Killing Vanity Metrics: How AI Just Blew Up The CMO Job | Next to Lead

This is so much bigger than marketing. AI is transforming the chief marketing officer's job. What once was brand and advertising, now is revenue. It's product, it's data, and it's so much more. You are accountable for driving total revenue, for driving deposits, for driving credit cards. AI touches about a quarter of marketing work, and companies expect that to pass half within just three years. This new idea of being a marketer who is orchestrating agents and orchestrating workflows. CMOs are now being tasked with driving growth. And even with flat budgets, marketing leaders are finding creative ways to own that growth engine like never before. We are going to hold ourselves accountable for the business outcomes, even if it feels uncomfortable. Even if I might say, well, I don't control all the revenue levers. Well, guess what? No one does. So giddy up. Payoff can be lucrative with a seat at the very top. So how do you hold what's become an increasingly powerful seat in the C-suite when facing so much uncertainty? At CanLions, I pose that very question to the marketing chiefs of Slack, Zoom, Slalom, and TD Bank. I'm Ruth Umo, and this is Fortune Next Lead. Today's discussion is one most marketing leaders are already having behind closed doors, but rarely sharing in public, because the reality is that while the CMO title hasn't changed, the mandate for CMOs certainly has. As many of you here in the audience can attest to, today's CMO is being asked to drive enterprise growth, while the very systems underneath all of you are being rebuilt in real time. It's an interesting time. It's a fun time. We're seeing seismic shifts. Customer journeys are changing. Teams are changing. Technology is certainly changing. Expectations are changing. And as you all can certainly attest to, accountability is only increasing for marketing chiefs. So that's the very tension we are here to talk about today. Now, without further ado, I'd love to introduce my panelists here on stage with me. Sitting directly to my left, Sangeeta Prasad, Chief Marketing Officer at Slalom. Her fan base is here. Right here. Ryan Gavin, Chief Marketing Officer at Slack. I have PTSD from those Slack pings, by the way. Kimberly Storin, Chief Marketing Officer at Zoom. Thanks. And Jenny Platt, Chief Marketing Officer at TD Bank US. All right, let's kick off by discussing what the CMO job is now. CMOs have always been responsible for growth. What feels different now, I think, is a level of accountability relative to the amount of control that marketing chiefs have. So I'd love to hear from each of you. When did you realize that your jobs had fundamentally changed? And how has that shifted or changed what you're now prioritizing as leaders? Please, kick things off. Hi, everyone. Great to be here. So one of the things about the CMO job has been changing forever. We have had more changes, if you look across the C-suite, than any other role. The CFO role has been pretty much constant. But the CMO role has continued to change. The thing that I think seems a little different this time is the blurriness of the borders around which we have responsibility. So it feels like marketing has become less of a function, more of a growth engine. And with that, the lines around what marketing does is different everywhere across companies. So for example, when I started in marketing, sales enablement, there was no question where sales enablement sat. It sat in sales. That's why it's called sales enablement. But now, many marketing leaders have sales enablement under their remit. In some organization, marketing reports into technology. So there's so much change in what we're doing that within the C-suite, we used to be CMOs have to be best friends with CFO. Well, now we have to be best friends with CTOs, head of sales, CFOs. Like, we have to build relationships across in order to do our jobs. Is that blurring of the CMO's role? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? One could argue, great. Your remit has certainly expanded. I think it's exciting. But what that means for us is we have to be very focused and clear with our teams in terms of what they're responsible for, what the expectations are. And we have to build teams that are agile and can pivot based on the questions and the needs of the business. But I think it's a good time. Listen, anyone who's ever spent any time with me knows that no marketer that works anywhere around me can own anything except for an outcome in the marketplace. Like, everyone has to be outcome-oriented, whether it's growing share, revenue, top line, bottom line. And, you know, that's not changed. But, you know, if you think about it, particularly B2B marketing at its most simplistic, its job is pretty simple. Like, you've got two major levers on either side of you. You've got the product, and then you've got sales. Like, those are massive levers. And marketing's job is to amplify and accelerate those two big levers, like, at its most fundamental. And I think what's changed, and, you know, is those levers are moving faster than ever before. Like, I'm watching product teams that are building in literally days and building in the open, creating new features and capabilities and releasing those out. And the question is, how do you have a marketing system, an engine, an orchestration that keeps up with that? On the other side, you have sales, which can get a lead from a website, could convert that lead, qualify it with an agent, and have someone on the phone within minutes. And how do you have a system that's going to support that level of real-time engagement, where, like, infinite segmentation is now a real thing? You can think about, like, everyone can be targeted at a personal level. So the full marketing system kind of has to be rethought for this world, where the two levers on either side of marketing are moving unbelievably fast. So it's both exciting, terrifying, and all the things. So I think of it as a little bit different, which is that marketing's job is to be the voice of and the voice to the market. And I think our ING has really limited us. It's made us execution in nature, right? Marketing, there's no chief producting officer, there's no chief selling officer, but there's a chief marketing officer. And that has really put us in this position of, like, what tactics and tools, what's in your toolbox? And you really just focus, when you have an ING, on being the voice to the market. And I think what's really exciting is that now we're seen as the voice of the market and the voice to the market, which means that we are in front of customers more frequently. We are leading market insights. We are owning not just product marketing, but in many cases, communication. We are listening to the market every single day, and we're bringing those insights back into the organization to stimulate growth, not just within our own team, but to bring those insights to product, and in some cases, sales, and to really represent both sides of that coin. And so, you know, I'm an advocate for dropping that ING, like, let's focus on the market. And that's how we can really start to be that driver and accelerant of sustainable growth. Love it. Love to go last on this. Now, I can build on everything all of my peers said, but I mean, I agree with you. I also think of it as marketing's job is to be the voice of the customer. And I think this is such an exciting change in the mandate of the CMO, because it really feels like this shift from operating in a vertical to needing to work horizontally. And for me, the trigger moment, back to the question, is recognizing that in order to win with consumers these days, given where expectations are, where experiences are going, this is all about customer experience and end-to-end customer experience and building trust. And so for marketing, we can't just win by optimizing a given product or a given channel or a campaign anymore. We're sort of chief growth officers, chief orchestrators, and the job is really to be that connective tissue across the organization, which requires that we operate very differently and embed ourselves so closely with our product teams, with our channel teams, with our data, with our technology. And that's the shift that I'm feeling. And so the hard part about it is that requires a lot of change management, but I think it's exciting. And when you can inspire your organization and marketers around, your job just got bigger in a really fun way. And now you get to be the growth engine that's gonna connect all of these dots and design horizontally end-to-end. It's a great day to be in marketing. All four of you have said this is an exciting time to be a marketer. Where does the frustration come in? There's still remnants of the ING. And in a lot of ways, we serve a lot of masters, right? We have to work so collaboratively and we have to have a point of view. Otherwise, you get into that situation where you're a service organization. And yes, we wanna serve the organization. We wanna serve the corporation, but we wanna do it with a point of view. In some cases, what's really challenging is you have a lot of masters. You've got the product teams. You've got sales. You've got your GMs. You've got your regional sales. You have your corporate narrative. You've got your people team that you're trying to help. You've got your IR team and your finance team that you're trying to help direct that reputational narrative. And so sometimes you go home. And the customer, right. And then you go home at the end of the day and you're like, whew, that's a lot of collaboration. And so it can be very invigorating, but it can also, you know, it's a lot of people to be working with on a daily basis. I also think sometimes the frustration comes around the systems and processes of an organization. In B2B marketing, often marketing is at the front end of innovation and change, and we're leading the way. And we're working with a lot of internal partners, and not everyone is as innovative as maybe the marketers are. So trying to drive the change can be a frustrating time, even when we know that's the right thing for the customer. One of the gifts I get that's also a curse is, you know, at Slack, you get to work with some incredible leading, like AI companies, some of the, you know, small startups, scale startups, opening eyes and profits, et cetera. And you don't have to go too much farther to see like what the future of work looks like than to get with one of these small companies that's building and innovating, that has no history of 10 different people and groups and silos and all those stuff, and where they're just like, how do we identify every digital touch point? How do we make this as efficient as possible? There's no barriers between customer success, product, marketing. It's all just one system, and it scales. And you sit and you look at that, and you're like, holy beep. And you're like, how do I get this inside of a very large organization that's got, you know, maybe dozens or 20 years of institutional crud that's built up? And so that's the challenge. How do you, you know, use that inspiration and lean into that, but then find the way to transfer that at scale, you know, where you've got a lot of existing infrastructure? Well, and I find that that requires so much influence. And so it's chief change agent, chief growth officer, chief influence officer. And you have to figure out how to speak the language of so many of these different stakeholders. How do I influence this? How I'm going to talk to the CEO maybe different than the CFO, certainly different than my technology team, my product partners, and the need to kind of be able to go pretty deep in each of those areas, I think is critical to success. Shakespeare says, what's in a name? I'd argue that it's quite important. You all have CMO titles. Does that still make sense? Should it be chief growth officer? I mean, should it be something different? Is that limited in any way? I mean, I describe myself as middle marketing overhead. So, you know, I would, if I had my druthers, I would have, you know, marketers referred to as chief growth officers or growth officers. And then I think, you know, I think maybe building on the point of every marketer, you know, honestly, a speech I gave to my team at the beginning of this year, I said, all of you walked in the room and you associated yourself probably with a function. I'm in the social team. I'm a designer. I'm a data scientist. I'm a finance person. And, you know, the push I gave to the team is we all need to lay those titles down in that association because now you're all like go-to-market engineers. And there's nothing that's out of bounds for you. So if you are working on an ad optimization campaign and the data science team has been a bottleneck in the past, that's no longer the case. Go build an agent. Go build your data scientists. Go build out your team. And that change is a big reorientation for, or everyone to really think about themselves as go-to-market engineers, not I'm an email specialist or I'm an events person. Sangeeta, let's make this a bit more granular as we lean into this topic of accountability. You spent your career at some of the most iconic and strongest brands, P&G, Amex, JP Morgan. You're now leading marketing for a company where trust and credibility are arguably the product. What role does marketing play in creating confidence when customers are ultimately buying expertise rather than something that's tangible? That's a really good question. And that's the question that every service company has, right, the people and the trust you build is really how you develop business. At the same time, I see marketing and branding being the other side of the coin. So the marketing part of it comes in as creating a trust umbrella so that the individual can become the other part, the other side of the coin in order to drive growth. So we are a growth engine, as I said. Our consultants, every single person in a service company represents the brand, the growth, and marketing. And in a lot of ways, that's much more difficult marketing than the P&Gs of the world, where you have a product, you put it on the shelf, and you market it. Here you have individuals who have to really believe the brand. And luckily at Slalom, we have great people in a very clear essence, which is we're fiercely human. And that helps us drive the trust and build the growth. Let me piggyback off something Jenny said earlier. You said that this role is really one that should in some ways be called the chief influence officer, your change agents. And I think many in the room would agree that one of the defining characteristics of the CMO role is that it's a role of influence. You're accountable for growth, but many of the levers of said growth, whether it's product decisions, pricing, customer experience, certainly tech investments and capital allocation don't sit entirely within your control. I'd love for you to get a bit more specific and give us anecdotes. Walk us through a decision you've made in the last year when you were accountable for the outcome, but not necessarily in control of all of the inputs. I mean, I'll give some examples, but I think it starts with operating model, which we've talked a little bit about. In order to do this effectively and to have influence, for us at TD, it's led to wanting to restructure how we actually work with all of those partners that we need to have at the table. And so like many companies, move to more of an agile kind of pod model. You need your marketer. You need your product person. You need your data technology, digital channels, all working day to day, making decisions and giving marketers the chance to demonstrate and build that credibility and that knowledge. So I think that a lot of the work that we've been doing is to set that foundation and set that operating model in place to be able to influence and speak the language and drive those decisions. I mean, an area I think that is sort of interesting that I always love to talk about is actually sponsorships because it's one where you don't always have the data that you need to sort of make a decision on let's go sponsor this particular team and form this partnership. And it's one where you got to sell because usually they're high dollar transactions. You got to sell the organization on the reason to do it. And I think it's a great example where so much of that has to be, we can't lose the marketer's role as leading with conviction and saying, I know what our culture is all about, what our values are all about. I'm going to select getting us into women's sports or whatever it might be because this is the right thing for us. It's how we're going to be able to show up and give back to our communities and to all of our stakeholders and reach a new customer base that's really important to us. And so it's an example actually where I think marketing can come in and say, hey, this is a territory that you've got to trust me. I need you to see the credibility that I have to know and then use the data as we get it. And sometimes that takes actually getting into the deal and proving things out and demonstrating the ROI over time. But that only works if you've built that operating model and that foundation to have the trust in place with your CFO who has to sign off on it in the first place. That makes sense. And on our side too, as a technology company that is moving, we are fully a system of action now, an AI platform that's really connecting conversations. And as you're seeing with these frontier models and AI native companies, you're moving fast. There's product releases on a daily basis. Zoom had 2,500 product and feature releases last year. And so the agility that comes with that speed, we call it the speed of Zoom. And it truly is. And it requires product and go to market, including marketing and sales to be in connection, working together at every moment because 2,500 features and products in a year is a lot. And no one team would be successful on their own. And we're all influencing each other. But I think, again, going back to my earlier part about being the voice of the market, I think our influence has become more powerful in this agile world because we're able to show up in those pods with a strong point of view around market and customer. And that ultimately is making us go at the speed of Zoom. Can I just add maybe a different perspective, which is that I agree with everything you've said. At the same time, marketing has always been an innovation function. By definition, innovation means doing something you haven't done before, which means you don't have 100% data to support it. So you have to take chances. You have to be creative. You have to have the conviction in order to go out and do it. The good news about today is there's enough data where you can learn quickly what's working, what's not, pivot, and focus on what's working. Give us a, for instance, of when you had to get that buy-in. A great example that we just had to go through is the shift from SEO to AEO. We're all talking about that, right? And our websites have been built to optimize for SEO. And then all these LLMs came in, and we have to change the way we're doing things to optimize for AEO. But LLMs are still figuring out how that works, and we are still figuring out how that works. That doesn't mean we don't do it. We try it, we experiment, we innovate, and we continue to cycle around it. So much of marketing is building the plane while flying it. Exactly. Yeah, I just, I mean, I'll give a strong plus one to, you call them pods, it's Slack, we call them growth squads. You'll never see a marketer feel more empowered when they can start their single-sentence job description leading with an outcome. My job is to grow revenue with the developer segment across the US, et cetera. Like, that is how every marketer's job should start, with a market outcome. And when they're part of a growth squad or a pod, they're with a collective set of individuals that can own an input metric that is responsible for an output metric. And that's a really powerful model. The other thing I'll say just to, maybe to add on this conversation is, when we think about outcomes in marketing, we have to be really careful and be honest with ourselves. If you polled all of the respective peer organizations that we get to work with, on the revenue side, on the product side, I bet you they would call BS on 50% of the metrics that marketing uses in KPIs. Marketing math, 100%. I also think we sometimes call BS on 50% of the metrics. I mean, there's a lot of vanity marketing metrics that continue to get used out there, MDP, blah, blah, and they can all just make you look good and make the team look good and they can all be meaningless. And so one of the things that we have to do, I think, in this era is say, we are going to hold ourselves accountable for the business outcomes, even if it feels uncomfortable. Even if I say, well, I don't control all the revenue levers. Well, guess what? No one does. So giddy up. Let's get after it. Take accountability for it and be willing to let go of some of those vanity metrics that might've made us feel good, but maybe not move the needle. Can I always say that marketing can never be green if the business is red or vice versa? And we used to live in a world where marketing would show that scorecard and be like, we're green. And you're like, no, the business is not green right now. So I love what you're saying. Well, yeah, I was going to go to the same place real quick, it's been amazing that actually fairly recently at TD, the conversation has really shifted where my business partners, our leadership is saying, I don't want to hear about marketing-driven sales anymore. Like you are accountable for driving total revenue, for driving deposits, for driving credit cards. Amazing. That's a huge tipping point. We're past the stage of needing to convince the business that we should have credibility to even be in the market and be putting things out there. We are being expected to be just as accountable for the top line metrics as our business partners. And that's awesome. I mean, that gives you so much runway to lean in and say, I have more power than I had in the past. And my job is to help orchestrate this growth across everything that we do, not just the silo of traditional marketing. One of you said at the top of the conversation that you now have to be best friends with your chief product officer, your CIO, your CTO. In journalism, we say as reporters that we are the voice of the reader. You all are the voice, the representative of the consumer. So how are you collaborating with your chief product officer? What does that new relationship look like, particularly in the AI era? I mean, I've said for years, I don't think this is a new thing, but the product is the marketing, the marketing is the product. And if you've got lines between them, you're in trouble. And so that means that if marketing is not sitting there building and thinking about building and we get to see a lot of amazing companies, OpenAI, Anthropics, et cetera, show the way of what does it mean to build in the open? And when you build in the open, something really cool happens. Everyone has just become a builder. So it used to be, you know, the building was the domain of product and engineering. It's like, well, guess what? No longer the case. So you're building on a project. You're in a Slack channel. The marketing team is building that project. The finance team has an input. The customer success team has an input. Everyone is now a builder. And that's a really powerful shift. And it uncorks a ton of potential in the organization that was previously untapped. When you have someone who's sitting with customers every day and they're watching the product being built live, talking with the team, and they can input in that moment, you get a better product. And so it's a cool time for marketers to lean in and be like, your job's not marketing. Your job is to go build with the product. Your job is to go sell with sellers. And we do that in the open. We do it together. Just to connect it maybe to the AI conversation. I think what's really interesting back to SEO and the world of SEO and how you used to be able to win in that and kind of game the system and that was marketing's job. We know that those days are over. And now as we learn our way into how you show up in LLMs, one of the first insights that I'm really focused on is this is so much bigger than marketing. In order to show up effectively in a world of LLMs, we need obviously great content, but we need outstanding products and pricing and offers. And we need people to be talking about our products and doing ratings and reviews and showing up in different channels than we focused on before like Reddit. That requires that we are hip-to-hip with our product leads, with our channel leads, with everybody who needs technology that needs to be in that ecosystem to say what does it take for your brand to actually show up in the world of AI. I love what Jenny said. And just building on that, because marketing is becoming more of a growth engine, our goals are aligned to what the product team's goals, the sales goals. And so it's not like this is what marketing's doing and this is what someone else, another team is doing. We're all aligned in our go-to-market focus and the growth focus. All right, so let's get a little spicy. You all say there's a lot of cross-functional collaboration. You're very omnipresent in some ways. If you could permanently own an additional function beyond marketing, what would it be? Product. I would say digital, end-to-end digital. Yeah, I was gonna say digital, but they just gave me that like two weeks ago. So I'm like, ----. Here's one that may be a hot take. I would love to really go deep in customer success because I think the truth sits there. And I think that voice does not make its way back to the products, to the sales, as much as into marketing, as much as it should, at least in our case. I just was with a CMO who owns marketing and customer experience, like the customer support teams. And I thought that was fascinating. I was going to say customer experience. So marketing plus customer experience, which includes solutions and services for us because we're a service company. Why don't we just have marketing, product, digital, and CX? I mean, that's the new role. Why don't we all just be CEOs? Let's just be CEOs. And PDS. We've talked extensively about what it feels like to lead. I don't wanna say without control because you certainly have control, but without full control internally, I am curious about externally. How has this shift changed what you demand from agency partners and vendors? Well, hot take. We don't use a lot of agency partners and that's really changing for us. We are working directly. And the reason for that is? We just work directly with the influencers, the creators. Even with our ad campaign, Zoom Ahead, we work directly with Colin Jost himself and his production team and didn't have a brand agency. So we feel like we can represent that authentic product truth and brand truth. And we want to be able to work with the creatives directly to bring that message to market. And whether it's what we're doing with social influencers, we launched a new ambassador program yesterday, or what we're doing even at the, I know the funnel doesn't exist, the gumball, right? Whatever you wanna call it. The top of the funnel with our brand campaign, we're going directly to the creative source. I don't know that it links back to control, but I think we are changing our relationships with agencies driven by technology and AI. I didn't want to use AI, but I think it's real. And we are evaluating what we can do internally versus what we need agencies for. And by definition, that's changing our relationship. This is the most popular time in the history of marketing to ask for budget. No, this is like the worst time in the history of marketing to ask for budget. Like, what are you talking about? Like, that's the last thing you ever wanna do at this moment. So. Says it with a straight face. Yeah, I was just saying, I was like seeing who was listening. Hello, hello. You know, the reality is, you know, we spend, many companies, their most important asset is what? Like, what's the thing they spend their most money on? It's their people. What can happen when you can make your people 2X, 3X, 4X more productive? It can be the one of the best drivers for top line growth a company has ever seen. So you talk about like agencies and speed. This is really about, you've got a lot of assets. Most of us have an embarrassing amount, a lot of assets. How do we maximize their potential? How do we take away the work of work? The stuff that's not adding value and get that focused on what's delivering for the company. And when you can do that, it's all about speed. And it turns out something funny happens. It's not like people work less. Let's just be honest. There's no four day work weeks in our future, at least not in mine. But people enjoy their work more because they're not doing the crap stuff. I'm spending two hours preparing for an internal meeting and here's your briefing doc, blah, blah, blah. They're doing stuff that's instantly adding value to customers or adding value to the business. And then you see people light up. People love their jobs. So that's that. I agree with all of that. My agency's right here. So they can hold me to what I say here. How to win these days has got to be on end-to-end customer experience. And the way I see it is we are really working closely with our agency as an extension of our team to help us with that. As people's time gets freed up because we can do brief writing faster and use AI tools for content creation, we all need to be spending more time on outside-in thinking, customer insights, understanding what's happening in competitive trends, figuring out how we can design more horizontally, end-to-end and influence our partners. And I think for me, that means pushing our agency, working with our agency to be by our side and really help bring in a lot of those insights. As all of you have become increasingly accountable for business outcomes, and Ryan, you already kind of alluded to this, but I'd love to double click. What's changed about how you define success for yourselves personally? Jenny, maybe we'll kick off with you this time around. Well, I think it goes back to being really excited to be out of the world of marketing metrics as my scorecard. And I have alignment with my leadership team and my CEO that that's absolutely what is expected of me. I am completely aligned with the business metrics and with the investor day targets that we've set, just like my product and digital peers are. But that does put more pressure. And it does mean that you have less control over that ultimate outcome and that it all comes back to being the chief influencer officer because you got to get all that done. I think you have more control if you have the data and the analytics. Yeah, in some ways, but you're not operating in kind of just the marketing swim lane with the outcomes that you can completely control through the efforts that your team delivers. But I think the biggest thing that's changed about my leadership is not just me being sort of excited and leaning into owning those metrics. It's how do I get my whole marketing team on board and how do I help them feel excited, comfortable and excited that now the job is different and bigger and more complex and they all need to have accountability and lean into the overall business metrics as well, which is a change management curve that you got to kind of ride. So I have a personal scorecard as a good CMO and it's three things. Like, am I driving business value? And do I feel like I can stand up and say I'm driving business value? We had the conversation internally recently. Somebody was asking for more resources and I said, can I stand up in front of the executive staff and say that we have made this function so efficient that it's now time? And the answer is no. So am I driving business value? Am I having fun? And am I learning something new and taking calculated risks every day? And if those three things are not happening, then personally and also professionally, like, it's not a great space. So I'm always working to maximize those three levers. I love that. I'm stealing that. Got to have fun. If you don't have fun, we spend too much time at work. Yeah, I'll go maybe a different direction just because I love that. I think it's easy, I'll just speak for myself, sometimes at my level to talk about owning business outcomes and being responsible for driving those top line metrics. But you take yourself all the way down to maybe a recent college graduate. They've come in, they're working on a particular area that can feel a little daunting to ground themselves in something that feels maybe so far removed from maybe the work they're working on. And that's both an opportunity and a transformation. How do you get those individuals in the organization to go and feel like they can get their job connected into the other functions that they need to influence? Again, marketing's job is so much about influencing the levers around us to do the right thing. I would say it's awesome if you have an amazing idea, but if it doesn't land on one of the levers that's actually going to move the business, you didn't do anything. And so teaching our marketers how to have that influence and impact from day one, such that they feel like they can move the needle on those outcomes. In some cases, that's a real new skill because let's be honest, so many people, particularly more junior in the organization, have defined themselves by the activity they do. ING. Yeah, and that's death. And that will, it was bad before and it's going to be worse now. And so we got to take that all the way down in the organization. And that's a leadership thing that we need to go do. It's a cultural thing that we need to go do. It's a change management thing. I feel like going last year isn't great, but I agree with what everyone said. I look at it in a very simple way. Am I and is my team driving short to medium-term growth and long-term value for the company? And if we're not, what can we do differently to do that? But I'm going to add fun to that. And are we having fun while we do it? The hardest part right now I feel like for me is to get my entire team to think in terms of business metrics versus marketing metrics. Because as everyone said, they all grow up with leads and impressions and we have to kill those terms and build credibility around growth, share, revenue, sales. Let's talk headcounts. It seems as though a lot of companies are slashing marketing functions. I'm curious whether as you look at your respective companies, is the marketing team growing? Is it shrinking? If it is shrinking, does it really matter? If you are hiring, where are you leaning in? Give us some insight there. So at least for us right now, we don't see AI replacing headcount. We see it truly as an accelerant. But we're also not actively increasing headcount. We are looking at how AI becomes part of our day-to-day life and really being that superpower. And ultimately, we're seeing roles change. And so you're starting to see different titles start to emerge, marketing engineer, go-to-market engineer. And you can add a million terms there. And you're seeing people kind of falling into different buckets, right? You still have the strategists. You still have the folks that are QAing. But now you have this new idea of being a marketer who is orchestrating agents and orchestrating workflows. And so I think the function is shifting. And I think the skills within the function are shifting. And so sometimes it feels like marketing is not the same size of organization. But some of those skills are just changing. And it might not be the traditional marketing skill set that you've always hired. I agree. I think we're in a very similar place to what you described. And I think we know in general, obviously, some jobs will be lost. Others will be created. But my view is that in most cases, at least in the near term, it's more about evolution of existing jobs and people needing to learn new skills, leaning into the technology. Suddenly, we have these agents that we're going to need to manage. And so I think where I'm really focused with my team is on that encouragement for people to want to lean in and want to learn and be curious. Because I think that if you're open to that kind of change, more likely you're going to figure out, I get to stop doing these things in my job. Now I have more free time to do this. Now I need to learn this skill. And that's where we're going to win is if we can get the vast majority of our organization being very nimble and flexible to how their role needs to adapt to the new ecosystem. Yeah. Big plus one. I mean, let's be honest. I'm probably never going to hire anyone who says I'm a content editor ever again, right? So things are changing. That's OK. But there's also something really cool that's happening. How many of us have had someone young in their career come and say, hey, I'm ready to be a manager? And you're like, cool, cool. Like, who wants to work for you? But what's cool about now is like, listen, on day one. Sounds a little shady. And well, it's a good question to ask them because if they're not showing up. On day one, everyone can be a manager, right? In this world now, every person who comes in can have a team of agents that they are directing. And they don't talk back to you. That's why sometimes that gets a little cheeky. But you can have an orchestration team of like, I'm coming in. I've got my set of agents that I'm working. And I'm orchestrating. And that is the future workforce. Like, everyone is going to be orchestrators of work increasingly versus I'm an individual doer of work. And that's a really empowering thing for our teams. And it goes to the transformation that we're talking about. It goes to who do you hire in the future? Well, you hire the curious. You hire the builders. You hire the people who don't define themselves by a particular function but have no bounds in terms of what's possible. So it's a pretty empowering time. It's scary, yes. And we should acknowledge the scary. And that's OK. But it's also pretty empowering when you put it through that lens. I agree with everything that's been said. We're not looking at headcount. We're looking at skill sets. We know skills of the future are not skills of the past. So how do we empower our people to be skilled for the future? And then how do we hire people that have the skills that we need for the future? And they are, like you said, about core marketing skills. They're around problem solving, creative thinking. How do we bring people in who can help us elevate our game across the board? And I think we should really emphasize that because the things that we once thought were soft skills are hard skills. When we become more technologically advanced and we become more orchestrators, the secret sauce are going to be the people that have empathy, the people that have EQ, that know how to communicate and influence, that are able to have that critical thinking. And so those soft skills are now the hard skills. And I'm really glad that TD just launched our new brand, More Human, because that's what it's all about. It is. You got to get the balance, right? I mean, we got to lean into digital and tech and AI and all those things, but we also have to figure out how to show up with empathy, with advice, with the things that only humans can do. And that goes for our own employees, but also how we want to show up for our customers. Ryan, you brought up budget and how your CEO is just throwing money at the marketing function. But what's the hardest thing to defend in a budget conversation today? And I'll kind of bifurcate the question. Where do you think marketers are over-investing? Where do you think they're under-investing? Anytime someone wants new headcount, there's a new bar for like, okay, show me that can't be done with AI or show me you've hit max efficiency such that you need more headcount to amplify it. And it really goes down to this, being able to demonstrate ROI against the function in a new level that wasn't there before. It used to be, we've got 50,000 webinars and we're now going to try to do 75,000 webinars. So my math says we need 2.5 million more marketers. And it's like, no, that's not going to work anymore. So I think that's a different bar and a different expectation for where you invest and how you invest. And I think some of the interesting parts of marketing will be maybe some of the most challenged. Look at this beautiful space. Look at all this cans and all these events. This is real meaningful impact, but how do you draw a straight line from this to revenue when you're sitting in front of the board? And so I think increasingly, we're going to have to find the connective tissue between all the wonderful touch points that marketing does, all the human relationships and all the meaningful moments that marketing has. And what's the through line of that through to revenue or through to share? And there's probably not a perfect formula figured out just yet, but I think there's a lot of work to be done there. Jenny, I want to give a nod to the industry you're in banking and financial services, because I certainly have found customers increasingly expect the simplicity and personalization of a tech company, but they're also entrusted in banks with something that's far more consequential, and that's money and their financial wellbeing. How does that tension influence the kind of bets you're willing or even unwilling to make? Well, that's the exact essence of the brand launch, which is recognizing this tension and that what we are committing to do is get the digital experiences, the transactional experiences that people expect to be able to do on their mobile device to be really frictionless and easy, but acknowledging that in a topic like people's money and wealth and building for their future, you're dealing with things that sometimes you need real humans to be involved. And whether that's an experience where someone has fraud on their account and we need to get them to actually talk to someone right away, or whether it's someone's managing their money and they need a financial advisor, my view is that's not something that anyone wants to be outsourced entirely to robots anytime soon. We did an AI study at TD and actually learned that, that while over 50% of people will use AI to do research on financial products, less than 20% would be willing to outsource a full decision there. And so it's really important to us to go back to the orchestration role to think about the end-to-end experience and make it really seamless. People are going to need to interact with us in a smooth way on mobile, and then they're going to need to quickly be able to talk to somebody on the phone or walk into one of our branches and for us to be able to show up with that empathy, that advice, that helpfulness, and the things that really matter. And that's exactly the way we're building and why that horizontal work with our product and digital and retail partners, technology partners, is so critical. A lesson here, a lot of CMOs who are in this room, there are also a lot of aspiring CMOs who are in this room, for that next generation of marketing chiefs, what are the skills, the core capabilities that will be absolutely critical in the future? Well, I'm happy to start. I think this idea of the soft skills you're emphasizing, we talk at Slack a bunch, like work is in the conversation. And there's something that's really fundamental that's starting to happen, particularly in the AI space, which is work is going to flip from AI being a solo player experience, largely to a multiplayer experience. And when AI is brought into teams who are working and collaborating together, that starts to become very, very powerful. And you have these platforms where you can say, how do you accelerate teams with these tools and move AI into this collaborative environment where you're building in the open and you're creating in the open? And that's going to be the expectation for all CMOs going forward is like, how do you harness the capability of your team, the group, not individuals, but your team? And knowing that the team is always where it happened, you know, that Margaret Mead quote, never doubt the power, the small dedicated team to change the world, because indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. That's not going to change anytime soon with AI. In fact, I think it's going to be more impactful going forward. So focus on team, focus on how you bring that collaboration. I would say my number one piece of advice is do the hard thing and raise your hand. Because ultimately, this world is changing so fast. And for those of us who are looking for the next generation of leaders to pull up behind us, we're looking for the folks that are willing to go take on the challenges that we don't know the answer to. And so when I'm looking for, how am I, how, like, I know that we've got to be focusing on AEO. How am I going to do this? I haven't hired, this is months ago, we haven't hired anybody yet. We don't have the platform yet. We don't have the strategy yet. But who's going to raise their hand and take on that challenge and work with me to figure that out? And that skillset of feeling confident to raise your hand and ask for the hardest thing. It worked for me 25 years ago. And it's still the thing that will set you apart. And if you've got that ambition, don't be scared to ask for that because we don't know the answer and we need someone to partner with us. And likely, the best person for that job is somebody that you wouldn't necessarily think of. And so, I would just say, raise your hand and do the hard things. In a similar vein, I would say, get comfortable with the unknown and get comfortable with change because we know that change is coming. We just don't know what it looks like. So, someone who can demonstrate that they're comfortable with that today means that they will be comfortable with that tomorrow. And that's the most important thing is having the confidence of your convictions to lead a team through the unknown. And that's going to be what we need. Jenny, closing word. I agree with all that, but I'll leave it with three words that we're really focused on. Courage, curiosity, and accountability. That's what I'm hiring for. Love it. Well, we've covered a lot of ground from AI and organizational change to customer expectations, trust, and what it means to be accountable for outcomes you don't fully control. So, before we wrap, let me leave us with three reflections from today's conversation. First, the mandate has expanded faster than the organization around it. What we heard today is that modern CMOs are increasingly accountable for growth across systems, decisions, and functions they don't fully control. Number two, the tension is real, but so is the opportunity. The leaders on this stage, and certainly many of you, they aren't waiting for a perfect structure, perfect data, perfect certainty. They're helping to redefine the role in real time. And finally, three themes have surfaced again and again. Build influence before you need it. Connect customer insight to business outcomes. And again, make decisions before certainty arrives. And perhaps most importantly, have fun. So, please join me in thanking our panelists.