CMO tenure at the top 100 advertisers just hit 3.1 years, the shortest it has been since 2009. One in five Fortune 500 companies changed marketing leadership in the past year. And a growing list of companies, GM, UPS, Etsy, and Walgreens among them, have stopped hiring a CMO at all, folding the responsibilities into a Chief Operating Officer or Chief Commercial Officer role instead.
The easy explanation is performance pressure. Boards want faster results, budgets are tighter, and marketing has always been an easier line to question than sales or product. I think that explanation is right as far as it goes. I also think it’s incomplete.
What’s actually driving the turnover
What’s actually driving this is a transformation of the knowledge base marketing leadership used to be built on. For decades, a CMO’s value came from channel expertise, campaign management, and the judgment to run a calendar driven creative process at scale. AI has started replacing large pieces of that know-how faster than most organizations have figured out what to build in its place. Companies aren’t eliminating the CMO title because marketing stopped mattering. They’re eliminating it because the specific expertise the role was built around is being automated out from under it, and nobody has agreed yet on what expertise should replace it.
The transformation is not close to finished
I don’t think this transformation is anywhere near finished. Folding marketing into a COO or CCO role isn’t a resolution, it’s a placeholder. It’s what organizations do when they know the old structure no longer fits and haven’t landed on the new one yet.
What Boris Cherny’s framework explains about this gap
Boris Cherny, who leads Claude Code at Anthropic, has spent a lot of time mapping this exact gap, not in marketing specifically, but across knowledge work generally. He describes stages of AI adoption inside organizations, starting with agents blocked entirely and ending with thousands of agents operating across a business under executive oversight. His central observation is that individuals are getting enormous productivity gains from AI well before their organizations are structured to absorb those gains. The bottleneck was never the technology. It is the organizational design sitting on top of it.
That is exactly what is playing out in marketing right now. Individual marketers, and in some cases entire functions, are capable of more than they were two years ago, often dramatically more. But the org chart, the reporting lines, and the definition of what a marketing leader is even accountable for have not caught up. CMOs are losing their seats in the gap between those two speeds, not because they failed, but because they are standing in the part of the organization that has not been redesigned yet.
A framework for where marketing organizations actually sit
Here is what I think those stages look like translated into marketing specifically.
Gated. Marketing has no real agent access beyond a few point tools, and legal, IT, or brand approval blocks anything broader from moving past a pilot.
Assisted. One marketer pairs with one agent for drafting or analysis, but every output still gets reviewed and reworked by a human before anything ships.
Parallel. A single person is now orchestrating several agents at once, generating and testing variations across channels that used to require a full team.
Supervised autonomy. Whole workflows, campaign briefs, performance analysis, creative iteration, run with agents handling the volume while a marketer sets direction and catches the exceptions.
AI native. Marketing operates as a system of agents working across channels and functions continuously, with human leadership focused on strategy and judgment calls rather than day to day execution.
Most marketing organizations right now are sitting somewhere between the first and third stage, while individual marketers inside them are often already operating at the fourth or fifth on their own initiative. That gap, more than any single leadership failure, is what I think is actually driving the turnover.
FAQ
Why is CMO tenure at its shortest point since 2009?
Boards and CEOs are attributing it to performance pressure, but a deeper cause is that the expertise a CMO’s role was historically built around, channel management and campaign execution, is being automated faster than organizations have redesigned the role around new AI-enabled capabilities.
Why are companies like GM, UPS, Etsy, and Walgreens eliminating the CMO title entirely?
These companies are folding marketing responsibilities into COO or Chief Commercial Officer roles. This reflects organizational uncertainty about what a marketing leadership role should look like in an AI-enabled structure, not a judgment that marketing itself matters less.
What is Boris Cherny’s framework for AI adoption inside organizations?
Cherny, who leads Claude Code at Anthropic, describes a progression of stages, from organizations with no agent access, through individuals pairing with a single agent, to organizations where thousands of agents operate across the business under executive oversight. His core point is that individual productivity gains from AI consistently outpace an organization’s structural capacity to absorb them.
How does this framework apply specifically to marketing organizations?
Most marketing organizations currently sit in the earlier stages of this progression at the structural level, limited agent access and heavy human review, even though individual marketers inside those organizations are often already working far more autonomously with AI tools on their own initiative.
What should marketing leaders do about this gap?
Rather than treating the current instability as a hiring problem to be solved with the next CMO search, leaders should treat it as an organizational design problem: identifying which stage of AI adoption the marketing function is actually operating at, and deliberately building toward the next one rather than waiting for it to happen on its own.
Marc Drucker is a Fractional COO/CMO who has helped founders, CEOs, and PE firms scale consumer, food and beverage, and home appliance brands, generating more than $4.5B in new revenue across his career. More at marc-drucker.com.
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