For the second year running, the GSMA hosted a panel of CMOs to discuss the latest challenges and changes to cross the CMO desk. The discussion was lively, and opinions on the application of AI blew hot and cold like the weather outside.
The panel debated one of the biggest questions facing the industry: how to embrace AI at speed, without losing what makes brands distinctive, trusted and human.
Last year’s CMO panel focused on agentic AI, infrastructure constraints, and the evolution of the CMO role from brand custodian to digital visionary.
In 2026, the conversation is moving decisively forward (or, in the case of brand custody, backward) from exploring different facets of AI, to a more joined-up debate on how CMOs can use AI well and uphold an authentic, human brand in the face of relentless technological change.
TL;DR?
‘Resistance is futile’. That was the overwhelming take-away from this year’s CMO panel on AI adoption. We’re no longer debating whether we use AI, it’s where we use it, how we scale it, and where we take it next.
Every CMO shared their non-negotiables – red lines that they would never cross. ‘I want to look into my customer’s eyes’ said one CMO about the limits of using AI to personalise messaging.
The blueprint for marketers is clear: AI is going to expand into every area of our role. It’s our job as brand custodians and ethical marketers to curb that expansion and guide it into the places where it elevates and is truly useful.
The brands that get ahead in this AI age will be those that remain distinctively, consistently, and unmistakably — human.
Here are the key themes shaping the MWC CMO agenda.
1. We are in B2B Marketing’s most transformative era yet.
The CMO panel opened with a strong statement from Lara Dewar, CMO, GSMA: ‘Marketing is entering its most transformational era’. A lot is asked of CMOs in 2026 – they are expected to deliver growth while rebuilding trust, modernising data strategies, and integrating AI into every part of the marketing machine.
All while ensuring brands remain distinctive and authentic.
That’s a lot of pressure on a single role.
This pressure was echoed across the panel, with CMOs agreeing that AI has fundamentally reshaped how marketing operates and influences the business. Leaders now look to marketing to articulate a clear, trusted narrative around their brand’s AI journey. Mottos like ‘human-led, AI powered’ and a shift from ‘quantity at speed to quality at speed’ emerged from the discussion, showing that CMOs are working hard to positively define the change that AI has wrought.
CMOs also feel pressure to meet rising customer expectations. People want AI to deliver more personalised, individual experiences, but not at the expense of privacy or values. Jean-Marie Culpain, CMO, Orange explained that AI enables a ‘hyper-personalisation, a segment of one’. But there is equal need to balance this potential with removing bias, respecting boundaries, and avoiding red lines. In Jean-Marie’s words, ‘we don’t want to go too far, or we lose the trust of the customer’.
The tone from the panel was optimistic but clear: the stakes for marketing leadership have never been higher.
2. Successful AI adoption starts with cross-business alignment
One of the most practical lessons from the panel was the importance of early, cross-business decision making on AI tools.
Don McGuire, CMO, Qualcomm, shared how Qualcomm approached this challenge by establishing a cross-business AI council, bringing together marketing, IT and wider business stakeholders to evaluate AI tools collectively.
This approach delivered three critical advantages:
- Better AI tool selection (fit-for-purpose, not just IT-led defaults)
- Stronger internal alignment across teams
- Faster adoption by establishing super users
The emphasis was on close alignment at the highest levels. In Don’s words, ‘the relationship between CMO and CIO has never been more important’. Without early alignment, organisations risk a fragmented approach, leading to inconsistent outputs, wrangling over multiple tools, and missed value.
Another hot tip for marketers seeking to drive AI uptake: Roll tools out initially to just a few super users. If they love the tool and share this internally, that drives adoption. In Don’s words: ‘Super users create FOMO, and that’s how we scale’.
The takeaway for marketers is clear: AI is no longer a marketing side experiment; it is enterprise infrastructure. Effective deployment relies on central consensus, and a little bit of FOMO amongst your user groups goes a long way.
3. Should we be using AI to write content?
This hot potato sparked more debate than any other question discussed by the panel.
On one side, there was caution. For some brands, human-led copywriting remains essential. Neelam Sandhu, CMO, Vonage, steers her team away from using AI to generate content. Her concern? ‘In an environment where trust is so important’, Neelam explained, we risk compromising it if ‘AI content becomes vanilla and it loses its personality’. Lara Dewar backed this up, explaining that for content to be distinctive, it must be ‘empathetic and show real human emotion’.
Other CMOs took a more pragmatic view.
Don McGuire described AI writing tools as ‘transformational’, enabling consistency in tone and saving his team thousands of hours per month, freeing them to focus on higher-value thinking.
The common ground between the CMOs?
- AI can support and scale content.
- But humans must lead, shape and refine it.
Every B2B marketer must establish for themself where the compromise point sits. How much writing are we comfortable ceding to AI before we risk the individuality and character of our brand voice? What human/AI mix best achieves consistency of tone?
And can we create the volume of content our brand needs at this compromise point, or does that have to flex too? Several CMOs said that they were moving from, in Neelam’s words: ‘quantity at speed to quality at speed’, with emphasis on fewer, better crafted content pieces.
4. The changing nature of search
Perhaps the most significant shift is the sudden change to online search caused by the widespread use of AI chat. LLM use has reshaped how consumers discover brands, disrupting traditional SEO and SEM models.
Neelam Sandhu noted that this has forced marketers to lay aside traditional marketing metrics around keywords and rankings. Now, we follow new tech-led rules that, paradoxically, prioritise content that speaks to people in natural, human language. The challenge now is no longer ranking in search. It’s being selected by AI as a trusted human source.
The X-factor that sets great content apart? Writing that has genuine meaning and utility for the customer.
Roche Vandenberghe, CMO, Globe Telecom, stated that ‘the single big misconception about AI is the prioritisation for speed over meaning’. AI can generate nice-sounding content fast. But is that content useful to your clients?
In addition to utility, message consistency is vital for brands striving to appear in AI answers. Don McGuire explained that ‘it’s not about homogenous content.
It’s about establishing consistency and tone of voice, how you show up in this world’. He felt that AI tools help create consistency, citing Qualcomm’s ‘amazing results’ from rolling out AI tool WRITER across a 400-seat team.
Final thoughts: We have moved from experimentation to AI execution at scale
‘Resistance is futile’. That was the assessment on AI adoption from Don McGuire. He pointed out that ‘we live in a world that moves at the speed of TikTok’ and that no CMO can hire enough people to scale and keep up with innovation cycles. So, AI adoption is no longer a question.
This year’s discussion was all about how to use AI wisely. Where does it work for you? Where does it save your team time? Marketers are much more aware of the limits of AI, and cautious about overuse, especially when it comes to crafting an individual, authentic brand voice.
But, there was consensus that AI is an exceptionally useful tool that can, in the words of Roche Vandenberghe, ‘cut across the whole customer journey’.
The marketing teams that get AI adoption right will collaborate on tool selection across the business. They’ll carefully consider how they use AI to generate content. They’ll work hard to remove bias and uphold ethics when they use AI to segment and personalise campaigns.
And, they’ll think big. Because, to get ahead, we now must think about AI application across everything we do, not just discrete tasks. And think at scale.
The opportunity is enormous. But so is the responsibility.
And the brands that win will be those that remain distinctively, consistently, and unmistakably — human.
Ei Advisory provides B2B sales and marketing intelligence that helps companies reach, engage and convert customers. Powered by a combination of expert human analysis and our proprietary technology, Mercury, we serve clients globally from offices in London and New York.
To find out more about how we help B2B marketers, look at our Q&A section
Get in touch to find out how we can help you build trust and relevance in complex markets, contact Rachel Reasbeck at rachel.reasbeck@ei-a.com
If you’d like to explore what CMOs said at other events in our CMO Perspectives series, you can read our article on B2B Marketing at a Turning Point: Five Lessons from Davos 2026
Want to find out what CMOs are saying at other events around the globe?
Check out our other Insights articles on CMO perspectives.