AI rewired marketing. Leadership is next.

Marketers will look back on 2025 the way cricket fans recall the launch of T20: a year the game remained the same, but the way to win changed forever.

If last year proved anything, it's that cautious, consensus-chasing marketing leadership no longer earns a seat at the table. AI didn’t ‘disrupt’ the industry in passing. It blew the doors off business-as-usual and forced brands into a new kind of competitive reality, one where speed and intelligent orchestration, not just pedigree, write the playbook.

Yet, while a handful of market leaders seized their moment, too many CMOs/ leaders spent 2025 hedging testing, tiptoeing, and hiding behind phased rollouts that now sound like self-written obituaries.

The time for fence-sitting belongs to another era. If you’re still debating about whether AI marketing belongs at the centre of your strategy, you’re already behind.

Turning the page on ‘pilot initiatives’

From the vantage point I have in leading and overseeing diverse global campaigns, one thing is certain: 2025 was an inflection point that many failed to recognise. The winners from here on will not be those who experiment with AI, but those who already treat it as infrastructure, a living, learning intelligence fuelling every facet of the marketing ecosystem. Echoing Sachin Tendulkar’s perspective, ‘People throw stones at you, and you convert them into milestones’, leaders must see setbacks as feedback, not justification for hesitation.

And yet, too many organisations are still shackled to silos: creative, data, tech, all walled off. Old debates like human versus machine, scaling efficiency versus protecting creativity, feel as dated as CD-ROMs. The reality is that we need dynamic, end-to-end AI/human or human-led AI systems. These will be the only engines powerful enough to deliver the double-digit lifts in revenue and velocity that are already table stakes.

A constant cycle of pilots and initiatives, therefore, no longer demonstrates innovation; it underlines a lack of conviction. In 2026, brands that are architected for scale and move with decisiveness will be the ones that define the market and become its leaders. The rest will become history.

Orchestration is the only acceptable standard

Incremental improvement that may seem wise on paper now belongs to the previous decade. The modern CMO/ leader needs to champion high-level orchestration with real-time, cross-channel execution where AI doesn’t just augment, but fundamentally powers marketing’s nervous system.

This means tearing up obsolete org charts and replacing them with agile, cross-functional pods where creative and analytics are fused in action. It also means making integrators and orchestrators humans who bring empathy, editorial sense, and strategic intuition to the table the new core of teams. And it goes without saying: AI must be front-and-centre, powering insights, extending analysis, targeting audiences, and overseeing impact or measurement on a rolling, ‘always-on’ basis.

Treating this as anything less than infrastructure may lead to strategic compromises over time.

As we all know, discovery no longer starts in traditional search bars. Generative AI has rewritten the playing field where relevance is now formed in milliseconds, and cultural context shifts by the hour, not the season. Brands win not by pushing more, but by authentically connecting, using AI to surface the right creative or response in the right geography, with local nuance and agility at the core.

Localisation is therefore now a survival tactic and strategy, not a luxurious add-on. In this context, it will be crucial to equip teams with adaptive intelligence and measurement tools, so that they are empowered to respond to cultural dynamics as they arise. Agile, cross-disciplinary teams fuelled by real-time data but grounded in a strong human editorial point of view will be the only way to thrive.

Trust is now the final differentiator

Finally, in this fast-changing world, consumers are only getting savvier: they know where AI is at work and expect transparency and ethics to be as clear and strategic as any campaign brief.

Real leadership then will be about actualising customer trust. Transparency can’t exist as a footnote to your values presentation; it must be visible, measured, and built into the DNA of every marketing process. This is not just a matter of adhering to principles; it’s about achieving competitive differentiation.

Measurement must also evolve. Forget counting clicks or impressions; depth of engagement, customer growth, and perpetual resonance are what matter now. This is why it’s time to embed trust in every layer: transparent, explainable AI, non-negotiable data privacy, and visible, daily commitment to ethical standards. Trust in these times is a true metric, not a motto.

It’s an opportune time, then, for marketers to ask the only questions that matter:

• Are we architecting for structural AI enablement?
• Can we ensure every organisational layer connects creativity, analytics, and accountability daily?
• Is our narrative truly adaptive and contextually real-time?
• Do our metrics capture enduring customer value?
• And is trust truly rooted in our processes?

Our next move cannot be another round of ‘strategic exploration’. The clock is ticking, and it’s ruthless with those who are still waiting in the wings.

So, what will define 2026?

In my view, the coming year will be one where human intuition and AI precision finally move in harmony. Year 2026 won’t be about building more technology. It will be about crafting better systems, stronger teams, clearer ethics, deeper cultural understanding, and most importantly, more adaptive, measurable, human-first marketing engines.

Unlike what has been bandied around recently, marketing’s future doesn’t lie in being mechanised or automated but in being augmented, shaped by humans, and scaled by intelligence.

And we’re only just getting started. The path ahead calls for leaders who are not only architects of algorithms but stewards of possibility who can synthesise: balance risk with empathy, creativity with discipline, and data with imagination.

-Amardeep Singh, co-founder and president, Gutenberg