Gartner just dropped a finding that should make every CMO reconsider their job description: only 15% of CEOs view their marketing leader as strongly AI savvy — despite 82% of business leaders saying their brand and culture must evolve to keep pace with AI.

That gap is the opportunity. The marketing leaders who are seizing it are not just running campaigns. They are shaping markets.

The Market Shaper Profile

Gartner research consistently finds a specific profile of marketing leaders outperforms peers. They are described as market shapers. They excel at innovation, positioning, and insight generation, and they adapt their behaviors to what the business needs most.

Market shapers outperform because they influence how customers perceive value, how leaders prioritize investments, and how the organization navigates disruption. They are also leading the pack in AI adoption. They are already using AI more extensively and across a wider range of use cases than their peers.

Most importantly, they apply AI beyond creative production or task automation. They use AI to monitor shifting customer needs, synthesize fragmented signals, and run rapid experiments that inform strategic decisions.

The Four Key Behaviors

Gartner identifies four behaviors that distinguish market shapers, each reinforced by AI:

  • Customer influencer: Shape customer preference by ensuring the brand remains visible and trustworthy in AI-mediated journeys. This includes optimizing content for AI discovery and using AI-enabled monitoring to detect misinformation early.
  • Customer advocate: Guide enterprise priorities by synthesizing voice-of-customer signals. AI helps aggregate direct, indirect, and inferred feedback to keep decisions grounded in real customer value.
  • Market designer: Direct innovation toward ideas that reinforce future brand ambition. Synthetic data and rapid prototyping allow teams to test concepts before scaling investment.
  • Market wayfinder: Translate disruptive signals into a coherent narrative for the enterprise. AI-powered scenario planning helps stakeholders see around corners.

Efficiency Is Not the Strategy

Many marketing organizations make the mistake of seeing AI primarily as an efficiency tool. Productivity gains matter, but this narrow focus limits marketing credibility with leadership by keeping its contributions focused on execution. It also misses AI greatest value.

Market-shaping leaders use AI to accelerate insights. They apply it to understand how customer questions are evolving, how AI discovery is changing buying journeys, and where trust is eroding.

Brand as Enterprise Discipline

As AI accelerates commoditization and misinformation, brand becomes one of the few levers organizations can use to claim a distinctive and trustworthy position. Companies with high-performing brand strategies are twice as likely to exceed growth goals.

The differentiator is not higher spending. It is stronger alignment between brand and business strategy.

Market-shaping marketing leaders treat brand as an enterprise discipline. They use AI-generated insight to update value propositions, guide innovation priorities, and protect trust. Brand strategy becomes the channel through which AI-driven insight is translated into direction.