Sign in with Google The unrealized CMO armageddon and why AI is at ‘the end of the beginning’
In the AI era, marketing should be unstoppable. Its future is being written in real time, and Frontier CMO talks to the leaders shaping it. Join Joshua Spanier, Google’s VP of AI and marketing strategy, in his deep dives with the leaders, marketers, and technologists who are rewriting the playbook. This is a special branded episode of Mixed Signals, presented by Think with Google and produced as part of our partnership by Semafor Brand Studio.
Joshua Spanier joins as a guest of Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast hosted by Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith.
Google VP of marketing and Frontier CMO podcast host Josh Spanier joins Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semafor, on the Mixed Signals podcast to talk about the state of marketing today, and why the predicted CMO armageddon for 2026 never happened.
Ben asks Josh why he thinks even sophisticated advertisers are only a few meters into the AI race and how Google uses incrementality and thousands of AI-generated budget scenarios to prove what’s working. They also get into Josh’s daily watch channel, what CMOs learn by being forced to post every day, and a lightning round of Signal or Noise.
Three lessons from the conversation stand out for marketing leaders.
The first is to build strategy around real business challenges rather than industry forecasts. Josh tells Ben that he is “very wary of future trend predictions,” because “invariably they all go horribly wrong.” He encourages CMOs to start with the specific problems their companies face and then work out how AI can help solve them, instead of adopting off-the-shelf solutions from consultants or the wider industry.
The second is to shift the question from what AI is doing to marketing to what marketers can do with AI. Early conversations about AI centered on job security and cost cutting. The most effective CMOs now see AI as a way to remove the constraints of budget, time, and headcount that have always limited good ideas. One Google creative team, for example, used Veo and Flow to produce a claymation-style ad inspired by “Wallace & Gromit” in six weeks, a project that would typically take about a year.
The third is that credibility comes from hands-on experience. As expectations of the role keep rising, teams and executives can quickly tell which leaders truly understand the technology. Josh recommends that CMOs build several AI agents themselves, because that firsthand experience earns real credibility with their teams and CEOs.
Watch the full conversation with Ben Smith, and check out all the Frontier CMO podcast episodes on our YouTube playlist.
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