All 2025 Conference Sessions

Gartner Opening Keynote: From What’s New to What’s Next — Leading Marketing’s Epic Journey to Growth

Speakers:

• Alex De Fursac Gash, VP Analyst
• Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone, VP, Advisory

Key take-aways

• Marketing leaders face immense pressure to work harder, deliver faster, to use less but deliver more. They’re working in an environment of constant change, endless new demands and cross-functional complexity.

• Continuing to walk the same path of the “typical” marketing journey rapidly diminishes the probability of success. Adaptability is key — in fact, failure to adapt is a top reason CEOs say they’ve parted ways with their CMO.

• A key reason why many CMOs struggle to implement their long-term plans is strategic dysfunction — marketing and enterprise objectives that are numerous and conflicting.

• A recent Gartner survey revealed that many CMOs fit one of two profiles: enterprise operators or market shapers. While enterprise operators focus inwards, market shapers have deep customer and marketing insight.  Being seen as a market shaper makes a CMO eight times more likely to succeed in their role.

Market shaping CMOs focus on four things:

• Enterprise leadership commitments to the customer
• Enterprise understanding of and response to disruptive forces
• Customer preferences for your organization over the competition
• Future product strategy by helping product leaders understand unmet customer needs.

Signature Series: How to Develop an AI Strategy for Marketing

Speakers:

Nicole Greene, VP Analyst

Key take-aways

• Sixty-two percent of CEOs say growth is a top strategic priority for their organization. Marketing is uniquely positioned to use AI to help achieve that growth.

• Last year, it was all about GenAI. Now, we’re tracking emotion AI, machine customers, influence AI and agentic AI, too. It’s time to develop a short, mid and long-term strategic vision that considers AI as a tool, then as an agent, and then as an influencer. 

• The majority of organizations are currently using AI as a tool. They’re in the early stages of AI adoption, with a limited number of use cases aimed at reducing the burden of manual tasks.

• In the medium term, CMOs should plan for using AI as an agent, focusing on use cases that support better customer experiences. Agentic AI requires quality data and guardrails to succeed and mitigate risks.

• In the next three to five years, marketers will be using AI as an influencer. That means AI can lead decisions autonomously, requiring less human oversight. Marketers will need the discipline to optimize for both human and machine customers.