The Red Pill Series: Why the CMOs leading successful AI adoption are the ones still learning

The marketing leaders getting the most from AI aren’t the ones with the best tools or the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who are personally, visibly and continuously learning. In the third article of The Red Pill Series, humari’s Joe Hildebrand explores what red pill leadership looks like for CMOs navigating AI transformation.

BCG’s recent ‘AI Radar’ report found that C-level executives who are deeply and personally engaged with AI are twelve times more likely to be among the top 5% of companies succeeding with AI innovation. Not twice as likely. Not three times. Twelve.

That’s not a marginal advantage, it’s a fundamentally different outcome and it’s driven by something that has nothing to do with the technology itself: the leader’s willingness to stay close to it.

What the best CMOs are doing 

The marketing leaders I see getting the most from AI share a set of behaviours that may have felt uncomfortable in many boardrooms five years ago. They spend time in the tools themselves rather than delegating experimentation to their teams. They ask questions they don’t know the answers to in rooms full of people who report to them. They talk openly about what they’re still figuring out and where they’ve got it wrong.

This isn’t weakness. It’s the single most powerful thing a CMO can do right now, because when the leader models curiosity and experimentation, the team mirrors it. When the leader stays distant, mandates adoption and measures usage from a dashboard, the team plays it safe. The leader’s relationship with AI sets the ceiling for the entire function’s capability.

It's about is, not just our teams

Gartner’s February 2026 survey of 402 senior marketing leaders found that 65% of CMOs expect AI to dramatically change their role in the next two years, yet only 32% believe significant changes are needed to their own skill set. One in five said no personal change was needed at all.

This isn’t necessarily arrogance, it’s instinct. CMOs built successful careers by assembling talented teams and empowering them to execute. Applying that same approach to AI feels entirely natural, even though it leaves a growing leadership fluency gap that the rest of the C-suite is starting to notice. Only 15% of CEOs currently believe their CMO is AI-savvy and CMOs are now held four times more accountable for AI ROI than any other executive in the business.

The cost of distance 

The price of staying distant isn’t just strategic, it’s psychological. Recent research published in Harvard Business Review identifies what it calls ‘psychological debt’: a cluster of negative effects including reduced autonomy, diminished competence and identity threat that accumulate when employees adopt AI without the right leadership conditions around them. In a study of 1,200 employees across sectors, higher psychological debt was strongly linked to lower and less sophisticated AI usage, even among people who recognised its value. Early-career workers were the most affected, which for marketing teams where junior talent handles much of the execution now being reshaped by AI, should be a particularly sobering finding. This isn’t something a training programme fixes. It requires leadership that is close enough to see it.

Why this matters more for marketing than elsewhere 

Marketing is under unique pressure. The function with the highest potential for AI-driven revenue growth is also the one where CEO confidence in leadership capability is falling fastest. The Boathouse CEO Study found that 60% of CEOs now view marketing as a cost centre, up from 35% just a year ago. That perception doesn’t shift by buying better tools. It shifts when the CMO demonstrates, credibly and visibly, that they understand how AI creates value and that they’re building the human conditions for it to work.

Leading from the front

The red pill for CMOs isn’t a strategy document or a transformation roadmap. It’s a personal decision to stay close to the technology, to learn publicly and to create the conditions where your team can do the same. Gartner predicts that by 2027, a lack of AI literacy will rank among the top three reasons CMOs are replaced at large enterprises. That’s not a threat, it’s a signal that the definition of marketing leadership is changing, and the CMOs who recognise that earliest will be the ones who shape what it becomes.

And whilst leadership sets the direction, the culture you create determines whether anyone follows. In our next article in this series, we’ll look at the cultural conditions that separate the marketing teams getting real value from AI from those that aren’t.