How AI Raises The Stakes For CMO-CIO Collaboration

Marketing and technology have never been more intertwined, yet effective collaboration between these functions remains elusive for many organizations. As AI accelerates transformation across workflows, this misalignment can become a liability.

While collaboration improved during the pandemic, progress has stalled due to lack of goal alignment, communication failures, and conflicting priorities and budgets.

GenAI And Agentic AI Technologies Amplify Existing Challenges

The successful integration and deployment of AI initiatives will hinge on healthy collaboration and alignment between IT, marketing, and other critical business functions. This is because AI:

• Both consolidates and fragments the martech landscape. AI is lowering the barrier to entry for software development, fueling the creation of a “hypertail” of specialized, AI-native start-ups. Thousands of new AI-native solutions continue to enter the market, while many legacy tools fade out, as evidenced by Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersmas’ 2025 martech landscape. CMOs must navigate a dual reality: Their existing “legacy” tech stack may be at risk of becoming obsolete, while they’re simultaneously confronted with an overwhelming array of new — often unproven — AI-native point solutions.
• Can exacerbate marketing and technology misalignment. Most CMOs still lack influence over AI strategy, which remains dominated by CIOs, CTOs, and other technology leaders. However, marketing will increasingly depend on function‑specific small language models and AI agents that must be tightly woven into their daily workflows. CIOs, prompted by the hyperadoption of generative AI (genAI)  tools by individual workers, are imposing guardrails to protect data, privacy, and IP — a necessary move that can unintentionally create further tension between marketing and technology teams.
• Unlocks new ways of working between marketing and IT. “While dealing with legacy IT is still difficult, I believe AI will provide an opportunity for marketers to internalize capabilities and reduce their dependency on legacy IT/agencies. If we find the right skills — like we did when we internalized digital media buying — it should be easier to collaborate with technology teams,” said Nikos Vlachopoulos, commercial director and CMO at Vodafone.

Embrace Collaborative Leadership

To overcome potential pitfalls, CMOs must embrace a new leadership style to break traditional silos and create the right environment for good decision-making. In their quest to improve collaboration, leading CMO/CIO partnerships:

• Cocreate martech strategy, planning, and execution. CMOs and CIOs should jointly anchor martech decisions in business objectives, connect annual planning to long‑term priorities, and ensure that execution delivers rapid, measurable outcomes. “AI is a good opportunity for partnering with technology teams to challenge the real value and the total cost of ownership of some platforms: We must build tomorrow’s new martech, but not with yesterday’s CRM tools,” said Pierre-Yves Calloc’h, former global CDO at Pernod Ricard.

• Share aligned goals centered on customer obsession. CMOs and CIOs need to move from separate KPIs to co-owning business-level goals. By jointly aligning around shared metrics, they eliminate conflicting priorities and reinforce accountability from both functions. When both sides measure success the same way, decisions naturally orient around outcomes rather than organizational boundaries.
• Hire, train, and empower cross-functional teams to make faster decisions. Recruiting challenges and talent gaps are often mentioned as barriers to broader team collaboration. To overcome this, leaders should jointly interview and hire hybrid skill sets, as well as training employees in both departments in new skill sets, with the goal of improving their understanding of each other’s projects, processes, culture, and communication styles. “It’s key to understand marketing processes, and to spend time on the ground with marketers to understand what the data really means and where to find it,” said Paul Gallavardin, chief data officer at Autodistribution.
• Evolve a collaborative mindset. Marketing and IT leaders should focus less on ownership and more on defining how each team contributes to innovation. Quentin Briard, CEO of marketing, digital, and technology at Club Med, described his team’s blend of “diverse specialist expertise” across brand, product innovation, data, AI and digital capabilities, a mix which he says “becomes even more powerful with AI.” There’s no perfect org model; the right structure depends on each organization’s culture and legacy.
• Mutually embrace each other’s empathy, trust, and respect. By moving beyond transactional relationships, CMOs and CIOs can recognize the complexity of each other’s roles. In doing so, they treat each other as strategic partners as opposed to service providers, enabling faster and smarter decisions.
• Institute formal governance processes while developing formal relationships. A joint martech governance model makes it explicit when you need a decision, who makes it, and who’s responsible for implementing it. This is crucial for accelerating decision-making, budgeting, and speed to market; however, don’t underestimate the importance of personal relationships, informal meetings, team building, and colocation in establishing a trusted CMO/CIO relationship.

Clients who want to better understand the reality of how marketing and technology teams collaborate can read the report, The State Of CMO/CIO Collaboration For 2026. Schedule a conversation with me to go into the details of what it means for you for your particular industry or country.

 (This blog post was cowritten with Maeve O’Keeffe.)