When everyone creates with AI, what’s left for the CMO to govern?

In the age of AI-generated content, the chief marketing officer’s greatest value is no longer creating marketing assets but instituting and governing the systems, standards, and trust behind them.

In brief

• AI-generated content is increasingly being created outside marketing teams, often without review, making brand governance more difficult and less visible to CMOs.
• Four major shifts are noted in creating content using AI: unseen creation, benign uniformity, creative inversion and erosion of authorship, all of which are cultural and operational rather than technical risks.
• Widespread use of the same AI tools and prompts can flatten originality, producing generic, low-quality content at scale.

The biggest marketing risk was once signing off the wrong campaign. Today, with 63% of organisations allowing citizen developers to build their own AI tools, brand creation is happening everywhere – often outside marketing, and often without review. How does the CMO respond?

Just 3% of marketing leaders can identify the appropriate controls for key AI risks, according to the latest EY Responsible AI Pulse Survey.

This doesn’t surprise me. Creative teams work in an unpredictable world where amorphous ideas are tested, discarded and reshaped every day. They are comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity and unpredictability.

This mindset has made marketing one of the fastest adopters of AI. But it also means AI has been embraced as a creative accelerator long before the risks are fully understood.

Across Australia, organisations already report a wide range of negative impacts from AI-related risks. Hallucinations or misinformation in AI-generated content (70%), misuse of AI by employees or customers (60%) and reputational damage from visible AI failures (43%) all sit squarely in marketing territory.

For chief marketing officers, I see four distinct shifts:

• Unseen creation: Content produced outside marketing, at scale, without review
• Benign uniformity: Convergence of tone, style and ideas
• Creative inversion: AI used to accelerate output, rather than expand creative thinking
• Erosion of authorship: Loss of clear human judgement and accountability.

Notice none of these are ‘technical’. They’re cultural and operational.

Unseen creation is already well underway. What was once an occasional rogue PowerPoint is now an exponential increase in content generated by non-creative teams and individuals using AI tools – much of it invisible to marketing.

When the same tools, prompts and workflows are used everywhere, creative work converges. Originality flattens. Benign uniformity results. Merriam-Webster’s choice of ‘slop’ as its 2025 word of the year captures the zeitgeist: low-quality digital content produced at scale by AI.

What often follows is creative inversion. AI is increasingly used to accelerate finished output – faster copy, more variations, more volume – rather than to expand creative thinking. AI should be a catalyst for creativity, not a replacement.

Brands aren’t built from prompts or policies. Their history is shaped over decades through judgement, instinct, insight and lived experience. That’s what people trust. AI can be trained on brand guidelines, but it can’t truly understand brand history like a human being can.

CMOs must also invest in creative literacy alongside technical capability. When non-creative teams lack the skills to recognise good writing or good graphic design, the first AI-generated draft can look ‘good enough’. Creative illiteracy is an invisible risk of AI.

This is why CMOs must look far broader than what marketing produces. As AI-enabled content multiplies, traditional checks and balances can’t keep up. The response is to pursue responsible AI with clear boundaries and governance structures. Not to slow innovation, but to define where human judgement, tone and creative integrity remain non-negotiable.

In practice, the safest places for marketing to experiment with AI sit upstream: in digital analytics, insight generation, segmentation and pattern recognition. These applications are powerful, scalable and low risk for brand integrity.

But ultimately, brand trust is one of any company’s most valuable assets, and the CMO is its custodian. That means responsible AI sits squarely within the CMO’s remit.