CMOs Are Dead — Here's What Replaces Them, Says Digitas Leader

At Cannes Lions this summer, Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas North America, made a striking claim: the classic chief marketing officer role is effectively finished. Instead of campaign-building executives, the future belongs to data-informed leaders who can transform entire business growth engines — what some now call chief growth officers.

Lanzi spoke at a live taping of the Decoder podcast at the Uber Villa, where she pushed back hard against what she saw as an industry problem: the tendency of agencies and tech platforms to make wildly unrealistic promises about what artificial intelligence can do for brands. Her parent company, Publicis, even released a satirical video before the festival titled "The Wrong Promises," mocking the absurd commitments being pitched to clients — from free AI services to outcomes guaranteed to win awards.

The AI Hype Repeats an Old Pattern#

Lanzi drew a pointed parallel to programmatic advertising, a technology that arrived with sweeping promises of full automation and required nowhere near what the industry predicted. "The AI story is the new programmatic story," she said, with the same false assurance that technology alone would handle what actually demands human judgment, nuance, and strategy.

The difference now, she noted, is that these overblown promises come from within the agency world itself and from the platforms, creating a dangerous dynamic where everyone in the industry feels pressure to match inflated claims. The result: unsustainable business models built on promises that can't be kept.

A New Structure for Marketing Leadership#

Digitas has restructured to reflect this shift. Lanzi introduced three newly reimagined roles:

• Chief Intelligence Officer — moving beyond traditional analytics to build an intelligent platform where AI agents can operate and all employees can benefit from data insights
• Chief Systems Officer — replacing the conventional COO, focused on understanding how marketing itself functions as an integrated system rather than isolated campaigns
• Chief Transformation Officer — helping clients (particularly CMOs) transition into a growth-focused mindset and building the capabilities required for that shift

The point isn't that marketing is being automated away; it's that the function must now operate as an interconnected machine, where brand building, data intelligence, and real-time optimization happen together.