AI didn't kill the CMO. Your board did.
A third of the Fortune 500 no longer has one. The reason isn't the one you've been told.
Start with the number that should worry you more than the one everyone quotes.
In 2024, only 329 of the Fortune 500 had a named C-suite marketing leader. The year before, it was 357. That is a drop of nearly eight percentage points in twelve months [1].
Zoom out and the trend is slower but pointed in the same direction. Spencer Stuart’s longer series has the Fortune 500 at 71% with a marketing chief, down from 74% in 2009 [5]. So this isn’t a cliff. It’s a slow bleed with a bad year in it.
Either way, the headline holds. Roughly a third of the largest companies in America do not have a CMO. Not a struggling one. Not a short-tenured one. None.
The conversation about marketing leadership has been stuck on the wrong question. Everyone argues about how long CMOs last. The more interesting thing is that a growing number of companies have decided they don’t need one at all.
The tenure debate, briefly
It surfaced in an unlikely place. At the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion, Bozoma Saint John, former CMO at Netflix, Uber, Apple Music, and Pepsi, mentioned that the CMO job is short-tenured by nature. Andy Cohen made a face. He later doubled down on Threads, saying every CMO he’d worked with stayed longer than that [2].
She responded with a video, some data, and a lecture. He conceded: “I WAS UNAWARE. I AM NOW” [3].
It was a good exchange, and it made a real point badly. Here is what the data actually says.
CMO tenure at S&P 500 companies is 4.1 years, down from 4.3 the year before. The C-suite average is 5 years. CEOs get 7.6. CFOs get 4.7 [1].
So the CMO seat is the least stable executive seat in the building, but it isn’t a two-year job. It’s a four-year job in a room where everyone else gets five to seven.
And short tenure isn’t only a firing story. Roughly two-thirds of departing Fortune 500 CMOs get promoted or move to a comparable or better role [4]. Spencer Stuart’s own read is that low tenure is not a sign of failure. Plenty of these people are leaving because someone offered them more.
That’s the honest version. It’s less dramatic than the Bravo version, and it still points at something broken.
The churn is the cost
Here’s what nobody puts on the P&L.
Every CMO transition resets the brand. The new one arrives, runs their audit, finds the positioning “unclear,” and rebuilds it. The agency changes. The messaging changes. The customer segments get renamed. Eighteen months of accumulated brand equity gets written down to make room for someone else’s thesis.
Do that every four years and you never compound anything. You just keep buying the same asset and throwing it away before it appreciates.
Brand equity behaves like an investment, not an expense. It’s the only line on the balance sheet that gets more valuable while you sleep, and it’s the only one most boards are willing to reset on a whim. Nobody would tolerate a CFO who restated the books every time a new one walked in. In marketing we call it a refresh.
The four-year number isn’t the problem. The four-year *reset* is.
Why the seat is being cut
Now the harder question. Why are a third of the Fortune 500 running without one?
The convenient answer is AI. It’s convenient because it’s nobody’s fault. Technology arrived, the function became efficient, the role got absorbed. Nothing to examine.
That answer is wrong, and the timeline gives it away. The elimination started before the technology could have justified it.
Here’s the real answer, and it’s less comfortable.
The CMO role has the least standardized scope in the C-suite [4]. Ask three companies what their CMO owns and you’ll get three answers. Sometimes it’s brand. Sometimes it’s demand. Sometimes it’s the website and a content calendar. Sometimes it’s the whole revenue engine. A CFO’s job description is a known quantity. A CMO’s is a negotiation.
That ambiguity is not the CMO’s doing. It’s the board’s. You hired someone into a seat you never defined, judged them against a target you never wrote down, and then concluded the seat itself was the problem.
A role nobody scoped is a role nobody can defend. So when the budget conversation comes, it’s the first one on the table. Not because the work stopped mattering. Because nobody in the room could say precisely what it was.
AI just gave that decision a respectable name.
I wrote this down six years ago
In 2019, McDonald’s, Uber, and Johnson & Johnson all eliminated the chief marketing officer role within weeks of each other. In each case the remit was split among executives already on staff [6]. It made the news as a curiosity. Three big companies, one strange decision.
I posted about it at the time. What I said then was that big marketing roles were becoming project-based, that the function was drifting toward the gig economy the way creative work already had, and that I wasn’t convinced technology could replace the 360-degree work of brand building, customer targeting, relationship building, and performance marketing.
The line I’d keep: consumers are not automated, and neither is their trust.
That was written before the current wave of AI existed. The tools have changed completely. The argument hasn’t changed at all.
And here’s the part that should settle the debate. McDonald’s brought the role back in under a year, then expanded it [5].
They ran the experiment. It failed. They reversed it quietly, the way companies do when the press release would be embarrassing.
I’m not raising this to take a victory lap. I’m raising it because the reasoning that was true before the technology arrived is still true after it, which tells you the technology was never the actual variable.
What AI actually took
AI has been very good at the executional half of marketing. It writes the copy. It builds the variants. It buys the media. It runs the segmentation math faster and cheaper than the analyst who used to own it. If your definition of marketing was “produce assets and place them,” then yes, that function is being automated, and a lot of it should be.
But that was never the job. That was the output of the job.
What AI cannot do is decide who the customer is. It cannot walk into a room and know that the room is wrong. It cannot tell you that the campaign is technically correct and emotionally dead. It cannot sit across from a founder and say the thing nobody else will say, which is that the product is fine and the story is the problem.
Marketing is a consumer science, and the science part is increasingly automated. The consumer part is not. Human beings do not buy on a spreadsheet. They buy because something made them feel understood, and understanding people is not a task you can prompt your way into.
Every model is trained on what already happened. That makes it excellent at the average and useless at the exception. Marketing that works is almost always the exception, the choice that looked wrong in the deck and right in the market. That judgment sits in a person, and right now the companies cutting the seat are cutting the person who holds it.
The seat gets more valuable, not less
Here’s the part I’d put in front of a board.
When execution gets cheap, execution stops being a differentiator. Everyone has the same tools. Everyone can produce the same volume at the same quality on the same day. The floor came up and the ceiling didn’t move.
Which means the only remaining advantage is the stuff that was never automatable in the first place. Taste. Judgment. Knowing which customer to pick. Knowing what to say to them. Knowing when the number is telling you a lie. Knowing that a brand is a promise and that promises compound only if someone keeps them consistently for longer than a fiscal year.
That’s a person. That’s the seat. And it’s worth more now than it was when the job was mostly production management, not less.
Cutting the CMO in 2026 is like firing your architect because the construction got faster.
What I’d tell you now
If you’re a CEO, a founder, or an investor sitting on a board and the CMO conversation is on the agenda, here’s the short version.
Define the mandate before you hire. The single biggest predictor of a short tenure is a role nobody scoped. If you can’t write down what this person owns and what winning looks like in eighteen months, you’re not hiring a CMO. You’re hiring someone to blame.
Give it longer than a fiscal year. Brand compounds. Demand converts. Those run on different clocks and you need both. Judging a brand investment on a quarterly cycle is how you end up funding the same repositioning four times in a decade.
Stop confusing the tool with the function. AI made the executional layer nearly free. That is a reason to hire better judgment, not less of it.
And understand what you’re actually cutting. When you eliminate the seat, you don’t eliminate the work. You distribute it to people who are already busy, none of whom own the customer, and all of whom will optimize their piece of it correctly while the whole thing drifts.
A company without a CMO doesn’t stop marketing. It just stops deciding what it means.
Blake J. Lopez
Miami · Los Angeles · New York · Dubai
Sources
[1] Spencer Stuart CMO Tenure Study, via Adweek, “Why CMO Tenure Remains Stubbornly Short” (January 2026). CMO tenure at S&P 500 companies stands at 4.1 years in 2025, down from 4.3 in 2024, against a C-suite average of 5 years; CEOs 7.6 years, CFOs 4.7 years. https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/why-cmo-tenure-remains-stubbornly-short/
[2] Reality Blurb, “Boz Saint John calls out Andy Cohen for his skeptical reaction to her CMO career during the RHOBH reunion.” https://realityblurb.com/2026/05/01/boz-saint-john-calls-out-andy-cohen-for-his-skeptical-reaction-to-her-cmo-career-during-rhobh-reunion-as-andy-responds/
[3] Art Threat, “Bozoma Saint John calls out Andy Cohen at RHOBH reunion over CMO career skepticism.” https://artthreat.net/27297-45490-bozoma-saint-john-calls-out-andy-cohen-at-rhobh-reunion-over-cmo-career-skeptici/
[4] Spencer Stuart CMO Tenure Study 2025; Forbes, “Rising CMO Tenure Signals Shift In C-Suite Dynamics.” Roughly 65% of departing Fortune 500 CMOs are promoted internally or move to comparable or better roles. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerdooley/2025/03/14/rising-cmo-tenure-signals-shift-in-c-suite-dynamics/
[5] Fortune, “Chief marketing officer roles are disappearing at Fortune 500 companies” (January 2024). Per Spencer Stuart, 71% of the Fortune 500 has a marketing chief, down from 74% in 2009. Companies that eliminated the standalone CMO role include Lowe’s, Hyatt, McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, Uber, and Lyft. https://fortune.com/2024/01/16/chief-marketing-officer-cmo-fortune-500-disappearing/
[6] CNBC, “McDonald’s, Uber and Johnson & Johnson no longer have chief marketing officers — here’s what that means” (July 2019). https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/25/mcdonalds-uber-and-jj-have-removed-the-chief-marketer-role---heres-why.html McDonald’s reinstated the role less than a year later and later expanded its remit, per Fortune (see [5]).