CMOs face a make-or-break moment as digital channels and personalization collapse | MarTech

""The foundations CMOs once relied on are eroding fast, from how teams operate to how brands earn trust and drive growth," Sharon Cantor Ceurvorst and Ewan McIntyre write in Leadership Vision for 2026: Chief Marketing Officer." "In 2026, CMOs face a pivotal choice: Bolt AI onto legacy systems and risk irrelevance, or embrace the opportunity to build what comes next.""

"The finding is counterintuitive: the most heavily used and most historically effective digital channels are now the least stable. Channels like search, display and social-cornerstones of modern marketing investment-are facing accelerating obsolescence. This is due in part to how generative AI is fundamentally altering how customers search for information, discover brands and make decisions. What's replacing the human-driven marketing journey is an "agentic" one-where AI-powered tools perform tasks on behalf of customers, mediating their exposure to brands."

"Dig deeper: How AI just nuked marketing as we know it This shift challenges not only channel tactics, but the logic of decades of marketing strategy. "The digital channels most at risk from AI disruption are the ones with the highest historical spend and impact," the authors write. As a result, CMOs must now rebuild their channel strategies from scratch, using a "zero-based" approach that does not assume the past predicts the future."

Digital channels and personalized engagement are breaking down as generative AI changes how customers find information, discover brands and make decisions. Highly relied-upon channels like search, display and social face accelerating obsolescence as AI creates agentic journeys that mediate brand exposure. That disruption undermines decades of channel logic and requires zero-based channel planning that does not assume past spend predicts future impact. Marketing is taking on broader responsibility amid AI, cross-functional demands and market volatility while resources remain constrained, forcing CMOs to choose between patching legacy systems with AI or building new, future-ready capabilities.

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