AI reshapes brand leadership roles of CMOs and CXOs

In today's rapidly evolving landscape, AI agents are collapsing the traditional divide between marketing and customer experience. No longer confined to silos, AI is rewriting the playbook for CMOs and CXOs, forcing leaders to adapt or fall behind.

The New Leadership Paradigm

• CMOs now oversee AI enablement pods, focusing on cross-functional training and monitoring AI across the customer journey.
• CXOs are hiring Experience Prompt Engineers to fine-tune AI's contextual responses.
• Leadership requires a blend of data fluency, AI literacy, and ethical oversight.

AI in Action: Legacy vs. Challenger Brands

• Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) integrates AI into decades-old operations, leveraging tools like AI-enabled skin analysers and virtual try-ons. These innovations have driven over 5 million consumer trials with conversion rates exceeding 2.5%.
• Zepto, an AI-first challenger, uses its Zepto Atom suite to create Consumer Personas—AI-generated profiles that compress weeks of insight gathering into minutes.

Agencies Adapt to AI

Agencies are shifting from production to orchestration, balancing human creativity with AI's speed and scale. They now focus on:

• Building proprietary workflows
• Ensuring brand voice consistency
• Layering human insights into machine-driven experiences

The Human-AI Handoff

While AI excels at high-volume, low-complexity tasks, humans still handle edge cases requiring emotional nuance. Effective organizations carefully map this handoff to maintain both speed and empathy.

Ethics as a Cornerstone

Bias, hallucinations, and consent are no longer footnotes but front-page issues. Leaders are aligning with global standards like DPDP and CCPA to ensure AI systems protect privacy while delivering value.

AI Owns the Funnel

Well-designed AI agents don’t just optimize individual funnel stages—they connect them. Companies dedicating over 50% of their GTM tech stack to AI are significantly outperforming peers.

Emerging Roles and Skills

New hybrid roles are emerging, such as:

• Agent Orchestrators managing multi-agent systems
• CX Prompt Engineers shaping AI responses

These roles demand a mix of creative, technical, and strategic skills, driving companies to focus on retraining over recruitment.

The Constant: Trust

As Apurv Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of SquadStack.ai, puts it:

"If customers walk away feeling more understood and reassured, the tech did its job. If not, AI becomes just more noise."

Apurv Agrawal, co-founder and CEO, SquadStack.ai