Every CMO needs an AI marketing champion

Jim Lecinski is a clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and author of “The AI Marketing Canvas” (Stanford Press, 2026), in which this concept originally appeared.

The opinions expressed are his own and may not reflect those of Google.

You’ve heard the phrase, “When something is everyone’s responsibility, it soon becomes no one’s responsibility.” Nowhere is that more true than with marketing organizations and AI.

Here’s the pattern I see across big global brands and smaller companies: Marketing teams embrace AI; tool adoption and training spike; experimentation begins. Yet real change stalls in pilot purgatory. Marketing, IT, data science, procurement, agencies, legal — everyone owns a slice, but no one owns the outcome. Activity rises, but real impact lags.

The lesson is clear: AI transformation is mostly a change management challenge, not a technology challenge, which means it’s an ownership challenge.

The CMOs I see scaling AI successfully share one defining move. They name a single accountable owner. I call this person the “AI Marketing Champion.” Every great movement needs a hero, and the Champion is the person who will turn your scattered pilots into sustained, scalable progress across your marketing organization.

Modern AI adoption crosses every boundary and touches every team. Marketing has to redesign workflows. IT handles integration and security. Data teams manage data quality and model governance. Finance looks at investment trade-offs. Agencies and vendors bring new skills. No coordination, no momentum.

That’s the Champion’s job: keep momentum moving week to week. In practice, Champions identify the highest-value marketing use cases, assemble the nimble, lean cross-functional teams to deliver them, and run a test-and-learn portfolio with clear priorities, owners, budgets, and success metrics. They translate ambition into executive-ready business cases, with ROI, risk, and resourcing spelled out. Together with the CMO, they decide what to build, what to buy, and what to stop. And they celebrate wins and scale those winning plays across the marketing organization.

The biggest lift is cultural, not technical. Champions make it smoother for your marketing team to progress with AI. They show the practical benefits and help colleagues navigate uncertainty. Over time, teams won’t just “use” or “adopt” AI. AI will become central, making their work easier and more effective in big ways.

The Champion is rarely a net-new, full-time hire. Often the Champion wears a second hat alongside their existing leadership role. Credibility and cross-functional pull matter more than title.

The best Champions share a few traits. They’re bilingual in marketing and technology. They have strong program management instincts and communicate well. They build relationships across silos and persist with grit when friction appears. Above all, they put rapid learning over perfect planning.

One example: The CMO of a large restaurant chain I worked with was struggling to make AI progress happen. They decided to name their most data-fluent and process-minded marketing director as their AI Marketing Champion. Quickly, clear use cases, tools, and partners were identified, teams were rapidly trained, and best practices were regularly shared. AI adoption soared. Cycle times decreased, and most importantly, the team’s KPIs showed real improvement, now powered by AI.

Here’s a simple question for you: Who is the single person on your team who wakes up every Monday responsible for moving AI adoption forward across marketing?

If the answer is unclear, or if it’s “everyone,” then it’s time for a change. Naming an AI Marketing Champion doesn’t guarantee success. But failing to name one guarantees slow progress. Technology makes transformation possible, but only clear ownership can deliver it.

Frontier CMOs understand this. As always, it’s about people. Empower the right AI Champion, set a weekly cadence, and ask them to drive a measurable portfolio of use cases. That’s when you’ll turn random experimentation into consistent execution, speed up team-wide adoption, and move your marketing team from learning about AI to winning with it.