I volunteer with a group of growth leaders, and I have been digging into research for an upcoming interactive workshop on how the roles of the CMO, CRO, CGO, CCO, and other growth executives are changing.
What stood out to me was how clearly the research validates what many of us are already experiencing.
Titles are changing. Responsibilities are overlapping. Growth is being spread across more functions. Executives are being asked to do more with constrained resources, while AI continues to change both how the work gets done and what leaders are expected to understand.
At the same time, CEOs, boards, and investors still want answers to some very basic questions: Are we growing? Is that growth profitable? What is getting in the way? And who is accountable for fixing it?
The research does not necessarily tell us something entirely new. In many ways, it puts data behind what growth leaders are already seeing and experiencing inside their organizations.
Here are a few of the statistics that caught my attention. We will unpack what they may mean in a moment.
A Few Numbers Worth Sitting With
Spencer Stuart’s 2026 research found that 31% of S&P 500 companies do not have an enterprise CMO. At the same time, the average tenure of an S&P 500 CMO is 4.1 years. That number by itself could sound concerning, until you look at what happens next. Of CMOs who exited between 2021 and 2025, 62% were promoted or moved into a similar or larger role, and 9% became CEOs. Spencer Stuart also points to the growth of what it calls the “CMO-plus” role, where responsibilities extend beyond traditional marketing into broader commercial, revenue, or customer leadership.
McKinsey found something else that caught my attention. Companies with one customer- or growth-oriented executive on the executive committee experienced up to 2.3 times more growth than companies with multiple overlapping customer or growth roles. That executive could be a CMO, Chief Commercial Officer, CRO, CGO, or another role. The title itself was not the point. Clear accountability was.
Then there is AI. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found that CMOs are allocating an average of 15.3% of their marketing budgets to AI initiatives, yet only 30% report having mature AI readiness capabilities. Seventy percent say becoming an AI leader is a critical goal this year, while 70% also acknowledge that their internal marketing processes are not mature enough to implement and scale it effectively. Marketing budgets, meanwhile, remain relatively flat at about 7.8% of company revenue.
And this is not just coming from consulting and executive-search firms. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Marketing examined growth job postings and conducted in-depth interviews with Chief Growth Officers. The researchers found that growth is increasingly being treated as a distinct, cross-functional responsibility designed to bring together initiatives that have traditionally lived across marketing, sales, product, customer relationships, data, process improvement, and other parts of the organization.
Each of those findings is interesting on its own. Together, I think they tell a much bigger story.
Maybe We Have Been Asking the Wrong Question
For several years, there has been plenty of discussion about whether the CMO role is disappearing. I am beginning to think that is the wrong question.
The work is not disappearing. It is being redistributed.
In some organizations, marketing still sits under a traditional CMO. In others, sales and marketing report to a Chief Commercial Officer. Software companies increasingly use the CRO title. Other companies have introduced Chief Growth Officers or Chief Customer Officers. Spencer Stuart found that some organizations without a traditional CMO have simply moved those responsibilities into broader roles.
So perhaps what we are seeing is not the disappearance of a function. It is the breakdown of the traditional boundaries around it.
That makes sense when you think about how growth actually happens.
Marketing can create demand, but demand does not become revenue without sales. Sales can acquire customers, but those customers may not create long-term value if acquisition costs are too high or retention is poor. Customer success can improve retention and expansion, but it cannot compensate forever for weak product-market fit. Product can build something customers want, but that alone does not guarantee the organization can efficiently take it to market.
Growth has never really respected the boxes on an organizational chart. We may simply be reaching a point where leadership structures are beginning to reflect that reality.
When Everyone Owns Growth, Who Actually Owns It?
This may be the research finding I find most interesting.
McKinsey’s work suggests that companies perform better when there is a clearly identified customer- or growth-oriented executive rather than several executives with overlapping pieces of the responsibility. In other words, adding more growth titles does not necessarily create more growth. It can actually create fragmentation if nobody has the authority to connect the pieces.
I have seen versions of this play out in organizations. Marketing has a dashboard. Sales has another one. Customer success tracks retention and expansion. Product watches adoption and utilization. Finance has the numbers that ultimately make it into the board deck.
Every team may be reporting its part of the business accurately, and the company can still struggle to understand why growth is slowing.
That is where I think the modern growth leader becomes particularly important.
The job is not necessarily to personally own every function. It is to understand how the functions work together and to recognize where the system is breaking down. Can we bring the right people together to solve the problem? Are we working from the same definitions? Are the incentives aligned? Are we looking at activity or actual business impact? Do our leaders agree on what success looks like?
Those capabilities matter whether the title on the business card says CMO, CRO, CGO, CCO, or something else.
The Journal of Marketing research reinforces this idea. The growth leaders studied were not simply replacing marketing or sales. Their role was to orchestrate growth across functions, align priorities, and create greater accountability for high-impact growth initiatives.
The Metrics Are Telling Us Something Too
One of the most important shifts for growth leaders may have less to do with our titles and more to do with the language we use.
Functional metrics matter. CAC, pipeline, conversion, CPL, attribution, engagement, brand awareness, retention, expansion, and dozens of other measurements help us understand what is happening inside the engine.
But the higher we move within an organization, the more important it becomes to connect those metrics to the business’s economics.
Revenue, margin, profitability, cash, retention, efficient acquisition, return on investment, and enterprise value all become part of the conversation.
A CEO shouldn’t have to translate marketing performance into business performance. Neither should the CFO. That translation is increasingly part of the growth leader’s job.
This matters most in private equity environments, where functional performance is only one piece of the equation. A company may be growing revenue and still be destroying value. Growth leaders need to understand not only whether the organization is growing, but whether it is growing efficiently, profitably, and in a way that supports the investment thesis.
That requires us to think beyond our individual functions.
AI Is Accelerating the Change
Then we add AI.
Gartner describes today’s CMO mandate as a combination of growth, AI transformation, and cost discipline. Marketing leaders are investing heavily in AI while many organizations still lack the data foundations, processes, governance, talent, and operating maturity required to scale it effectively.
I think that distinction matters.
We have no shortage of tools. What many organizations still lack is clarity about the problem they are trying to solve, where technology fits into the workflow, which work should disappear altogether, where human judgment adds value, who is responsible for the outcome, and how success will be measured.
That makes AI a leadership issue as much as it is a technology issue.
The executives who thrive in this next phase probably will not be the ones who can name the most AI platforms. They will be the ones who understand how to redesign the work because the technology now exists.
Albert Einstein wrote in 1946 that “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” His context was obviously far more serious than a discussion about business transformation, but the underlying idea resonates: when the environment changes, the thinking that got us here may not be enough to get us where we need to go.
Change Is Not Really the Story. How We Respond to It Is.
You may have heard the phrase: “The only constant in life is change.” It is commonly attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. The exact wording is actually a modern paraphrase rather than a direct surviving quotation, although it reflects the idea of continual change associated with his philosophy.
Maybe that is a useful way to think about what is happening with growth leadership.
Change itself is not new. We have always dealt with new technologies, competitors, customer expectations, economic pressures, ownership structures, and business models.
What feels different right now is the speed and the number of changes happening at the same time. Our roles are already changing. The more interesting question is how quickly we change.
It Also Changes How We Think About Our Careers
Another side of this research matters, especially for executives thinking about what comes next.
If roles are becoming more fluid, perhaps we also need to be careful not to define ourselves too tightly by our last title.
“I’m a CMO.” “I’m a CRO.” “I’m a CGO.”
Those titles matter. They tell people something about the level at which we have operated and the responsibilities we have held. But increasingly, I think they are only the beginning of the story.
What problem do you know how to solve?
Can you fix a fragmented go-to-market engine? Can you connect marketing investment to measurable revenue? Can you bring marketing, sales, product, customer success, and finance around one view of growth? Can you improve acquisition economics? Can you identify why retention is failing? Can you build the operating structure required to scale? Can you turn customer insight into profitable growth?
Those answers tell someone much more about the value you can create than a title alone.
For a CMO, that might mean saying, “I build measurable growth engines that connect marketing investment to revenue.” For a CRO, it might be, “I fix fragmented go-to-market organizations and create accountability across the revenue lifecycle.” For a customer leader, it could be, “I turn customer experience into retention, expansion, and enterprise value.”
The point is not that titles no longer matter. They do. But perhaps our title tells people where we sat, while our outcomes tell them what we can do.
That distinction also matters when we think about how growth leaders get noticed. Instead of leading with a list of responsibilities, we may need to become much clearer about the problems we solve, the business outcomes we have created, and the situations where our experience creates the most value.
So, Who Owns Growth?
I started digging into all of this while preparing for a workshop, but the research reinforced why I think the conversation itself matters.
Does growth belong to marketing? Sales? Customer success? Product? A CRO? A CGO? The answer will probably look different depending on the company, business model, stage of growth, and even ownership structure.
I am not convinced there is one organizational structure that is right for every company. I am increasingly convinced that growth cannot be a collection of disconnected functional goals.
Someone has to see the entire system. Someone has to understand why growth is or is not happening. Someone has to create alignment around the customer, the economics, and the priorities. And someone has to help turn all of that into action.
Maybe that person is the CMO. Maybe it is the CRO. Maybe it is the CGO. Or maybe the roles will continue to evolve into something we have not fully named yet.
That is the conversation I am most interested in having.
Join the conversation: What are you experiencing in your organization? Are the lines between marketing, revenue, customer, and growth becoming clearer, or are they becoming even more blurred?
Research Referenced
Spencer Stuart, CMO Tenure 2026: Snapshot of an Expanding Role for Marketing Leaders
Read the Spencer Stuart research
McKinsey & Company, The CMO’s Comeback: Aligning the C-suite to Drive Customer-Centric Growth
Read the McKinsey research
Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey
Read Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey findings
Atefi, Y., Hohenberg, S., Janani, S., & Zhou, W. (2025), The Growth Department: The Emerging Role and Impact of Chief Growth Officers and Their Cross-Functional Teams, Journal of Marketing
Read the Journal of Marketing study
The CMO Survey, 35th Edition (2026), Marketing Contracts Under Economic Pressure Despite Growing Value and AI Gains
Read the 35th edition findings
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