What Does It Really Take To Lead AI Transformation In Marketing in 2026?

On November 14, 2025, the Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange gathered a room full of marketers, strategists, and curious leaders to ask one core question:

What does it really take to move AI from experimentation to actual transformation inside marketing?

To answer that, Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange co-organizers Jessica Hreha and Tammy Tufty brought MAICON back to Charlotte. MAICON is the annual Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference produced by Marketing AI Institute, a premier event that helps non technical marketing and business leaders understand and scale AI in real organizations.

Jessica shared her MAICON talk on the emerging role of Director of Marketing AI Transformation. Tammy followed with her own MAICON takeaways on AI literacy, prompting, personas, and the shift from AI literacy to AI fluency.

I attended as a fractional CMO, thought leadership architect, and visibility strategist, and I asked questions I hear every week from clients who are trying to lead AI change while still doing their day jobs. This is my field report for wiredPRworks with AI assistance. All errors are mine. Title image created by ChatGPT.

Part One: The Missing Role in AI: Why Companies Need an AI Transformation Leader [who is also a marketer]

Jessica opened her presentation with a familiar story.

The CEO sends the memo.
“We are AI first now.”

Licenses roll out. ChatGPT, Copilot, maybe a few niche tools. IT owns procurement and security. Training is minimal. Everyone is told to “experiment” and “report back.”

The result is what Jessica called DIY AI. She described what many teams are experiencing: uneven adoption, fragmented experimentation, and no clear visibility into what’s working or replicable.

Most teams get stuck between experimentation and transformation. Pilots exist. Progress does not.

Her core point was simple and uncomfortable:

When AI transformation is everyone’s job, it is also no one’s job.

That is where the Director of Marketing AI Transformation comes in.

The New Role: Director of Marketing AI Transformation

Jessica walked us through what this role actually does inside a marketing organization. It is not a side hustle, an “extra project,” or a passion hobby.

Jessica outlined how this role bridges strategy, capability building, and change leadership across marketing, IT, and operations. It is a dedicated function focused on direction, readiness, adoption, and measurable progress — not an extra project layered onto someone’s workload.

She also showed real examples of professionals who moved into these roles at HubSpot, Prudential, and other enterprises. None of them started as “AI people.” They started as marketers who saw the gap and stepped into it.

Their shared traits:

• Strategic marketers with cross functional credibility
• Technically curious, not necessarily technical
• Obsessed with measurement and repeatable workflows

As someone who guides organizations through brand and growth inflection points as a fractional CMO, I recognized this immediately. It is the same leadership moment I see when a company’s brand no longer reflects who they have become. It is not a Martech problem. It is a leadership decision.

My Question: How Do You Lead Skeptics, Not Just Enthusiasts

During Q and A, I asked Jessica about the people side.

I have seen the whole emotional spectrum around change, including intranets, social media, and yes, AI. Excitement. Fear. Fatigue. A sense that “this will change everything” pressed up against “please do not break what is working.” Thinking back to the time, I managed the launch of the first intranet for a Fortune 100 client, I’ll never forget all the diplomacy, negotiation, and education it took to get 16 different departments to work together. Although it was one of my most challenging projects ever, it certainly ranks among the most rewarding.

My question to Jessica was essentially:

How do you get people aligned when change feels risky, personal, and exhausting?

Jessica answered with a story from Brice Challamel, a leader at Moderna, and his now famous “five kinds of cows” crossing a river. It sounds whimsical. It is actually a sharp leadership framework that breaks teams into distinct behavior groups — the early leaders, the enthusiastic adopters, the cautious majority, the doubters who need evidence, and the skeptics who worry about what could be lost.

Ignore skeptics and you miss valuable risk signals. Engage them and they often become your strongest advocates once they see that their concerns have been heard and addressed.

Her advice:

• Identify which groups exist in your organization
• Tailor communication, training, and expectations to each group
• Treat skeptics as early warning sensors, not obstacles

In other words, AI transformation is not just a tooling project. It is an exercise in organizational psychology and change leadership.

Roadmaps, Not Random Acts Of Piloting

Jessica then pulled back the curtain on what a realistic 90 to 120 day marketing AI roadmap looks like when someone owns it.

Jessica outlined what a structured 90 to 120 day marketing AI roadmap looks like when someone is responsible for it. It begins with assessing readiness and current use, reviewing capability gaps and existing tools, and then designing tightly scoped pilots with clear hypotheses and success criteria. Her central message: most of the work happens before any vendor demo.

Then comes pilot design. Here she was blunt:

An AI pilot without a narrow problem, a clear hypothesis, and baseline data is a waste of time.

Her checklist for a serious pilot:

• Narrow, clearly defined workflow
• Documented current process, time, and cost
• Success hypothesis before the first prompt
• Evidence that existing tools have been tried first
• Pre agreed criteria for “keep, scale, or kill”

Seventy five percent of the work happens before a vendor demo. That is also where most organizations skip straight ahead.

As a fractional CMO, this aligns with how I structure 5D Visibility and Fractional CMO engagements. We don’t start with tools. We start with clarity, constraints, and a realistic path from now to next to scale. Thanks to Jessica for sharing her MAICON presentation with us!

Part Two: Think Different: From AI Literacy To AI Fluency

After Jessica’s presentation, Tammy Tufty, co-leader of the Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange, took the mic for the second part of the program to share her MAICON conference takeaways.

If Jessica focused on who leads, Tammy focused on how we work.

Tammy noted the difference between MAICON’s main themes:

2024 was about AI literacy.
2025 is about AI fluency.

It’s no longer enough to know which tools exist. The real advantage belongs to marketers who can design better workflows, write sharper prompts, and feed AI with better context.

Prompting Is The New Creative Brief

Tammy reiterated a line from Andy Crestodina, a Growing Social Now guest:

If you can’t brief an agency, you cannot brief AI.

The same skills that make a strong creative brief now make a strong prompt:

• Clear role
• Clear task
• Clear audience and persona
• Clear success criteria

She emphasized that prompting is strategy work, not typing. Chris Penn’s advice stuck with many of us:

When you are writing a prompt that really matters, your brain should hurt.

Tammy encouraged us to add one line to any serious prompt, as suggested by Chris:

Ask me one question at a time until you have enough information to successfully complete the task.

It slows the model down. It forces you to see where your own thinking is fuzzy or incomplete. It turns AI into a collaborator, not a vending machine.

My Second Question: What About Personas And Real Customer Language?

Later, I asked Tammy something I hear from clients all the time.

Most organizations have personas. Many have too many. Few actually use them. I shared a past example where interviewing fifty customers revealed an entirely different internal language than the brand was using.

So I asked:

What is the best way to create personas the AI can actually use, without turning this into a massive research project that never ends?

Her answer was refreshingly practical:

• Use AI tools for deep research to surface patterns, themes, and language
• Cross check that against live human input interviews, sales calls, reviews
• Treat persona docs as living data inputs, not pretty slides that never get updated

Her core point:

Personas are no longer marketing extras. They are data your AI needs to perform.

If you skip personas or keep them vague, you are feeding AI with low octane fuel. You will get generic, AI slop content that could have come from anyone.

If you treat personas as shared fuel across ChatGPT, Jasper, Copilot, Salesforce, and other tools, you align your entire stack around the same customers, the same language, and the same buying triggers.

That’s where my work as a fractional CMO and thought leadership architect converges with what Jessica and Tammy shared. When we align personas, positioning, and AI workflows, marketing stops asking for attention and starts reinforcing the reputation you already earned.

AI Slop, Sticky Notes, And Daily Habits

Tammy also warned about something we are all seeing more of:

AI slop.

It looks fine at first glance. Grammatically correct. Structured. Harmless. Also:

• Full of clichés
• Emotionally flat
• Devoid of point of view
• Interchangeable with any other brand

AI slop is not AI’s fault. It is the result of:

• Weak prompts
• Missing context
• No human review
• Publishing the first draft

Her antidote:

• Slow the AI down
• Add more context than feels comfortable
• Force a second and third round
• Always have a human edit for voice and meaning

She closed with a practical habit from Geoff Woods, author of The AI Driven Leader.

Two sticky notes:

1. “How can AI help me do this”
2. “Role, Context, Interview, Task”

Ask the first question before you start a task. Use the second as your mental checklist for prompts. Do that once a day for thirty days and you are no longer “dabbling in AI.” You are building AI leadership muscle.

Why This Matters For Marketing Leaders And Teams

For me, this event crystallized three truths that I see in my fractional CMO and thought leadership work.

1. AI transformation is a leadership decision, not a tooling decision.
   Until someone owns marketing AI strategy, roadmap, and enablement, you will stay in pilot purgatory.
2. Personas, prompts, and processes are now core AI assets.
   If you want AI to amplify your brand instead of flatten it, you need sharper personas, smarter prompts, and redesigned workflows.
3. Marketing is at the center of the AI opportunity.
   We sit at the intersection of language, behavior, and emotion. That is exactly where AI operates. The question is not whether AI will reshape marketing. It is who will lead how that happens inside your organization.

Thank You, Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange

A huge thank you to Jessica Hreha and Tammy Tufty for:

• Creating the Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange
• Curating a community where marketers can speak honestly about what is working and what is hard
• Bringing MAICON insights home and translating them into real world guidance we can act on right now

If you are in or near Charlotte and you care about the future of marketing, AI, and leadership, keep an eye out for their upcoming events. This community is building something important, the future.

About The Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange

The Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange is a growing community of marketing and AI professionals who want to learn, experiment, and lead together. The group hosts events, seminars, and local conversations that explore how artificial intelligence is transforming marketing in practical, human centered ways. It is a hub for collaboration, professional growth, and innovation for anyone interested in the intersection of marketing and AI in the Charlotte region.

About The Author

Barbara Rozgonyi is a fractional CMO, thought leadership architect, and keynote speaker who guides organizations through brand, visibility, and growth inflection points. Recognized as one of the Top 100 Keynote Speakers to Watch, she founded CoryWest Media and created WiredPRWorks, a long running marketing and PR blog. Barbara works with visionary leaders, marketing teams, and associations to align strategy, storytelling, and AI powered systems so their brands become seen, trusted, and chosen in competitive markets.