The Last CMO: The Future of the CMO Role

Q: What is the average CMO tenure in 2026?

4.1 years, according to Spencer Stuart's CMO Tenure 2026 study published in January 2026, which tracked 346 named CMOs across the S&P 500 as of June 30, 2025. The all-C-suite average is 5.0 years, so CMOs do sit below the executive norm, but only the COO is shorter at 3.3 years. Consumer companies run shortest for CMOs at 3.5 years and healthcare at 3.9 years. Short tenure by itself is a weak signal of failure given that most departing CMOs move up rather than out.

Q: Why do so many companies no longer have a CMO title?

Because the marketing leader's title has fragmented into four groups. Spencer Stuart's March 2025 analysis of 329 named Fortune 500 marketing leaders (as of June 30, 2024) found 40 percent hold the plain chief marketing officer title, 16 percent hold a combined title such as chief marketing and communications officer, 33 percent keep marketing in the title but drop the word chief, and 11 percent have no reference to marketing in their title, using words like commercial, growth, customer, brand, or strategy instead. The most-missed figure is the 33 percent: a third of the marketing leaders in that sample are not a chief anything, which is roughly a fifth of the Fortune 500 rather than a third of it.

Q: Should the CMO own AI, or the CTO?

At most companies today the CMO does not own it. Spencer Stuart's December 2025 survey of CMOs found AI strategy and implementation is most often led by the CTO or CIO at 44 percent, followed by the CMO at 32 percent, with the CEO leading at 19 percent. That split matters commercially because the same survey found more than two-thirds of CMOs feel leadership pressure for cost savings within two years and 36 percent expect AI-driven headcount reductions. A marketing leader absorbing the cost-reduction expectation while a different executive controls the technology producing the savings has taken the liability without the asset.

Q: How do executive search firms test AI fluency in CMO candidates?

With specificity questions designed to separate real operating experience from rehearsed vocabulary. Hager Executive Search published a five-question screen in March 2026 built around asking a candidate to describe a decision they made differently because of AI and what they learned, where AI creates the most risk in their function, how they are developing their team's capability and what resistance they hit, which tool surprised them in the last six months, and where humans will keep outperforming AI. The firm names three red flags for what it calls AI-washing: buzzword density without specific implementation detail, enthusiasm with no skepticism about limitations, and delegating AI strategy without personal engagement.

Q: What is a CMO and Chief AI Officer combination?

It is a single executive holding both the commercial mandate and the AI mandate rather than splitting them across two chairs. The structural case comes from two separate IBM studies. IBM's 2026 CEO Study, released May 4, 2026 and based on 2,000 CEOs across 33 geographies and 21 industries surveyed February through April 2026 with Oxford Economics, found 76 percent of organizations now report having a Chief AI Officer, up from 26 percent a year earlier. A separate IBM Institute for Business Value study with the Dubai Future Foundation, published July 15, 2025 from more than 600 Chief AI Officers across 21 industries and 22 countries, found that CAIOs running centralized or hub-and-spoke structures can realize 36 percent higher ROI than those in decentralized ones. AI authority is consolidating into a named role at the same moment marketing authority is fragmenting out of one. Holding both is how a marketing leader keeps the expanding half of the mandate.

Thirty-one percent of the S&P 500 has no enterprise CMO. The easy read is that the job is being eliminated. The data says something less comfortable: the job is being unbundled, and most marketing leaders are quietly losing the one piece that was going to make the role bigger.

This is the fifth piece in a six-part series on what marketing leadership looks like heading into 2027. The first four covered budget, agents, search, and personalization. This one covers the chair itself, because every recommendation in the other four assumes somebody with authority is still sitting in it.

Short tenure is not the story everyone thinks it is

Start with the number that gets quoted wrong most often. Spencer Stuart's CMO Tenure 2026 study, published January 2026 and covering 346 named CMOs across the S&P 500 as of June 30, 2025, put average CMO tenure at 4.1 years against an all-C-suite average of 5.0. That gap is real. It is also smaller than the churn narrative implies, and the CMO is not the shortest seat in the building. The COO is, at 3.3 years.

The part that gets dropped entirely: of the 218 CMOs who left between 2021 and 2025, 62 percent moved into equivalent or bigger roles. Nine percent went straight to a CEO seat. Another 13 percent became a divisional CEO, president, or COO. Seventy-seven percent landed somewhere new inside six months. Fortune reported in June 2026 that 37 percent of sitting Fortune 500 CEOs have marketing somewhere in their background. People are not fleeing this job. They are being promoted out of it, which produces the same turnover statistic and means the opposite thing.

One number in that study should worry you more than the tenure figure, and almost nobody cites it: 73 percent of S&P 500 CMOs are first-time CMOs. The seat turns over fast and it is mostly being filled by people who have never held it before. That is a bench depth problem, not a job security problem.

The title is not disappearing. It is dissolving.

The fragmentation is easier to see in the title data than the tenure data. Spencer Stuart's March 2025 breakdown of 329 named Fortune 500 marketing leaders, measured as of June 30, 2024, splits four ways: 40 percent hold the plain chief marketing officer title, 16 percent hold a combined title such as chief marketing and communications officer, 33 percent keep marketing in the title but drop the word chief, an SVP or EVP of marketing, and 11 percent have no reference to marketing in the title at all, using commercial, growth, customer, brand, or strategy instead.

The 33 percent is the buried lede and it is the one almost every write-up skips in favor of the more quotable 11 percent. A third of the marketing leaders Spencer Stuart could identify are not a chief anything. They are a senior or executive vice president reporting into someone who is. Worth being precise about the denominator, since it is easy to overstate: that is a third of the 329 leaders in the sample, which works out to roughly a fifth of the Fortune 500, not a third of it. The conversation about whether the CMO title survives is a level below the conversation that actually matters, which is whether marketing has a seat at all.

You can see both patterns in named roles right now. Jane Wakely at PepsiCo carries EVP, chief consumer and marketing officer, and chief growth officer, International Foods. Vineet Mehra at Chime was promoted from chief marketing officer to chief growth officer in December 2025 and still oversees marketing, which is the trend in a single career: the word left the title, the work did not. Emily Prazer at Formula 1 is chief commercial officer. These are expansions, not demotions, and that is the honest read of the trend. Jessica Apotheker, global CMO at Boston Consulting Group, put the logic plainly to Fortune in June 2026: "Brand building is absolutely core to what we do. But we need to expand the function from there."

One housekeeping note, because it matters if you are going to repeat these figures in a board deck. Several write-ups report the 31 percent no-CMO figure as Fortune 500. Spencer Stuart's own January 2026 study says S&P 500, 346 named CMOs, as of June 30, 2025. The title breakdown above is the Fortune 500 sample, from a different study a year earlier. Two different indexes, two different measurement dates. Cite them as one dataset and someone will catch it.

The mandate expanded. Then somebody else took the best part of it.

Here is where the optimistic reading of all this breaks down.

Spencer Stuart surveyed CMOs about AI and published the results in December 2025. More than 80 percent said they are piloting AI projects or scaling proven use cases. And then this, verbatim from the study: "No CMOs, however, believe they have fully transformed their function, and only a tiny fraction believe they have integrated AI across all areas of the marketing function."

Not a low percentage. None. In a survey where four out of five respondents are already running AI work, zero of them think they have finished the job.

The reason sits three paragraphs later in the same study. Asked who leads AI strategy and implementation, CMOs named the CTO or CIO 44 percent of the time. The CMO came second at 32 percent. The CEO led at 19 percent. So at roughly two thirds of these companies, the marketing leader is not the one deciding how AI gets built or where it gets pointed.

Now put that next to the pressure they are absorbing. More than two-thirds of the CMOs in that same survey said they feel leadership pressure to deliver cost savings within two years. Seventeen percent already cut headcount in the prior twelve months. Thirty-six percent expect AI-driven headcount reductions in the next twelve to twenty-four. Among large companies above $20 billion in revenue, 37 percent of CMOs expect savings of 20 percent or more, against 6 percent at smaller companies.

That is the whole problem in one place. Marketing leaders are being handed the cost-reduction expectation while a different executive controls the technology that produces the reduction. If you own the number but not the mechanism, you are not running a function. You are absorbing a quota. The title fragmentation is downstream of that, not the cause of it.

What executive search is actually screening for now

The hiring side has already adjusted, which is usually where you can see a shift before the org charts catch up.

Hager Executive Search published a five-question AI-fluency screen in March 2026, updated in August. The questions are unglamorous and they work: describe a decision you made differently because of AI and what you learned from it; where does AI create the most risk in your function right now; how are you developing your team's capability and what resistance have you hit; what tool or application surprised you most in the last six months; where will humans keep outperforming AI in your function.

Every one of those is a specificity test. You cannot answer them from a keynote. The firm names three tells for what it calls AI-washing: buzzword density with no implementation detail, enthusiasm with no skepticism about limitations, and delegating AI strategy while claiming credit for it. That last one is the 32 percent showing up in an interview room. A candidate who says they "partner closely with IT on all things AI" has just told you they do not own it.

Worth staying skeptical about how fast this is really moving, though. The same piece cites research that only 34 percent of organizations are genuinely rebuilding around AI even while 53 percent name AI fluency a top talent priority, and Gartner's projection that over 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027. The screening rigor is real. The transformation underneath it is thinner than the job specs suggest, and a candidate who says so out loud is usually the one who has actually shipped something.

The combination that survives the next org chart

Two trends are running at the same time and they are usually discussed separately, which is why the conclusion gets missed.

Marketing authority is fragmenting out of a single named role. AI authority is consolidating into one. IBM's 2026 CEO Study, released May 4, 2026, based on 2,000 CEOs across 33 geographies and 21 industries surveyed February through April 2026 with Oxford Economics, found 76 percent of organizations now report having a Chief AI Officer, up from 26 percent a year earlier. That is a 50-point move in twelve months, which is close to unprecedented for an executive title.

The structural finding comes from a different IBM study, and the distinction matters if you are going to repeat it. A separate IBM Institute for Business Value survey run with the Dubai Future Foundation and Oxford Economics, published July 15, 2025 and based on more than 600 Chief AI Officers across 21 industries and 22 countries surveyed in the first quarter of 2025, found that CAIOs running centralized or hub-and-spoke models, a central AI function partnering into the business units, can realize 36 percent higher ROI than those in decentralized structures. Having the title is not the variable. Having the title attached to real central authority is.

Which points at the answer for anyone in the marketing chair right now. The durable position is not defending the letters C-M-O. It is holding the commercial mandate and the AI mandate in the same person, so that the function producing the cost savings and the function accountable for them are not two different org-chart boxes negotiating across a table. I hold the Certified Chief AI Officer credential alongside the marketing seat for exactly this reason, and the practical difference is not vocabulary. It is that nobody has to translate for me when the decision is which model to run, what it costs per output, and whether the margin survives the invoice.

That is the same discipline this whole site is built on and the reason AI Commercialization: the complete guide exists. Technology proves it runs. Commercialization proves it pays. A marketing leader who can only speak to the first half is going to keep losing the second half to whoever can.

What to do before the next planning cycle

Four things, in order of how quickly they change your position.

Find out which of the three numbers you are. Ask your CEO, plainly, who leads AI strategy here. If the answer is the CTO or CIO, you are in the 44 percent, and every AI-driven savings number in your plan is a promise you cannot personally keep. Better to know that before you commit to it in a budget review than after.

Stop accepting the savings target without the mechanism. If leadership expects 20 percent out of your function through AI, the counter is not resistance. It is a written scope: what you control, what you need control of, and which number moves in each case. Cost pressure with no authority is the fastest route to being the 4.1-year average.

Get specific enough to pass the screen you will eventually sit through. Not the vocabulary. The decision you made differently, the thing you turned off, what it costs to run per month, who reviews the output before it leaves the building. Those are the questions being asked in search processes right now, and most sitting CMOs cannot answer them with names and numbers.

And stop optimizing for the title. Thirty-three percent of Fortune 500 marketing leaders do not have "chief" in theirs, 11 percent do not have "marketing," and a meaningful share of the people who left the seat entirely moved up. The title is the least stable thing in this dataset. The mandate is the asset. Go take the half of it that is still available.

The series

Six deep dives on marketing leadership heading into 2027:

The AI Budget Trap: the readiness gap behind the 15.3 percent, and how to fund AI without writing it off.
Marketing to Machines: when AI agents become the customer.
Your Search Traffic Is Not Coming Back: the measured decline and the AI referral playbook.
Personalization After the Cookie Reversal: first-party or bust.
The Last CMO: the fragmenting title and the expanding mandate. This piece.
The 2027 Marketing Stack: what earns budget and what gets cut. September 1.

The hub for all six is The 2027 CMO: what marketing leaders must prepare for. If the AI-ownership question in this piece is the one you are actually stuck on, who should own AI: CAIO vs CTO vs CIO takes it apart properly, and the Chief AI Officer guide covers what the role owns when it is set up correctly.

Frequently asked questions

Is the CMO role going away?

No. It is being unbundled rather than eliminated. Spencer Stuart's January 2026 study found 31 percent of S&P 500 companies have no enterprise CMO, but it also found 62 percent of the 218 CMOs who left between 2021 and 2025 moved into equivalent or bigger roles, 9 percent went directly to a CEO seat, and 77 percent landed somewhere new within six months. That is not the exit pattern of a dying function. The real risk is not losing the title. It is keeping the title while another executive takes the AI mandate attached to it.

What is the average CMO tenure in 2026?

4.1 years, per Spencer Stuart's CMO Tenure 2026 study published January 2026, covering 346 named CMOs across the S&P 500 as of June 30, 2025. The all-C-suite average is 5.0 years. Only the COO is shorter, at 3.3. Consumer companies run shortest for CMOs at 3.5 years, healthcare at 3.9. Short tenure on its own is a weak failure signal given that most departing CMOs move up.

Why do so many companies no longer have a CMO title?

The marketing leader's title has split four ways. Spencer Stuart's March 2025 analysis of 329 named Fortune 500 marketing leaders as of June 30, 2024 found 40 percent hold the plain CMO title, 16 percent a combined title such as chief marketing and communications officer, 33 percent keep marketing in the title but drop the word chief, and 11 percent have no reference to marketing, using commercial, growth, customer, brand, or strategy instead. The 33 percent is the most-missed figure: a third of the marketing leaders in that sample are not a chief anything, which is roughly a fifth of the Fortune 500 rather than a third of it.

Should the CMO own AI, or the CTO?

At most companies today the CMO does not. Spencer Stuart's December 2025 CMO survey found AI strategy and implementation is led by the CTO or CIO at 44 percent, the CMO at 32 percent, and the CEO at 19 percent. That split matters commercially because the same survey found more than two-thirds of CMOs feel pressure to deliver cost savings within two years and 36 percent expect AI-driven headcount cuts. Owning the savings number without owning the mechanism that produces it is a structurally weak position regardless of title.

How do executive search firms test AI fluency in CMO candidates?

With specificity questions rather than vocabulary checks. Hager Executive Search published a five-question screen in March 2026: describe a decision you made differently because of AI and what you learned; where does AI create the most risk in your function; how are you building your team's capability and what resistance did you hit; what tool surprised you in the last six months; where will humans keep outperforming AI. The firm flags three AI-washing tells: buzzwords without implementation detail, enthusiasm without skepticism, and delegating AI strategy while claiming it.

What is a CMO and Chief AI Officer combination?

One executive holding both the commercial mandate and the AI mandate instead of splitting them across two chairs. IBM's 2026 CEO Study, released May 4, 2026 from 2,000 CEOs across 33 geographies and 21 industries surveyed February through April 2026 with Oxford Economics, found 76 percent of organizations now report a Chief AI Officer, up from 26 percent a year earlier. A separate IBM Institute for Business Value study with the Dubai Future Foundation, published July 15, 2025 from more than 600 Chief AI Officers across 21 industries and 22 countries, found CAIOs running centralized or hub-and-spoke structures can realize 36 percent higher ROI than decentralized ones. AI authority is consolidating into a named role at the same moment marketing authority is fragmenting out of one. Holding both is how a marketing leader keeps the expanding half.

Sources

CMO tenure, the 31 percent no-CMO figure, and exit destinations: Spencer Stuart, "CMO Tenure 2026: Snapshot of an Expanding Role for Marketing Leaders" (January 2026; 346 named S&P 500 CMOs as of June 30, 2025). Note that Spencer Stuart uses the figure 62 percent for two different things in that study, exits to similar or bigger roles and CMOs promoted from within; the exits number is the one used here. Title fragmentation (40/16/33/11): Spencer Stuart, "CMO Tenure Study 2025: The Evolution of Marketing Leadership" (March 2025; 329 named Fortune 500 marketing leaders as of June 30, 2024). AI ownership split, the "no CMOs" transformation finding, and the two-thirds cost-savings pressure figure: Spencer Stuart, "The AI Reckoning: Why Marketers Think 2026 Is a Make-or-Break Year" (December 2025; Spencer Stuart publishes no methodology section, sample size, or fieldwork dates for this survey, so treat the percentages as directional rather than projectable). Chief AI Officer adoption (76 percent, up from 26 percent): IBM Institute for Business Value 2026 CEO Study, released May 4, 2026, 2,000 CEOs across 33 geographies and 21 industries, fieldwork February to April 2026 with Oxford Economics. The 36 percent hub-and-spoke ROI figure comes from a different study and is frequently misattributed to the CEO Study: IBM Institute for Business Value with the Dubai Future Foundation and Oxford Economics (published July 15, 2025; more than 600 Chief AI Officers across 21 industries and 22 countries, fieldwork Q1 2025). Executive search AI-fluency screening, and the 34 and 53 percent figures: Greg Lamboy, Hager Executive Search, "How to Hire an Executive Who Actually Understands AI" (March 17, 2026, updated August 13, 2026). The agentic-AI cancellation projection: Gartner (June 25, 2025), which forecasts over 40 percent, a floor rather than a ceiling. The Apotheker quote and the roughly 37 percent CEO-marketing-background figure (which Fortune attributes to Spencer Stuart): Fortune (June 22, 2026). Named executive titles are taken from each company directly rather than from press coverage: PepsiCo for Jane Wakely, Chime's December 10, 2025 promotion announcement for Vineet Mehra, and Formula 1 for Emily Prazer.

About the author

Jeff Brokaw is a sitting CMO and Certified Chief AI Officer who ships AI in production, not slideware. He has been building AI systems commercially since 2016. He built the commercial engine behind $185M in new-business revenue for a defense manufacturer, and authored the go-to-market behind a $114M institutional raise that came together in under 30 days.