“I’m not even sure the title chief marketing officer captures [my role] adequately anymore.”
Ally Financial CMO Andrea Brimmer says that matter-of-factly. At the Detroit-based digital financial services company, the executive who once would have been measured on advertising campaigns now oversees communications, user experience, creative services, customer acquisition, and an internal product innovation studio.
She spends as much time thinking about how large language models understand the firm as she does about television commercials, and she frames marketing’s contribution in terms any CFO would recognize: pricing power, long-term investment decisions, and revenue.
The evolution of Brimmer’s role reflects a larger shift taking place inside corporate America. Artificial intelligence is changing how consumers discover companies, collapsing what marketers long understood as the purchase funnel into a single query.
As large language models increasingly synthesize a company’s reputation into a recommendation, influence within the enterprise has increasingly shifted toward the executive responsible for understanding customers.
