately that's why I think Marketing is the leader here, the R in the RACI/RASCI Model. If AI is only used a cost cutting measure; there will not only be enormous missed opportunities, but enormous negative societal impact.
And all the way back to email and marketing automation, lead scoring software, CMS systems, DAM systems, and championing the use of performance metrics for marketing, etc.
Anyway, your last sentence in your reply scare the hell out of me, and I agree completely.
If AI impacts the value that customers receive from the product, then yes, Marketing must be the driver. Who else would own it? Operations? Finance? Sales? Not likely.
It depends on the business and the customer, of course, but because AI is so new, it needs piloting by marketing teams to understand how customers take to it.
the counter argument appears to be that in some, heh or many orgs, marketing simply isn't resourced appropriately.
I can't imagine most CMOs adding ai to their list of responsibilities without adding commensurate headcount. but it's clear that someone in the org has to manage it.
It feels analogous to "Marketing [or any other department] should own data visualization," where the needs are more local and varied. Marketing should be able to visualize data related to marketing, and sales, and have greater awareness of the velocity of tech development within the organization, but their visualization of that will be different from how the CTO will want to be able to visualize the state of various efforts within her domain, and both will be different from how the CFO is visualizing revenue and spend. It may be that some specific department will need to manage AI as a service, for other departments, but I would imagine that more a fit for whatever passes for "corporate IT." But lots of different departments will make use of it, like lots of different departments make use of data visualization tools, and apply them to various (and perhaps overlapping) data domains that may also be owned or shared by other departments.
Could you address the actual points being made, first?
If the hypothesis is, "marketing was best suited to be the driver of AI in the enterprise," I would say that seems weak, given that it (AI) is applicable widely, will differ in its application, and so is a lot like other phenomena like data visualization. Maybe Marketing will be more impacted sooner, but it's as much like "the second mouse gets the cheese" (i.e, can serve as a cautionary tale), as it is that it ought to confer some sort of lead role.
I suggest taking a look at the discussion Beth Seitzberg and I had as perspective.
Marketing is the only function charged with growth.
"Literally every other function is a cost center charged with cost reductions."
Huh. I am one of those other functions (InfoSec), and I don't run it like that. We are absolutely a function seeking *cost avoidance* (e.g., the data breach that sucks a million away from the bottom line), but we also spend much of our time being a business enabler. I've spent half of today helping a Sales colleague with documentation of certs and compliance that will demonstrate to our customer that we're meriting their trust... "InfoSec as Sales Enablement" is a Medium draft I'm incubating at this very moment.
As a part of that work, I ran this ChatGPT query a few weeks ago: https://chat.openai.com/share/19ddbd20-1776-4bc7-a12f-3b617736de1e
We also think about "How can we mature processes to be able to as adequately manage a company twice our size, so we can grow?"
InfoSec is charged with making it possible for the company to grow. As is Product, and Engineering, and DevOps, and HR.
And I certainly expect that, as with us, Marketing will be asked if it could apply AI in order to decrease costs. AND to increase opportunities.
To clarify: the primary purpose of Info sec is cost reduction, in ways that minimize impact on revenue. there's nothing wrong with that. And the primary purpose of marketing is to increase revenue in a cost effective way.
I should have been more clear, and I regret the confusion.
How would you sell that to a c-suite or board who doesn’t see marketing’s current track record with tech to be successful? That sounds like a snarky rhetorical question but we all know that it’s real. So what differentiates Marketing to lead out on AI? Specifically, what are Marketing’s unique skill sets in this regard? What would the cross-business plan look like? How would Marketing lead the process of connecting AI to business outcomes outside its own domain? Mark
I'm so glad you came over to chat! I don't see your comment as snarky at all- we both know this is the reality of the cmo's world today.
I love the question and the opportunity to think throught this out loud.
1. Communication: Marketing knows best how to structure and plan communications, while focusing on the needs of the "customers" - internal and external.
2. It may very well come down to the exact skill set and track record of the CMO(which I use synonymously with head of marketing at any size) in terms of execution. Eg not "does marketing own this but can THIS cmo own it?"this is where the "growth hackers" are not going to look good next to those with strong brand and org behavior chops (maybe I'm huffing my own fumes as an MBA, but that level of thinking does help with so many things to be taken into account.)
3. Let me flip your question on your head. What makes any other function any better, given that (if we are honest) no one really knows, and marketing's profession is being disrupted first?
Loving this convo. let's keep it going!
Awesome because I think there’s a lot of meat here, not just specifically but that is more broadly applicable.
My reference point here is the roughly 300 F1000 CEO and CFO interviews I’ve done this past year about how they see their GTM leadership, what marketers need to change, what the C-suite needs to change, and generally their views on the ongoing dysfunction between marketing, sales and the Business. I’ve heard a lot of honest venting and loads of profanity related to these topics, and a lot of pretty quiet introspection too.
The net net is that if there are two functions that CEOs and CFOs really struggle with, it’s marketing and sales. One CEO said, I have lots of confidence in my sales leaders to achieve their number, and zero trust in how they do it. I have lots of trust in my CMO to always want to do the right thing for the company and it’s customers and zero confidence that s/he knows what that is and how to get to that understanding. This is a F1000 CEO talking.
I asked him to elaborate and it got salty. “Marketers are shit re thinking ahead and assessing potential consequences. They think linearly in a nonlinear world. They don’t try to foresee what’s coming further than 2 quarters and they get that internally. They don’t understand how we make money. They don’t understand the consequences of bad use of tech. Like, do they realize that their overuse of marketing automation pretty much drove EU privacy laws in the past 5-10 years?”
Like a lot of things, a mix of fact and emotion. But that’s the selling environment that this idea will be headed into in more than 60% of major companies.
Right now, it’s the Wild West. But given the broad perception of Marketing generally and martech specifically (fair or not), I think they’d go with technical and compliance rich functions.
this is a freakin' awesome post, Mark. I love its raw honesty and clarity of thought.
(sidebar, I think I'm more different than I realize, though you KNOW I agree marketing has a branding problem).
I've seen so many great cmos-as defined exactly by the people you to defined above- struggling with awful CEOs here in the valley, now I want to see those folks go work with some of these incredible F1000 CEOs outside the valley, it could be a match made in heaven.
Is it a recruiting issue? What is causing this mismatch?
I have so many thoughts, among which is a total abdication here in the valley of strategy from the ceo --relying on marketing to get "growth" without a plan to do so, via produt, geography, and what not.
I will add that non enough cmos are educating the c suite on exactly why stuff can't be tracked the way the've been led to believe in-in short, earning that trust you just talked about. I preach it up an down all my coaching and analytics engagements.
I also have a thought on the quality of people some of these ceos hire-they're all about the flashy madison avenue ads, and not looking deeply enough themselves at people who might challenge their thinking.
tldr; I think I can grok where they're coming from and I believe them, but 2 sides to any argument, no? what do you think?
One thing that’s very very clear in my book research and interviews is that the C-suite and investor base own more than 50% of the dysfunction. Positional power, to start. Nature of VC model for a second. This is a prominent part of my book.
But the other part is equally problematic. And that’s the almost complete lack of intellectual underpinnings for B2B GTM. Almost no real research, no causal analytics, a lot of data viz being called analytics, lots of OJT marketers and sales leaders who know how to execute a process / turn a crank but know next to nothing about how to know if it’s working.
I just keynoted the Marketing Accountability Standards Board summit last week. Mainly B2C, growing B2B presence. Super smart people no exceptions. I got a question after my bit was over, and I mentioned how much value B2B would get from MASB. The reply? “I totally agree, but every time I mention MASB to my CMO, the answer is “we’re too busy.”
Man, I want to work with that one, a CEO who actually wants marketing to understand the business model and look beyond the revenue goal for Q4? Fantastic. I also agree completely that Marketing has an image and branding problem, though I tend to blame the platform people who sold into corporations at the C level with promises of knowing a customer's every thought. Maybe those of us who are business-oriented, strategy-first, tech-obsessed need to split into a new category of marketing.
There’s a lot of responsibility to go around. But we need to remember that for every platform that was sold in above the head of the CMO, marketers bought a lot of applications that were grounded in wishful thinking and, TBH, ignorance. Exhibit A is touch-based “attribution” which never was and won’t ever be a statically valid and rationally rooted approach. It’s not attribution, as causality is inseparable from attribution and touches aren’t evidence of causality. Time lag isn’t addressed either. You can’t optimize spend based on MTA or LT with any legitimacy. But it was easy to extrapolate from the data already in the stack and to visualize across a journey diagram.
I’m writing a book right now on the GTM Revolution that’s being driven by CEOs and CFOs. The two most commonly cited FUBAR moments are the crazy use of MA, ultimately triggering a renewed commitment to GDPR, and the fallacious use of touches to substantiate marketing value. It’s why more and more companies are turning to FP&A teams, not RevOps, to assess, calibrate and optimize GTM spend.
I hear you on attribution models being sketch from the beginning. I think that was a well-meaning attempt to give CEOs and CFOs metrics they could relate to. Marketing-to-sales ratio seems like a better measure, but only if the company is non-combative internally.
Great conversation.
The mission of Marketing is to help Sales sell more product to more customers faster and more profitably than Sales could do by itself. This multiplier effect is the net / net expression of the value of Marketing.
Agree it was well intentioned. The problem is that they didn’t know it was fundamentally flawed and didn’t want to find out. It’s a trivial example of the problem, but we will be years reclaiming the word “attribution” from this whole mess.
There is a third leg to the stool, and unfortunately it is the often predatory GTM by many “predictive” apps that were never predictive, and “analytics” apps that were never anything but data viz + extrapolation. My personal view is that many misrepresented the facts and predated on marketing teams who rarely knew up from down in this area of operations.
I think it might be more accurate to say Marketing "could own Generative AI," but all AI? Sorry, narrow AI's been going on for years outside of marketing. And agree that marketing has an image problem when it comes to tech. Also, we're already seeing GAI in use outside of marketing too in areas like finance, legal, and within other datasets across a company.