Lauren Whife Akey, CMO, Demand AI
The Chief Marketing Officer role has always demanded versatility — understanding customers, building brands, generating demand, supporting sales, managing budgets and proving commercial value. AI hasn’t simplified any of that. But it has fundamentally shifted what effective CMOs prioritize.
Having built Demand AI’s marketing function through rapid growth from zero to $15 million in revenue, I’ve come to believe the greatest opportunity isn’t using AI to produce more marketing. It’s reconsidering the purpose of marketing itself.
Start With The Outcome
Rather than asking “What campaign should we run?”, CMOs should begin with fundamental questions: What are we trying to achieve? What do our customers care about? What problem are we solving?
AI lets us return to first principles. Try things. Learn quickly. Abandon what isn’t working and scale what is.
Strengthen Sales-Marketing Alignment
The CMO and CRO partnership should transcend pipeline targets. The two should collaborate to understand customer challenges and needs — favoring signals over arbitrary lead volumes. Who is engaging? What are they interested in? What questions are they asking?
Challenge Ideal Customer Profiles
Ideal customer profiles built on data and intuition alone can misrepresent market reality. AI-powered buyer behavior analysis reveals what the market actually demands — creating a cycle where engagement creates insight, and insight improves our marketing.
Brand Through All Published Content
B2B buyers conduct self-directed research across search engines, social platforms and communities long before they contact a salesperson. Every piece of content should be useful, insightful, engaging — or all three — and strategically distributed where customers expect to find it.
Leverage Conversational Interfaces
Conversational AI lets buyers ask self-directed questions rather than follow predefined content paths. That benefits both the buyer and the marketer, since those inquiries reveal customer knowledge gaps and where they sit in the journey.
Modern CMOs should prioritize better understanding, better decisions and better customer outcomes — not technology for its own sake, and not chasing arbitrary metrics. The challenge is reimagining the role using AI’s capabilities, rather than simply accelerating traditional practices.