Key Insights from Aventi Group’s Chicago CMO Luncheon: Reshaping Teams in the Age of AI
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Key Insights from Aventi Group’s Chicago CMO Luncheon: Reshaping Teams in the Age of AI
I’m always energized when the Chicago CMO community comes together—and our most recent luncheon was especially thought-provoking. The topic: Reshaping teams in the age of AI. And as you might imagine, the conversation was lively.
The Three Pillars Still Matter—But They Look Different in an AI World
When you strip it down, reshaping teams for the AI era comes back to three familiar pillars: people, process, and technology. In many ways, that hasn’t changed from the pre-AI world—but how those pillars show up absolutely has.
People: Keeping Humanity at the Center of AI
People came first. We talked a lot about the importance of humanity and where humans must step in when AI falls short. AI doesn’t operate in a vacuum. People play a critical role as orchestrators—defining the strategy, providing the inputs, training teams, integrating systems, and ensuring AI works in service of the business. Just like any new technology, AI only delivers value when humans guide it with the right data, instructions, and context.
Process: Productivity vs. Efficiency and Where AI Truly Shines
Process is where things got especially interesting. A healthy debate emerged around whether AI’s greatest value lies in productivity (doing more) or efficiency (doing things smarter). While both matter, the discussion leaned heavily toward AI as an efficiency engine.
Take sales enablement as an example. The outputs—playbooks, decks, scripts, buyer-journey content—largely remain the same. What changes dramatically is how you get there. With a custom LLM trained on your go-to-market strategy, personas, and value proposition, AI can generate targeted training content, power seller chatbots, and rapidly tailor messaging for different buyer interactions. These initiatives existed before AI—but what once required 8x the resources can now be done with a fraction of the effort.
Another emerging process challenge surfaced as well: governance. Across marketing teams, dozens of AI use cases are being built by curious and innovative team members. The question CMOs are now facing is how to track them, evaluate their impact, determine ownership, and decide which should scale across the organization. One practical workaround shared was maintaining a centralized inventory—yes, even a simple spreadsheet—to track models, owners, effectiveness, and update needs. That visibility creates a foundation for an AI charter team to prioritize and invest where it matters most.
We also explored some creative and “cool” use cases—like leveraging AI to amplify a company’s biggest advocate: the visionary CEO or Head of Product. By building a digital twin from interviews, writing, and presentations, teams can automate thoughtful social content (with human review) that consistently amplifies leadership voice while freeing up valuable executive time.
Technology: How CMOs Are Experimenting with AI Tools
On the technology front, CMOs shared hands-on experimentation with tools like Adobe Firefly for rapid brand-safe video creation, synthetic AI audiences for insight testing, and platforms like Gemini and NotebookLM to ideate, draft, and repurpose content trained on multiple source documents.
To wrap up, we ran a quick poll on the most impactful AI use cases today. Three rose to the top:
- Automating sales enablement
- Transcript creation
- Curating and analyzing marketing intelligence
Looking Ahead: The Future of AI in Marketing Teams
I’m excited to keep learning alongside this forward-thinking community as we continue to explore how AI can elevate teams—and the CMO role itself—in the marketing organization of the future. Already looking forward to the next conversation.
