By 2030, the creative CMO will return, but with revenue accountability

Picture a marketing leader in the FMCG era of the 1990s. Their day began with creative briefs, storyboards spread across conference tables, and debates over which celebrity would embody their brand's spirit. Fast forward to 2010, and that same leader stared at dashboards tracking click-through rates, conversion funnels, and attribution models. The creative instinct remained, but it had been joined by an uncomfortable companion: the spreadsheet.

Today, as 2026 unfolds, that leader faces something more disorienting. Marketing budgets have stagnated at 7.7% of company revenue according to Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey, with 59% of CMOs saying they lack sufficient funds to execute their strategy. Yet India's advertising industry grew 8.3% in 2025 to reach Rs 1,21,339 crore, with digital advertising now commanding 59% of all spends at Rs 71,621 crore, per dentsu's Digital Advertising Report 2026. The market is expanding, money is moving, but marketing leaders are being asked to do more with less.

And then there's AI. McKinsey's 2025 State of AI report found that 88% of organisations now use AI regularly in at least one business function, with marketing among the top three functions seeing the most impact. Generative AI has moved from novelty to necessity in less than two years. In fact, 70% prioritise it in marketing for efficiency rather than effectiveness.

The role that once balanced creativity and accountability now faces a third dimension: automation. 

Now, “CMOs will be required to directly contribute to business impact, not just in terms of leads or marketing-qualified leads, but in building trust, credibility, and stronger, less transactional relationships—especially in B2B contexts,” shares Khushboo Chawla, Head of Marketing, Exicom.

But here's the contradiction that defines 2026: CMOs now sit closer to business outcomes than ever before, yet they are losing their seats at the executive table. Spencer Stuart's research shows the number of CMOs at Fortune 500 companies dropped by 8% from 2023 to 66% in 2024. As marketing becomes more business-critical, the marketing leader becomes less visible. By 2030, this tension will either resolve or rupture entirely.

The creative CMO returns (But not the one you remember)

As we move toward 2030, something unexpected is happening. The creative CMO is making a comeback. Not the Mad Men-era creative director who relied on intuition and cultural zeitgeist alone, but something different. Something the algorithms cannot replicate.

"With AI taking over volume-driven tasks, the role of generative AI will largely be to generate at scale. But creativity sits at a very specific intersection, between the customer, the market, and the context, and that is where humans still have an edge," explains Chawla. 

When she talks about creative flair for CMOs, she's not referring to advertising creativity alone. It's about the ability to deeply understand the customer, the audience, and the business need, and then use creative thinking as a means to an end. Advertising agencies often bring creativity as the end product, their core talent. But agencies may not be as deeply embedded in the business context.

Think about what AI can actually do. It can generate a dozen campaign concepts in seconds. It can write body copy that's grammatically perfect. It can even analyse which creative elements historically drove the most engagement. What it cannot do is understand why a particular customer segment in Tier II India responds differently to value messaging than one in metro markets. It cannot grasp why a category's buying barriers exist or what motivates a new market entrant's strategy. 

"Creativity without context is meaningless, and context is something AI fundamentally struggles with," Chawla notes. “The need will move away from purely operational marketers to more intelligent marketers—people with judgment, clarity, and the ability to brief AI effectively.”

This is where the role expands into territory that CEOs and CFOs simply cannot occupy. They can read financial statements, approve budgets, and set strategic direction. But they cannot create the cultural understanding that turns a product into a preference, or a service into a story. 

McKinsey research on the CMO's role found that when there's a single, integrated customer-centric executive in the top team, growth improves by 2.3 times. The creative CMO who can provide context, not just content, becomes the bridge between what AI generates and what customers actually respond to.

The revenue mandate (And the CEO question)

But here's where it gets complicated. That creative layer matters, but it now exists under intense pressure to prove its financial worth. Research predicts that by 2027, over 40% of CMOs who push for larger brand budgets will lose influence with the C-suite because they will be unable to demonstrate sufficient returns. 84% of companies are stuck in "doom loop," a cycle where underfunded measurement leads to unclear impact, rising scepticism, and tighter budgets.

Nakul Kumar, Co-founder and CMO at Cashify, has watched this pressure reshape the entire function. "By 2030, CMOs will look similar to today on paper, driving growth, brand, and customer experience. The real change will be in how much of this responsibility is directly controllable and measurable," he observes. Today, CMOs still spend significant time strategising, coordinating teams, managing agencies, reviewing outputs, and working with fragmented data. 

With AI automating execution, optimisation, and analysis, day-to-day work will shift toward designing and governing growth systems. CMOs will focus less on supervising activity and more on shaping how data, platforms, pricing, product, and brand interact, owning outcomes with far greater transparency and speed.

To remain credible with CEOs, boards, and tech teams, Kumar notes that CMOs are developing skills to speak the same language across functions. 

“This starts with getting comfortable with numbers such as unit economics, customer lifetime value, margins, and payback periods, so marketing conversations are rooted in business impact rather than activity. Many are also learning how data systems and AI tools actually work beyond surface-level dashboards, enabling informed discussions with engineers and analytics teams.” 

This raises an interesting question: could this evolution position CMOs for the CEO role? The CMO Survey Fall 2024 found that 43.4% of marketers rate it as likely or very likely that a top marketing leader will become CEO. The reality is more nuanced.

Chawla is pragmatic about the possibility. CMOs transitioning into CEO roles is possible, but largely in businesses that are deeply marketing-led. If you look at brands that are built almost entirely on platforms like Instagram, marketing becomes the primary growth driver, with logistics or commerce acting as enablers. In such models, marketers naturally have a stronger chance of moving into CEO roles.

However, for CMOs to realistically be on a CEO trajectory in more traditional or mainstream companies, there is one critical gap to bridge: direct customer exposure. CMOs are otherwise well-positioned. They understand the bigger picture, industry dynamics, and behavioural insights, and often demonstrate strong leadership. 

In certain industries, the dynamic has been different. In telecom, for example, marketing was as valuable as, if not more valuable than, sales. While sales focused on customer acquisition, marketing was responsible for extracting long-term revenue from those customers. As a result, many marketing leaders in telecom went on to become CEOs, says Chawla. 

There are also emerging organisational structures where sales and marketing are combined under a single leadership role, such as a Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. While this creates a clearer pathway for marketers to move into broader leadership roles, Chawla doesn't see this becoming mainstream practice by 2030. There is still some way to go.

The hardest challenge: Smaller teams, bigger expectations

The most difficult aspect of the CMO role by 2030 is this: proving impact while teams shrink and attribution becomes more complex. It's a paradox that CMOs are already beginning to feel. On the one hand, costs will be reduced. 

"The dominant view today is that AI will reduce marketing costs. Teams will shrink, and marketers will be able to accomplish much more with fewer resources. While that is partly true, it's only one side of the story," explains Kumar. 

As AI takes over volume-driven work, the real question becomes: how will brands stand out? Marketing assets, whether content, social posts, or videos, are always a means to an end. Their quality, depth, and creativity shape customer perception, and that impact cannot be ignored. Viewing AI solely as a cost-saving tool risks undermining the true value marketing brings to a business.

Chawla sees this playing out in hiring and team structure. Purely operational roles, focused on churning out content or coordinating with agencies, will quickly become redundant. CMOs will prioritise fewer but more capable marketers. Strong review skills will become increasingly important. Marketers will need to clearly define intent, brief effectively, and critically evaluate whether outputs align with desired outcomes. Reviewing, refining, and anchoring work to strategy will matter more than doing everything manually.

Sumit Puri, VP – Marketing and Central Operations, Tata CLiQ, notes that as the CMO will also be accountable for revenue impact, growth acceleration, and customer lifetime value, “redefining the role with ownership of growth, product decisions, and revenue performance as AI and management expectations reshape the function. The CMO skillset will expand further to include full-fledged data, analytics, growth strategy, product, and customer experience.”

However, CMOs will need to educate leadership on this two-sided view of AI, what it does to costs, but also what it does to quality, ambition, and differentiation.

"While AI will deliver speed, scale, and efficiency, it will not create differentiation. That will continue to come from human insight, cultural understanding, and long-term brand narrative. CMOs will need to protect space for strategic thinking and creative risk-taking, rather than allowing optimisation systems to drive only short-term performance," Kumar reinforces.

Upskilling, the only path forward

If the CMO role is being simultaneously compressed and expanded, with fewer people doing more strategic work under greater scrutiny, then continuous learning becomes not just valuable but existential. "The most important skill marketers need today is the ability to acknowledge how much they still don't know," says Chawla bluntly.

After years of experience, it's not easy to return to learning mode, but continuous learning is no longer optional. Very few people operate in a constant student mindset, and that needs to change. While many are using AI organically in their workflows, far fewer are using it consciously as a learning tool. The World Economic Forum projected that 50% of all employees would need reskilling by 2025 as technology adoption accelerates, with the half-life of professional skills shrinking to just 2.5 years.

“Problem-solving will also become even more critical. Marketers will still be expected to diagnose problems and deliver answers,” Chawla notes. Alongside this, strong judgment and creative flair will be essential: knowing what to accept from AI, what to reject, and how to refine outputs meaningfully.  

Puri of Tata CLiQ sees the skillset expanding. "The most effective CMOs will be those who can translate insight into product innovation and tie every marketing decision directly to business performance. That ability to build a single, integrated growth engine will define leadership success in the decade ahead," he states.

Research depth is another critical skill that needs attention, and marketers will need to bring depth, context, and independent thinking to their work.  

By 2030, the role of a CMO won't disappear. But it will belong only to those who can do what the machines cannot: understand what matters to humans, create meaning from data, and turn insight into action that drives sustainable growth.