At the Cannes Lions festival, chief marketing officers from eBay, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management & E*Trade, Back Market, and Bucherer USA explained how they are retooling their teams, budgets, and creative processes around artificial intelligence. Their approaches reveal a clear fault line: some roles are being flooded with AI tools, while others are being walled off from automation entirely.
"It's amazing how quickly things are changing," said Adrian Fung, global CMO of eBay. He described the challenge of helping existing marketers think about what's next while still doing their daily work.
Retraining teams and adding product expertise
eBay is embedding product management skills directly into the marketing organization. "Bringing in more product management expertise directly into the marketing organization to help sort of craft what the future looks like," Fung said. The company wants to shield its core marketers from being "completely distracted and paralyzed by the fear of having change" by dedicating separate time and space for forward-looking strategy.
Fung called these hires change agents who can evolve workflows while the day-to-day operators stay focused. "Supplementing the skillset of the core marketing organization with these new skill sets is super important for us to be able to change quickly," he said.
The constant search for balance
Microsoft's Americas CMO Sydne Mullings said her team perpetually weighs short-term revenue demands against long-term product release cycles. "I always talk to my team about where's the next best dollar spent," she said. "We spend a lot of our energy on figuring out what performs, what doesn't, how we never fall in love with the bricks." She credits the balance to talent that can continuously apply data and insights.
Andrea Zaretsky, CMO of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management & E*Trade, framed the tension as a choice between AI efficiency and human connection. "We are thinking through what are the tools and capabilities we need, what is the right talent mix," she said. "But what has to remain core is the client and putting them at the center and making sure that the insights, the judgment, that's all human-based, as well as the creativity."
For CMOs building the skills to lead these changes, structured training such as the AI Learning Path for CMOs can help identify where to invest in team capabilities.
When brand voice rules out AI
Joy Howard, CMO of Back Market, said the used-electronics marketplace has a "very sober view of AI" and no plans to reduce headcount. Instead, the company wants to double revenue with the same number of people. "The days where you can work two years in the same position and then move on, those are long, long gone," she said, describing a new era of constant change.
Back Market invests heavily in its distinctive brand voice and deliberately avoids AI for writing. "We zig when others zag, and it really helps us stand out and break through," Howard said. She sees her role as keeping the team optimistic: "Because we work in a space where the emotional valence and the inspiration is so important. So, you have to keep that alive in the face of these relentless pushes towards efficiency and dehumanization."
In luxury, AI stays invisible
Carina Ertl, CMO of Bucherer USA, said luxury marketing demands that AI operate in the background. "What becomes even more important is the human connection. It's the experience, especially in luxury retail, where it's very high-touch and we're trying to build lifetime value with our clients through experiences in brand building and storytelling."
Why this matters for marketing professionals
The CMOs' comments reveal a split: AI is being pushed into analytics, media buying, and workflow automation, while roles tied to brand voice, client judgment, and high-touch experience remain deliberately human. For marketers, that means career durability may hinge less on mastering any single platform and more on developing strategic thinking, creativity, and the ability to manage AI tools without letting them dictate the brand. Teams that can balance both-applying machine speed to measurable tasks while holding onto human judgment for customer relationships-will shape the next phase of the function.
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