Forbes CMO Summit: Marketing Insights
What an insightful week at the Forbes CMO Summit in Miami. Here are my AI influenced takeaways and kudos to Seth Matlins and the Forbes team for curating an invaluable experience for the marketing fraternity. This was my third year participating—having presented and been on panels in the past—and it surpassed my expectations again:

💡Champion Marketing: We marketers must champion our discipline more fervently. Simply assuming others understand its significance as well as we do is a mistake. If overlooked, we risk undermining our impact or perpetually having to defend our worth— especially as our field enters a phase of massive AI driven disruption. Our roles are destined to change and it will be up to us to define what it means to be a marketer in an AI era where so much more of marketing maybe automated. We need to do more to market marketing, not just our brands, products, or ourselves.
💡Organize Right: When marketing is structured wrong, marketers invariably fail. As CMOs, we should advocate for roles where our path to drive growth is clear and where our responsibilities are well defined. Shadow Marketing—be it by taking Growth Marketing outside of marketing or by making marketing subservient to Sales or Finance for example is not good. Furthermore, lets actively participate in the org design conversations for the AI driven future.
💡Fix your Job Description: Addressing challenges like stakeholder capitalism, demographic changes, media consumption shifts, digital platform regulation, AI ethics, and misinformation is now integral to our roles. While embracing this expanded responsibility is needed (Dylan Mulvaney's interview underscored that point), securing support from CEOs and the rest of the C-Suite is necessary first. Otherwise, choose to only accept the narrower definitions of the CMO. Many of us have learned this lesson the hard way.
💡Dive into the AI Future: AI isn't a fleeting trend; it's a huge game-changer on par with the Internet's emergence in the 1990s. The focus needs to shift from CFO collaborations alone to partnering with the CTO to drive a joint AI-centric business and marketing agenda. This is a golden opportunity. Embracing AI ensures a seat at the executive table— where as full-funnel marketers we will get to drive growth in new ways.
💡Own the Finance Metrics: A lesson I learned at Visa was that every marketer is, first and foremost, a business leader. In today's landscape of digital upheaval, wavering customer loyalty, and high costs of capital, we need to think more like business strategists and fluently speak the language of finance and operations. That means caring about their metrics more than your own. Trust me, it'll allow us to have the profound impact we're all capable of.
Do you agree with the above? Arguably, the AI era will usher in even more profound changes in marketing. Nonetheless, the points above provide a solid foundation to start from.








