The experiment is over. Now the real work begins.
How marketing leaders are moving AI from workflow to the work, and why creative thinking still wins.
I remember the moment I stopped thinking of AI as a marketing experiment. It wasn’t during a vendor demo or a conference keynote. It was during a client call with a team that had been using generative AI for six months. They were producing more content than ever. But the pipeline hadn’t moved. Win rates were flat. Their sales team said the messaging “all sounds the same.”
The experimenting with AI is over. And that’s the best thing that could happen to marketing.
From shiny toy to operating system
For the past two years, most marketing teams treated AI the way they treat any new technology. They experimented. They plugged ChatGPT into content workflows. They tested image generators. They automated social posts. Some of it worked beautifully. Some of it taught expensive lessons. All of it was necessary.
But research now tells us experimentation is no longer the story. Jasper’s 2026 State of AI in Marketing report, based on a survey of more than 1,400 marketing leaders, found that 91% of marketing teams are now actively using AI, up from 63% just a year ago. Ninety-five percent plan to increase their AI investment. The question has shifted entirely from “should we adopt?” to “what happens after adoption?”
Jenny Herbison, SVP of Global Marketing at Exclaimer, put it well in a recent Forbes piece: we’re moving from the preschool stage of AI experimentation to higher education, where structure, critical thinking, and real results matter. I couldn’t agree more. The leaders pulling ahead aren’t the ones with the most AI tools. They’re the ones who’ve embedded AI into how their marketing actually operates.
The efficiency is real, but it’s table stakes now
AI has delivered meaningful efficiency, and those gains are real. Teams are drafting content faster. Campaign variations that once took weeks are produced in days. Data analysis that required a dedicated analyst can now surface insights in minutes. The productivity story is legitimate, and it’s one reason leadership commitment to AI has reached 83% across organizations.
But here’s the paradox that caught my attention in the Jasper research. As adoption surges, confidence in proving AI ROI has declined, from 49% last year to just 41% today. That’s not because AI is delivering less value. It’s because expectations have changed. “Save us time” was the justification in 2025. In 2026, the C-suite wants measurable outcomes, pipeline influenced, revenue attributed, and customer acquisition cost reduced.
Teams that can measure ROI are seeing extraordinary returns, with 60% reporting at least a 2x return on their AI investment. The gap isn’t in AI’s capability. It’s in the operating model around it. This is something I work through with almost every client at Brand Anthem. The technology isn’t the bottleneck. The absence of a system around the technology is. Without clear ownership, governance, and measurement infrastructure, AI produces volume without value.
Brand Governance. The unsexy word that separates leaders from followers
The biggest barrier to scaling AI in marketing is no longer budget, skills, or leadership buy-in. The bottleneck is governance, legal compliance, brand review processes, and quality control systems that weren’t built for the speed and volume AI creates. Whether you’re in a highly regulated enterprise environment or a fast-moving consumer space, the challenge is the same. AI can produce content faster than your organization can approve it.
The solution isn’t to slow AI down. It’s to bring governance upstream. The smartest teams are defining their brand guardrails, audience context, and compliance requirements and embedding those rules directly into the system. Every draft starts within boundaries, rather than being policed after the fact. Legal and brand teams become architects, not gatekeepers. And review cycles that used to take weeks now move in days.
This is exactly the kind of structural work that our Anthem Growth Narrative System is built for. When we define a client’s corporate narrative, message architecture, and brand governance, we’re building the operating foundation that makes AI-powered execution trustworthy and scalable.
The leadership-to-IC gap is a warning sign
CMO optimism about AI is sky-high. 88% of CMOs say AI has increased their job satisfaction, and 61% can measure ROI. But individual contributors, the people closest to the work, only 56% report increased satisfaction, and just 12% can measure ROI. That’s not a technology gap. That’s a leadership gap. ICs feel the mounting pressure of increased volume, tighter quality expectations, and governance friction more acutely because they’re the ones executing. When AI becomes mandatory, but the systems around it haven’t been redesigned, the result isn’t empowerment. It’s exhaustion. Maturity closes this gap. Organizations furthest along the AI maturity curve report the highest job satisfaction, 66% in advanced organizations versus just 15% among beginners. The pattern indicates that when AI is implemented with structure, clarity, and clear ownership, change is empowering. Without those things, it feels destabilizing.
As a fractional CMO, this is one of the most important conversations I have with leadership teams. It’s not enough to buy the tools and declare an AI strategy. You have to redesign how work flows, who owns what, and how your people are trained and supported through the transition.
What AI still can’t do and why it matters more than ever
Now for the part of this conversation that I care about most, and where the real competitive advantage lives. AI can write, but it cannot believe. AI can mimic tone, but it cannot feel it. AI can generate a hundred variations of a headline, but it cannot tell you which one carries the conviction that will make a buyer care. As someone who has spent 25 years building brands, I can tell you that the work that moves the needle has never been about production speed. It’s about strategic clarity. It’s about understanding what a brand needs to say, to whom, and why it matters.
Audiences recognize inauthentic communication. The brands that are winning, and will continue to win, are the ones using AI to refine their ideas, not generate them. They treat AI as a partner in clarity, not as a substitute for imagination.
The research backs this up. LinkedIn data shows that marketing job postings with “storyteller” in the title have doubled over the past year. Two skill sets are emerging as essential for marketing teams: systems thinking (the ability to design scalable operating models and workflows) and narrative craft (the ability to build compelling stories, exercise creative judgment, and bring a genuine brand perspective to market). AI doesn’t replace either of these. It makes both more valuable.
From creator to orchestrator
The most consequential shift I see happening right now is the evolution of the marketer’s role from creator to orchestrator. In the old model, marketers were the executors, planning campaigns, pulling insights, assembling briefs, routing assets, managing revisions, and coordinating distribution. In the emerging model, AI agents handle an increasing share of the execution. They can plan, draft, personalize, optimize, and distribute. Marketers move into the role of architects and conductors, designing the system, setting the intent, and guiding the outcomes. This is not a demotion. It’s an elevation. And it’s the reason I’m so energized about this moment in marketing.
The organizations getting this right are treating content at scale as a system, not a series of one-off projects. They’re building structured content pipelines with clear stages, from planning through creation, personalization, optimization, and activation, with defined ownership and governance at every step. When work is organized this way, scale doesn’t create chaos. Quality becomes repeatable. And AI transforms from a productivity hack into a durable operating model.
What marketing leaders should do right now
If you’re a CMO, VP of Marketing, or CEO navigating this transition, here’s where I’d start:
Audit your operating model, not just your tech stack. AI tools are only as effective as the workflows, ownership, and governance around them. If your team is producing more content but can’t prove business impact, the problem isn’t the AI. It’s the system.
Bring legal, brand, and IT upstream. Define the guardrails once, embed them into the system, and let your team move fast within those boundaries.
Invest in both systems thinkers and storytellers. You need people who can design scalable content operations and craft narratives with emotional resonance and strategic precision. These are complementary capabilities, and both are essential.
Close the leadership-to-IC gap. If your executives are excited about AI but your team is overwhelmed, you have an enablement problem, not a technology problem. Invest in training, governance frameworks, and clear role definitions.
Protect what makes your brand human. The more AI-generated content floods the market, the more your audience will crave authenticity, originality, and conviction. Your brand’s point of view cannot be automated. It’s your most durable competitive advantage.
The coming of age
We are witnessing marketing’s coming-of-age with AI. The experimentation phase taught us what’s possible. This next phase will determine what’s sustainable, what’s scalable, and what’s valuable. The teams pulling ahead are those that treat AI not as a collection of tools but as core operating infrastructure, with governance embedded from the start, systems designed for repeatability, and human judgment at the center of every strategic decision.
AI will be part of every marketing workflow. That’s already decided. But trust, authenticity, and creative judgment will remain the cornerstones of marketing that works. The future belongs to the leaders who can hold both of those truths at once.
That’s the work I do every day at Brand Anthem. And I’ve never been more excited about what’s ahead.
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Victoria Jones is the founder of Brand Anthem, a fractional CMO and marketing strategy firm serving mid-market, private-equity-backed, and founder-led B2B organizations. With more than 25 years of experience spanning technology and SaaS, healthcare and life sciences, industrial and manufacturing, professional and enterprise services, financial services, retail, hospitality, food service, education, government, and nonprofit sectors, Victoria brings strategic clarity, creative vision, and operational discipline to organizations navigating growth and transformation. She partners with leadership teams to modernize marketing, align brand and revenue strategy, and build scalable systems that translate insight into measurable business impact.