Architects of Tomorrow: The CMO’s Guide to Leveraging AI in 2026

More than $20 billion in digital ad spend disappears every year. That number has become impossible for CMOs to ignore, and it’s driving a new consensus around AI. Thankfully, after years of budget leakage, AI is finally creating the direct line between marketing dollars and business outcomes.

This new trajectory was a throughline at The Female Quotient’s AI Summit, where Christina Cubeta, Scope3’s Chief Marketing Officer, joined leaders from Mastercard, Ford, and Dentsu to discuss the future of marketing in an AI-first world. But the implications extend far beyond a single conversation.

Weeks later, the same theme was reinforced at Scope3’s AI Stewardship Salon with The WIE Suite, where 20 female leaders in AI gathered to explore responsible deployment, governance, and cross-functional change.

Agentic capabilities will be transformative, or as Christina put it, “the great reckoning for the CMO position.” What’s happening now represents a foundational shift in how marketing operates and a once-in-a-generation chance to rebuild for clarity, creativity, and growth. Here are five tips that will help CMOs build a better tomorrow for the entire media ecosystem in 2026 and beyond.

1. Regain control of marketing spend

Teams today chase attribution with imperfect tools and budgets leak across misaligned channels. In the background, consumer behavior is shifting faster than legacy infrastructure can keep up.

AI is the mechanism that helps tie spend directly to outcomes.

For example, AI systems can now redirect spend in the moment, shifting dollars away from low-quality impressions or content misaligned with brand values. At the same time, AI restores financial visibility by surfacing waste patterns across channels that humans simply can’t see.

This infrastructure lays the rails for smarter, more sustainable buying, where CMOs gain a direct view of performance measurements as they run, not weeks after they close. In a word, AI is giving CMOs a level of control the industry has never had before.

2. Amplify human creativity

For all the headlines about automation, one of the biggest untapped value is still creative—preserving it, that is.

Right now, most creative gets diluted in the delivery process. Targeting reduces people to demographic shorthand, and media decisions happen downstream from insight. As a result, personalization becomes templated, losing emotional resonance and failing to connect with consumer behavior.

AI can hold the nuance, texture, and context that human teams already create but often lose on the way to market. It can surface patterns in what resonate and dynamically tailor messaging across channels, all without replacing the insight and intuition of creative teams.

Christina emphasizes that human talent remains essential. As futurist Sinead Bovell said at our AI Stewardship dinner, "…AI are not replacing full workflows," which means it's a tool to extend the reach and impact of our talents' skills and creativity, not a substitute for them. Fellow panelists like Cheryl Guerin, EVP of brand strategy at Mastercard, highlighted how this is already taking shape across the industry. She shared how her team's creativity, learning, and human expertise was integral to the recent launch of their AI card design studio.

As Alex Booker, Co-head of Creative for BBH shared at our recent marketing offsite in a message to his teams, "AI won't replace your job but someone who knows it will."

3. Build trust through transparency

One of the most powerful leadership moves in this transition is simply saying the quiet part out loud: AI is new for everyone, and nobody has it quite figured out yet.

That’s why transparency matters. It builds psychological safety inside teams, establishes credibility with partners, and accelerates standards across the ecosystem.

On the AI Summit stage, Christina discussed how Scope3 has embraced this openly. When AI outputs of an early product release raised concerns, the team updated the system within an hour and shared the changes publicly.

This commitment to transparency echoed strongly at the WIE Suite AI Stewardship Salon, where leaders emphasized the need for clear governance frameworks, open communication, and building trust early in the adoption curve.

Across both conversations, the message was clear: learning in public builds trust at enterprise scale.

4. Design for full orchestration

Today’s systems are fragmented, opaque, and slow. While many teams begin experimenting with AI through isolated tools, the fragmentation itself remains the core problem. CMOs sit at the center of that complexity, accountable for stitching the pieces back together.

This point was echoed across the AI Summit panel, particularly by Amy Thorne, CFO at Dentsu, who emphasized the importance of aligning the vision, the pace of change, and the KPIs that matter. That includes aligning talent, client needs, and operational workflows. As she put it, it’s truly end-to-end.

The path forward lies in connecting every stage of the marketing process into a single, orchestrated system.

A prime example is the recent launch of the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), an open standard enabling AI agents to communicate across platforms. It’s the first step toward end-to-end orchestration, where media, creative, and context finally share one language.

Not only will AI make tasks faster, but it will reshape entire workflows. CMOs who think end-to-end orchestration in mind will pull ahead of those who chase time savings alone.

5. Be a “learn-it-all”

The leaders who thrive in this era will be the ones creating a culture where curiosity outweighs certainty. That means not always having the most answers.

This philosophy came to life at both the AI Summit and the Stewardship Salon, where senior leaders from across industries gathered not to declare expertise, but to learn together. It’s a model for how modern CMOs can cultivate continuous learning inside their organizations.

Christina calls this moving from “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all.” This mindset shift has practical implications, including:

• Regular AI demos
• Documenting decisions to build institutional knowledge
• Continuously evolving risk frameworks
• Integrating experimentation with performance

In other words, it’s not all about defending budgets. Instead, leading organizational learning makes CMOs even more essential to the CEO. If you want to see how this mindset is already paying off in practice, discover how leading CMOs are leveraging the agentic advantage in our case study hub.

The shift to agentic starts now

AI is allowing marketing to increasingly prove its value with clarity and confidence. But it requires the courage to rethink workflows, rebuild infrastructure, and let go of the incremental in favor of what’s possible.

As Christina said at the AI Summit, agentic is bound to be "one of the biggest growth drivers since social media." From the AI Summit to the WIE Suite Salon, it’s clear that leaders across the industry are already preparing for this shift together.

If you want the deeper conversation, you can watch the full panel here.

And if your team is starting its AI-first transformation, Scope3 is ready to help.