Let’s be honest: you’re probably sick of hearing about AI.
It’s everywhere. In your inbox, on every panel, in every boardroom conversation. And amid the buzz, it’s easy to assume it’s just another hype cycle, a tech trend that your marketing or IT team can “look into.”
For many business leaders, this assumption is starting to cost them.
At Open Partners, we work closely with major brands and platform partners at the intersection of marketing, data, and AI. What we see – day in, day out – is that confusion and inaction at the top is leading to fragmentation and missed opportunities across the business.
Yes, the noise around AI is real. But the impact it’s having? That’s even louder, and permanent.
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Shifting the mindset: AI is not just a marketing problem. It’s a business-wide imperative
Executives often view AI as a marketing or IT concern; a technical effort for their CMO or CTO to navigate. But AI is already reshaping far more than campaign performance. It’s reshaping how consumers behave, how employees work, and how companies measure success.
Right now, your marketing team is probably reporting falling performance metrics and distorted attribution. It’s not because they’re underperforming. It’s because AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity have changed how people search, discover, and buy.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: your competitors’ AI models may already know more about your customers than you do. CMOs are on the front line of these shifts, but without C-suite reinforcement, even the best marketers can’t unlock AI’s full potential.
Treating this as a tactical marketing issue misses the point entirely. These are structural shifts.
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Why CEOs must prioritise AI strategy and integration
1. AI is rapidly skewing business intelligence metrics, planning, investment, and material outcomes
Measurement was challenging before. AI just made it much harder. Let’s not forget: even before AI entered the picture, measurement was already a mess. With the loss of third-party cookies, growing privacy regulations, and walled gardens from the big platforms. Attribution was unreliable at best. AI has now compounded that problem. Customer journeys no longer follow trackable paths. People are bypassing traditional funnels entirely. They’re engaging with AI interfaces that sit outside your current ecosystem.
If you can’t see how your customers are making decisions, you can’t lead with clarity. And that’s not a marketing problem. That’s a business intelligence problem. CMOs have the deepest insight into how customer behaviour is shifting. But for that insight to count, they need a framework the whole business stands behind. With the right mandate, CMOs can move from being under scrutiny to becoming a boardroom growth architect, the ones showing how AI can turn disruption into competitive advantage.
Here’s the provocation: if your board still believes in neat, trackable funnels, they’re working off a map of a world that no longer exists.
2. Meanwhile, your employees are already using AI, with or without you
According to Microsoft, 78% of employees are already using generative AI tools in some form. But only 10% of UK organisations are structurally ready for AI, according to Cisco’s UK AI Readiness Index.
That’s a massive gap. And a governance failure waiting to happen.
AI introduces new compliance risks, data challenges, and ethical concerns that can’t be managed in silos. We’re already seeing cases of employees drafting customer proposals in ChatGPT, analysts uploading sensitive data into public tools, and junior staff generating strategy decks with no oversight. None of this is malicious but without governance, it’s a risk at scale.
But it’s not just about containment. Used strategically, AI is already helping brands accelerate product innovation, personalise customer journeys at scale, and cut media waste by automating in real time. We’ve seen companies reduce campaign turnaround times by 40% simply by embedding AI into creative testing.
Ask yourself: when was the last time you knowingly let your employees deploy unregulated, business-critical software without approval? Because that’s happening with AI, today.
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AI needs leadership, not delegation
Too often, AI gets bounced between the CMO, CTO, and CIO. But what’s really needed is C-suite alignment and CEO-level ownership.
This isn’t about experimenting with tools. It’s about defining how AI fits into your operating model, your compliance frameworks, your workforce development, and your customer experience.
AI isn’t a side project. It’s the next foundation of business performance. The leaders who grasp this early won’t just avoid risk, they’ll redesign how growth happens, with AI as the operating system of the business. Without top-down direction, you risk confusion, inefficiency, and exposure, while your competitors move faster and smarter.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re not alone. But the answer isn’t to step back, it’s to step up. Ask:
- Where is AI already affecting our business that we haven’t acknowledged?
- Do we have a clear, governed approach to its use?
- Are we measuring success with frameworks that actually reflect how people behave today?
- Are we empowering our teams with guidance, or just leaving them to figure it out?
- Are we giving marketing the mandate and tools to support through these shifts?
Without clear answers to these questions and structured plans around them, businesses – and the teams responsible for growing them – are flying blind.
We know this because we help our clients answer these questions every day; we help them shape AI-first growth strategies that work across functions, combining Media, Data, and Creative, enhanced by best-practice use of AI, to drive material business outcomes. We know what works, and what businesses must do to strategically and responsibly harness AI to its full potential.
The bottom line? AI fatigue is understandable, but leadership fatigue is not an option
Not if you want your business to stay relevant.
Here’s my final provocation: If AI is changing your customers faster than it’s changing your business, how long before you’re irrelevant? Leaders who act now won’t just survive the disruption they’ll set the pace of growth in their industry.
For information, support, and guidance on how to imbed AI readiness into your businesses growth strategy, get in touch with Open Partners at info@open.partners.