Before and now
The CMO role: Before, the job was choosing technology vendors, choosing agencies, measuring campaign and pipeline results, optimizing for performance, and delegating the technical layer without asking too many questions about how it worked underneath.
Now, the job includes understanding what obligations each AI system you bring in actually carries. Demanding transparency from vendors before you sign, not after. Documenting why you use each AI system for the decisions that matter. Knowing when a customer needs to be told they’re talking to an AI. Sharing this responsibility with your CTO and your AI lead, rather than handing it off entirely to another department.
None of this replaces the commercial judgment that got you here. It sits on top of it.
CMO Governance can no longer be delegated away
The work of marketing and sales hasn’t turned into a legal function. What’s changed is that some decisions that used to be purely commercial are now also governance decisions. Which model scores your leads. System decides your customer’s next offer. Tools generates the content your brand puts in front of a regulator, a partner, or a client.
You don’t need a new department to handle this. You need someone in your team who carries the question, and a partner who can already answer it when asked.
Mainkore operates over 200 variables per decision, in 20 milliseconds, 24/7, across more than 12,000 campaigns, with performance guaranteed by contract. Being evaluated on those terms is not new for us. Being clear about what that means under a legal framework is simply the next layer of the same standard.
