Mastering AI in Banking: Essential Strategies for CMOs by 2026

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the landscape of marketing, moving it beyond simple campaign execution to a powerful engine for enterprise-wide value creation. However, a significant disconnect between marketing leaders and the broader C-suite threatens to slow effective AI integration within the banking sector, according to a recent report from BCG. While Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) often envision AI enhancing marketing effectiveness and personalization, their C-suite counterparts—CEOs, CFOs, and technology leaders—view AI as a strategic catalyst for overarching enterprise growth and business model innovation.

A survey of 60 senior marketing executives revealed that only a small fraction of AI initiatives deliver enterprise-level value, with most remaining confined to individual functions or pilot programs. To truly harness AI’s potential and align with core corporate objectives, marketing leaders must strategically redesign end-to-end workflows, particularly in critical areas like creative personalization, content adaptation, media measurement, and programmatic buying.

Key Insights into AI’s Impact on Banking Marketing:

• Only 15% of marketing AI initiatives operate cross-functionally at scale, delivering enterprise-level value. Most remain in exploratory (20%), functional pilot (31%), enterprise pilot (15%), or functional transformation (19%) phases.
• A majority of CMOs (57%) prioritize marketing effectiveness and personalization (45%) as AI’s primary value drivers, contrasting sharply with their C-suite colleagues who focus on broader enterprise growth.
• While 99% of surveyed banks are prioritizing AI in customer-facing services, only 32% report significant returns from these investments.

Unlocking AI’s Full Potential: A Shift in Operating Models

There’s little doubt among CMOs that AI will fundamentally transform marketing. Yet, a narrow focus on technology, rather than a holistic rethinking of operating models, limits AI’s true impact. The real opportunity for CMOs lies in leveraging AI to reinvent entire marketing operating models, driving more profitable growth, rather than merely automating existing campaign processes or speeding up creative production. This strategic disconnect can hinder CMOs from securing the necessary resources and organizational commitment for ambitious AI initiatives. Marketing leaders must evolve beyond traditional sequential campaign processes and brand stewardship to generate measurable business value and build organizational intelligence over time.

The core challenge involves seamlessly connecting internal and external ecosystems while carefully sequencing and navigating profound changes in how marketing work is actually accomplished.

How CMOs Can Drive Enterprise Value with AI Marketing

While company-wide transformation remains the long-term goal, CMOs should initially prioritize redesigning end-to-end workflows where AI promises the most significant and rapid disruption. AI initiatives scale fastest when organizations transform workflows that become demonstrably easier and more efficient with AI, rather than simply adding new capabilities to static process structures.

Creative Workflows: Identifying Quick Wins

AI can rapidly accelerate creative tasks, especially in:

• Personalization
• Adaptation (including translation or localization)
• Creative testing and versioning
• Content management
• Selected production tasks

AI excels in tasks that build on existing creative ideas and require less human judgment. Early successes, as reported by CMOs in BCG’s survey, are emerging in search, social, and programmatic content channels. Here, creative workflows can effectively leverage data and algorithms to amplify human inspiration and strategic direction.

Media Workflows: Prioritizing AI-Enabled Acceleration

Media workflows follow a similar pattern. Measurement, planning, and buying processes benefit from upfront human judgment in strategy development and business planning. These areas are well-suited for AI-enabled acceleration within a two-to-three-year timeframe. Key priorities in media workflows include:

• Programmatic advertising
• Search marketing
• Social media
• Online video
• E-commerce platforms, including product detail pages

Agentic AI: Reshaping Marketing Accountability

As AI capabilities advance, the focus in decision-making shifts from a simplistic “in-house versus agency” debate to nuanced designs governing who performs work and when. BCG’s survey indicates that a growing number of marketing tasks will transition from human hands to technology, regardless of whether they are creative or media-focused.

The Shifting Landscape of Agencies

Leaders anticipate a decline in agency contributions for creative and media work by 11 to 14 percentage points over the next few years. Technology is expected to absorb a significant portion of this workload. Internal marketing team accountability will modestly increase from 48% to 50% in creative work, while technology’s share will jump from 7% to 16%. Similar patterns are seen in media, with internal teams growing from 45% to 51% and technology expanding from 10% to 18% of total accountability.

Bottom line: Agentic AI is poised to manage over one-fifth of marketing’s total workload within the next two to three years.

Fundamental Restructuring of Agency Partnerships

AI-driven disruption presents CMOs with a unique opportunity to redefine agency relationships by leaning into leading AI enablers. However, CMOs remain largely skeptical of agencies’ current ability to scale AI effectively:

• 86% of CMOs believe their creative agencies are not currently using AI at scale.
• 67% hold similar views regarding their media agencies.

CMOs’ primary concerns revolve around proper incentive alignment, equitable value sharing from AI-enabled efficiency gains, and challenging outdated business models. This creates an immediate opportunity for CMOs to leverage their buying power to forge true partnerships rather than transactional vendor arrangements. BCG suggests aligning on desired business outcomes first, then designing the appropriate partnership operating model to support those goals effectively. Regardless of the new balance between internal and external teams, handoffs to agencies must be tightly integrated and transparent to prevent loss of signals and value across organizational boundaries.

Four Strategic Imperatives for Marketing Leadership

To thrive in this transformative environment, marketing leaders in banking must take decisive action:

1. Align with the C-suite

Overcoming the C-suite’s disconnect in language and vision regarding AI is crucial. This alignment is essential for unlocking company-wide investment and positioning marketing to lead cross-functional transformation at scale, rather than remaining confined to functional silos.

2. Focus on Measurable Marketing Wins

Prioritize initiatives where AI will most significantly reshape business performance. In marketing, this means concentrating on priority end-to-end workflows in creative and media functions, building foundations for broader cross-functional connectivity over time. By demonstrating how AI supports enterprise value and growth, not just marketing efficiency, CMOs can build compelling cases for wider company transformation.

3. Rethink Agency Partnerships

Agencies will remain vital, but current partnership models are unsustainable. Leaders who holistically redesign operating models—addressing commercial structures, capability development, data sharing protocols, and accountability frameworks—will emerge as true winners in the evolving landscape.

4. Reimagine Talent Strategies

The advent of agentic AI will forge fundamentally new connections between humans and AI within marketing workflows. As AI handles more linear elements like execution, optimization, and measurement, human talent can ascend to higher-value work, including strategy, partnerships, business planning, and genuine creativity. The future of marketing is not a choice between humans and machines, but a new human-led, AI-empowered operating model that optimally balances capabilities.

Source: Thefinancialbrand.com