One of the questions I’m often asked is: as a marketing leader or CMO, how do you champion AI usage on your team? There is no one-size-fits-all answer, since every organization differs in structure, team size, and AI proficiency. My advice is to begin by considering how you use AI at three levels: individual, team, and organization.
As it relates to the individual level, use AI like you’re GenZ. I'm reminded of something Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said a Sequoia Capital’s AI Ascent event in May 2025: Gen Z doesn’t just use AI occasionally. They treat it as an operating system for daily life. In his words, “Older people use ChatGPT as a Google replacement. Maybe people in their twenties and thirties use it as a life advisor, and then, people in college use it as an operating system. They don’t really make life decisions without asking ChatGPT what they should do.” Gen Z’s approach is a true behavioral reset. They use AI as a work-life operating system, not just a one-off tool. They use complex prompts to serve as a thought partner and help them make personal and professional decisions as they go through life. That's a very different dynamic and usage of AI than asking it for a quick answer to a question that you may have.
Let's consider the team level. When Gen AI first came out at the end of 2022, people were enamored by it, playing around with it and testing it out on a personal level. And that continues to be the case. However, when it comes to professional usage, we are now at the point when it needs to be much more formalized. What could that structure look like? As a marketing leader or a CMO, you should create a sandbox for your team to play with AI. It's critical that you define certain boundaries and usage guidelines that your organization deems important such as privacy, security, and your company's knowledge or IP. You have to make sure that these are protected and proprietary information isn’t used to train external LLM models. These are the boundaries of the sandbox. And inside them, let your team play. It’s not enough to encourage exploration, you should actually mandate that your team uses AI in their work. With countless people sharing new ideas for using AI every day, it can feel like you’re behind. But remember, the models are getting more sophisticated and no one can figure out the best way to accomplish your unique goals other than yourself.
Once you've created the sandbox, give your team the space to experiment and explore. Encourage them to try to use AI assistants to augment their work, agents to handle aspects of existing workflows, or even develop autonomous agents to take over and re-invent entire workflows. These ideas can only come to life if you give your team the space to test, iterate, and just as importantly, the permission to fail.
If you look at the work your team does with AI and you don't see plenty of failures, it probably means you’re not being bold enough in your usage of AI. The potential uses for AI are infinite. To truly innovate, you have to accept that many ideas will not work, and you have to give your team permission to fail.
The organizational level is just as important as the first two. I had the opportunity to participate in the Perplexity AI Business Fellow program and one of the most insightful sessions was a conversation between Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and Jensen Huang, the Co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA. Aravind asked Jensen a simple, yet thought-provoking question: what is the role of CEO in the new age of AI? He replied, “the CEO is a context engineer.” Today’s leaders can use AI to create clarity, set purpose, and connect dots across functions and processes. I believe this concept is relevant beyond the C-suite and will cascade throughout the entire organization, including marketing.
What does it mean to be a context engineer? As a leader, when you think about your team's structure it's important to operate with the acceptance that we are moving away from a world where people succeed through deep functional expertise in a specific discipline like brand, field, or product marketing. Marketers will need to develop T-shaped skills in order to be successful context engineers. Marketers may have deep expertise in one area, but the real competency has to be the range to understand multiple functions within marketing and beyond marketing, such as the entire go-to-market motion. These proficiencies will make for the best context engineers who have the knowledge to orchestrate existing workflows using AI, and then over time completely reinvent go-to-market workflows to be AI-native.
Being an AI-forward marketing leader requires both a shift in mindset and a framework for action. On an individual level, think about AI as your work-life OS. At the team level, create a sandbox for AI experimentation and mandate its usage. At the organizational level, prepare for a future where context engineering is foundational by investing in cross-functional upskilling for your team. This not only positions your company for success, but it also helps future-proof the skills and careers of your entire team. After all, the ability to adapt is the defining characteristic of a great marketing leader, or any leader today.