Strategic AI for CMOs: 2025 Report
The Futureproof Project
Acceleration Roadmap for AI Marketing
The Futureproof Project is an invitation-only community think tank of 300+ senior brand marketers dedicated to turning emerging tech into competitive edge. Most consultancy "State of AI in Marketing" reports are just a bunch of statistics and trends. Not this one. The Acceleration Roadmap — updated with new insights throughout the year — is a powerful resource with actionable frameworks, strategies, and case studies for all the areas that AI is transforming the AI landscape.
10 Critical AI Statistics
of global jobs will be disrupted by AI according to the IMF
of CMOs struggle to achieve value at scale from AI
of agentic AI projects are predicted to fail by 2027
AI companies in the world as of May 2025
have difficulty establishing ROl on identified opportunities
of users prefer AI-powered search engines
effectiveness lift for marketers that use AI daily
value genAI’s ability to personalize customer service experiences
of Google searches with AI summaries lead to a click
of day-to-day work decisions will be made by AI agents by 2028
Executive Summary
Lead the AI Shift. Or follow.
The greatest marketing opportunity of our time isn't mastering technology — it's unleashing imagination. While others rush to simply automate what exists, visionary leaders are reimagining what's possible when human creativity meets AI capability. This is the difference between following the AI transformation and leading it.
Traction, the marketing accelerator for brands and in-house teams, is proud to present the midyear edition of The Futureproof Project 2025 Strategic AI for CMOs Report, drawing insights from our community of 300+ CMOs and marketing leaders. As Futureproof members, they're pioneering the future of AI-enhanced marketing. This report captures the collective knowledge, case studies, and learnings shared by industry leaders on AI's transformative role in marketing today and its future.
This report reveals:
➔ CMO priorities for 2025 and the pressing need to preserve global trust
➔ The Crawl-Walk-Run path to AI marketing leadership
➔ Futureproof Studios: A new paradigm in video production and personalization
➔ Next-gen autonomous marketing agents and their strategic impact
➔ Proven success patterns from today's AI marketing leaders
Most importantly, this report provides the foundation for turning your boldest marketing imaginations into reality. Because while the technology is advancing rapidly, true leadership comes from knowing not just how to use AI, but how to dream bigger with it.
CMO Priorities & Trends
Unseen depths of AI impact.
AI Will Democratize Creativity
Transformative breakthroughs will emerge from the powerful synergy between exceptional human imagination and advanced AI capabilities, ushering in an unprecedented creative renaissance.
Expertise in an AI-Enhanced World
The art of human expertise will shift from domain knowledge to the nuanced ability to guide AI tools with deep contextual understanding. This will fundamentally reshape how we define professional mastery.
Ethical Adoption is Critical
As AI's power to both advance and potentially mislead society grows, governance cannot be left to self-interested corporations alone — we need ethical frameworks to ensure technology serves rather than subverts human wellbeing.
Enduring Relevance of Marketing
As long as humans remain fundamentally irrational beings, the core principles of marketing will endure. Ultimately, connecting with and influencing people will always be more art than algorithm.
Boiling the ocean doesnʼt work.
The Futureproof Framework offers a proven model for staged implementation of AI.
Crawl
Boost Operations & Productivity
Use off-the-shelf AI apps to boost internal ops and productivity. They are a simple way to explore AI's potential and ease your team's workload
Walk
Tailor Solutions with Your Data
Use internal data to refine AI outputs and adapt them to your unique requirements. Earn competitive edge with ‘moatableʼ bespoke solutions.
Run
Enhance & Differentiate CX
Upon mastering and futureproofing your systems, launch sophisticated AI models to increase resource efficiency + accelerate growth.
What this means for your team.
Workflows are your key to unlocking efficiency.
What this means for your team.
AI can eliminate repetitive tasks, allowing you to get rid of the busy work and focus on the parts of your job that really matter. But first, you need to identify those tasks—and the right tools to do the job.
Identify Repetitive Tasks
Every organization has areas where they are spending valuable time and resources on repetitive tasks. Before you can eliminate them, you need to pinpoint which tasks in your marketing processes are time-consuming, prone to human error, or executed repeatedly in a similar manner. Traction's AI Growth Engines solution can help you streamline this journey.
Define the Tools and the Steps
AI tools all have different strengths, weaknesses, features and capabilities. Research and select the appropriate AI/automation tools, and clearly outline each step in the workflow to ensure consistency and accuracy. Different tasks will require different levels of human's wielding AI tools. GenAI video production still requires great storytellers to craft something compelling. AI Agents that automate AEO/SEO blog posts still need a human in the loop to read them and make sure the content is accurate–and that it's good.
Implement, Monitor and Optimize
Deploy the automation within your marketing environment, track its performance against defined metrics, and continually refine the workflow based on insights or feedback. You'll need to ensure that you've designed a marketing organization that has the right people, partners, platforms and processes in place so you can thrive at this stage.
FAQ: State of AI in Marketing 2025
Q1. What are the top CMO priorities for 2025?
CMOs are the change agents of the AI Revolution. CMOs are focused on balancing AI efficiency with human creativity, preparing their workforce for AI-augmented roles, investing in AI literacy across their organizations, and setting realistic expectations for adoption. They are also prioritizing ethics and governance to ensure AI drives growth without eroding trust.
Q2. How many companies are actually seeing value from AI?
Despite the hype, only about 4% of companies report substantial value from their AI investments. Nearly three-quarters (74%) struggle to achieve results at scale, highlighting the importance of practical frameworks like Crawl-Walk-Run for implementation.
Q3. What is the Crawl-Walk-Run framework for AI adoption?
Crawl: Use off-the-shelf AI tools to boost productivity.
Walk: Apply internal data to refine outputs and adapt AI to unique business needs.
Run: Deploy sophisticated AI models to drive growth and differentiate customer experiences.
Q4. How is AI impacting brand marketing and measurement?
AI is reshaping brand management with AI-ready toolkits, automating workflows, and enabling real-time brand measurement. Tools now identify digital “body language” signals—like repeated product page visits or hesitations at checkout—offering precision insights to optimize engagement.
Q5. What role will AI agents play in marketing?
2025 is being called the year of AI agents. These digital co-workers can save teams 15–20 hours per week by automating workflows, optimizing campaigns, and engaging customers in real-time. Marketers are starting with pilots like hyper-personalized emails and conversational commerce before scaling to complex orchestration.
Q6. How is AI changing search and SEO?
Search engines like Google Gemini are shifting from keywords to entities and topics, prioritizing intent, topical authority, and user experience. This means winning in AI search requires deeper content, clear topical expertise, and multimodal formats (text, video, images, audio).
Q7. What GenAI video tool should I use?
There's no simple answer to this question — you'll likely use a variety of tools to create a high-production value brand video. Different platforms are better at creating source images, have different features to handle specific shots, and at managing different parts of the process like voiceover, music, animation, upscaling, and editing.
Q8. How to design the marketing organization of the future?
AI does not respect your org chart. Traction has a powerful framework for Marketing Org Design led by practitioner consultants. You'll need to rethink your approach to people, platforms, partners and process. A blank sheet of paper approach is appropriate, but you're also going to want to invest in training your teams to thrive in this new landscape.
Q9. What industries are seeing the biggest AI marketing opportunities?
Early success is strong in consumer tech, healthcare, and CPG—sectors where personalization, accelerated research, and rapid content production provide immediate ROI. B2B is also emerging, with AI agents supporting account-based marketing and sales enablement.
Q10. What’s the single most important lesson for marketing leaders from this report?
The biggest differentiator isn’t just deploying AI tools—it’s knowing what great looks like. CMOs who combine AI capability with bold imagination and human judgment are the ones setting the pace for growth.
Download the Strategic AI for CMOs report.
Ready to start futureproofing your business? The Futureproof Project Acceleration Roadmap for AI Marketing report is truly a fantastic resource — there's no other report like it.