Marketing teams can now move from idea to launch faster than ever thanks to AI, but strategic thinking hasn't kept pace. Senior marketing leaders say that gap is becoming an expensive problem.
The finding emerged from a closed-door roundtable convened by The Ortus Club shortly after this year's Cannes Lions festival. Chief marketing officers and heads of demand generation, event marketing, and partner marketing participated from brands including Salesforce, Accenture, and Celonis, among other global technology and software companies. The discussion built on patterns The Ortus Club has tracked across similar roundtables since 2015.
Speed Raises the Stakes for Strategy
AI-powered execution has compressed the timeline from planning to launch. With teams able to move faster than ever, participants described far less tolerance for unclear goals or half-formed strategy. Gaps that once stayed quietly contained now play out at scale, in public.
That's shifting where marketing leaders spend their attention: less on execution mechanics, which AI increasingly handles, and more on defining clear, measurable objectives before execution starts. The result is a premium on getting fundamentals right before a campaign begins.
For teams adopting AI, the pressure is compounding. Weak positioning, imprecise targeting, or poorly defined objectives can now be amplified at a scale and speed that would once have taken far longer to reach.
Buyers Are Getting Harder to Convince
The pressure isn't only coming from inside the marketing function. Participants pointed to a parallel shift in buyer behavior, describing growing resistance from prospects who are reluctant to take a meeting without first hearing from a peer who already uses the product.
Executives said this reflects rising skepticism toward unsupported claims, particularly around AI-driven results. Buyers increasingly want to know who else has proven a product works, and under what conditions, before they will take a first meeting.
In response, marketing teams are placing greater value on evidence: customer examples, peer validation, and measurable outcomes are becoming central to how marketers build credibility with an increasingly skeptical, selective buyer base.
As AI continues to remove friction from execution, the roundtable's discussion pointed to a clear conclusion: the harder, more valuable work is shifting upstream, toward deciding what's worth executing in the first place. For marketing teams already exploring AI for Marketing, that means the differentiator is no longer speed - it's judgment.
What This Means for Marketing Leaders
The roundtable's message for marketing professionals is direct: AI doesn't make strategy optional. It makes weak strategy more expensive. With buyers more skeptical and campaigns launching faster, the cost of poor positioning or unclear objectives is no longer contained - it's amplified in public.
For CMOs and senior marketing leaders, the practical takeaway is to invest in the upstream work before execution begins. That means defining clear, measurable objectives and aligning on target audiences before a campaign brief goes out. The teams that master this will separate themselves from those that don't. For a structured approach to this shift, see the AI Learning Path for CMOs.
About The Ortus Club
The Ortus Club is a global B2B executive event agency specializing in invitation-only roundtables, masterclasses, and summits across APAC, EMEA, and the United States. Since 2015, the company has delivered more than 3,200 executive events across 40+ countries, connecting over 38,000 senior business leaders through curated experiences for organizations including Google, Visa, Meta, Adobe, IBM, and Zendesk.
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