What Does a CMO Decide in the Age of AI? What Automates and What Doesn't

Bidding is automated, reports generate themselves, and creative can be produced in minutes. So what is left for people to decide? This article separates marketing decisions into those that can be automated and those that cannot.

Optimisation Is Not the Same as Setting the Objective

This distinction defines the boundary of what automation can do.

Automated bidding makes it clear. Give it a target of lowering CPA and it will adjust bids far better than a person. But it will not judge whether lowering CPA is the right target for your business right now.

Set a CPA-reduction target while trying to reach new customers and delivery drifts toward the existing audience that converts easily. The numbers improve and the business does not move.

What Automation Handles

What you can hand over is fairly clear.

Optimising toward a given target

Bid adjustment, delivery scheduling, narrowing targeting. There is no longer a reason for people to do this work.

Compiling and visualising results

Gathering numbers from each tool and putting them in a table. If people are spending time on this, it is the first thing to automate.

Producing and testing creative at volume

Making several variations, watching the response, narrowing down. This cycle has become far faster.

What to say is a separate matter. Variations of the expression can be automated, but generating candidate messages requires knowing what the customer is struggling with.

Anomaly detection

Catching sudden changes in the numbers. More reliable than a person checking dashboards every day.

What Automation Does Not Handle

This is what becomes the centre of the CMO's job.

What to set as the target

Chase volume this quarter, raise the average value, or try a new market?

This does not come out of past data. It is a judgment informed by the state of the business, competitor movements, and the board's intent.

What to stop

Finding the campaigns with bad numbers can be automated. Whether bad numbers mean you should stop is a different question.

Has it only just launched, is the direction wrong, or has the market shifted? The same number means different things.

Who to aim at

Finding the responsive segments within your existing audience is exactly what automation is good at.

But the decision to go after people you have never reached will not surface, because the data is built only from past contact. Opening a new market is something a person has to initiate.