AI does not fix a broken go-to-market system. It amplifies it. Connect the data and align the organisation first.

McKenzie did a media degree and was captured by the marketing side through elected options. She started in PR after a CIPR Graduate Open Day, watching case studies of big campaigns and real human connection. Her first job carried shiny brands on the surface but was deep B2B tech, and she has stayed in B2B tech ever since, moving from PR into events and experiential, then traditional marketing, and now growth orientated strategy where all of it comes together. It feels, she says, like a full circle moment.

There is a lot of noise, and marketers have been asked to do more, to own technology and become specialists in data, for years. When AI arrived, the question was whether it would be the saviour. What McKenzie sees strongly is that it is the amplifier of the issues that already existed. AI can do great things in the right system, but the conversation should be about what it is surfacing, and about the broken parts of the go-to-market system that have to be addressed first.

The biggest problem is data. Great creative counts for little if data sits in silos and is not connected, because reaching buyers across a messy, nonlinear journey becomes almost impossible. If data is disconnected, AI has disconnected data to work from. Clients are finally taking data health seriously, because they can see that layering AI on top just accelerates the issues and creates a noisier market.

CMOs are inundated with vendors and tools that all claim to solve the data challenge, but there are many pockets of data problems to sort. The real question is how to connect first and third-party data into the wider go-to-market ecosystem, and to build a realistic roadmap to change. Much of the innovation happening is in pockets. It can look like system change, but it is often just more volume in one area, which leaves the buyer with an inconsistent journey.

Because solving the data disconnect takes more than marketing, AI has forced conversations outside the marketing team, across strategy, data, technology and activation. Agencies like McKenzie's now consult on change management, not just campaigns and martech. The first job is getting leadership and all departments on the same page, before worrying about process.

She points to a recent global product launch briefed directly by a CCO, an interesting pivot in who takes responsibility. Five or ten years ago the conversation would have been mostly with sales and product. This time it ran across sales enablement, the CPO and the wider organisation, so the work lives and breathes across the business rather than becoming another siloed activity.

The approval process with the CFO has never been tighter. Budgets that marketing once owned freely now face far more scrutiny and demands for proven return. Every activity has to be clear about how it moves the buyer towards revenue and helps commercial goals, and those success measures cannot sit in isolation from sales and customer experience.

McKenzie describes a CMO she has worked with for years who traced it all back to the strategy she presented on day one, and admitted she had become numb and stopped fighting the battle. McKenzie talks a lot about marketers losing their mojo. The answer is to keep finding purpose, build a roadmap to impact, and find the advocates in the business who will back you.

Two things are helping marketers argue their value. First, attribution, so teams can show what happens to revenue if they switch off brand. Second, generative engine optimisation, whose insights open up discussions about how a brand is perceived and where it shows up. You can have a great story that says you can do X, Y and Z, but if your reviews say the opposite, the LLMs will surface it. It has to be a connected story that meets its brand promises.

Twelve months ago everyone predicted the end of copywriters. The opposite has happened: McKenzie's team keeps hiring them, the role has changed, and GPTs sit in certain workflows, but the skill is still needed. It is human intervention that makes strategy work. And in a world where whatever you put into ChatGPT is told it is a great idea, it is a great time to be average, so authenticity and the throwaway insight from a focus group matter more, not less.

The asks on CMOs are enormous: an AI strategy, martech choices, a brand campaign, metrics and ROI, all at once. McKenzie's blunt question is who this unicorn is who is a specialist in all areas. She runs community groups for leaders out of seat and hears about silent restructures hitting senior roles. The clearest way to see what is expected of a CMO, she says, is to ask the people interviewing for the role.

At enterprise level a CMO may be expected to act as a transformation director who brings in specialists with the budget behind them. In mid-market and SMB that support does not exist, so one person is asked to be a jack of all trades. Several leaders she knows who have held multiple CMO seats are choosing to step down into a specialist area, because they feel they are being set up to fail.

Moving from an agency you built into a new brand is the hardest part, but keeping the client's needs front and centre made the rationale clear, because those needs had outgrown what a specialist agency could deliver alone. Educating the team on the commercial realities all along made the move into Marketbridge easier to explain.

Culture, McKenzie argues, is not the big strategy decks or the action plan after an employee survey. It is the small things day to day, and if every leader models that behaviour it cascades. Her advice to those starting out is the same instinct: curiosity and proactivity, seeking people out for a 15-minute call, because people are usually happy to help and that is how you learn the realities of the work.