There’s an unspoken rule in the C-suite: the size of your organization is the measure of your importance. Nobody frames it that way. They say “scale” and “category leadership” and “center of excellence.” But the math is simple. More people, more budget, more complexity mean more power.

Nowhere has this been more true, or more exposed, than in marketing.

AI started doing the work of entire marketing teams. And suddenly every CMO in America faced an uncomfortable question that had nothing to do with technology: if a machine can replace half your department, what was that half doing?

The answer, which nobody admits out loud, is that too many CMOs built empires instead of businesses. They optimized for organizational size, not business outcomes. They measured success by team growth, budget expansion, and the complexity of their own org charts, not by whether the company grew.

I know because I was one of them.

I spent a decade scaling a marketing organization at Autodesk to 130 people across multiple countries. I built the full playbook. Live-action commercials, guerrilla-style campaigns, integrated programs from top of funnel all the way down to ad creative. It looked impressive. It was the kind of work that gets you recognized and wins awards. And I measured my own success, at least in part, by the growth of that team, by budget size, org chart complexity, and the scope of what I controlled.

I also know exactly where the real leverage was, and where the headcount existed to service the org itself rather than drive the business. Some of the team was running campaigns for the sake of running campaigns. Some were running passion projects: things people wanted to do that weren’t tied to the bigger mission, but the org was big enough and well-resourced enough to absorb them. And some roles existed because the org chart demanded a layer there, not because the business did. I built it. I was proud of it. And when I finally looked at it honestly, a meaningful percentage of it was sustaining itself, not moving the company forward.

Building the org for its own sake, scale as the prize and not the means to one, is its own leadership model. It has a name. I call it the celebrity CMO. It’s not really about marketing as a craft. It’s about being the figurehead; the person on the talk-show circuit, the one whose personal brand gets fused with the company’s, the one leveraging organizational resources to prop themselves up. Big flashy campaigns with big-name talent. Awards. Status. The appearance of momentum. Performance is rarely the point; visibility is. Boards don’t push back because they don’t have a way to see through it. The tenure for that model, by the way, tends to be short; two years is a long run.

But that’s started to change with AI. AI gave them the x-ray. Salesforce cut roughly 1,000 jobs in February, marketing among them, and is redeploying headcount into AI roles like “Deployment Strategists” and “AI Conversation Designers” rather than rebuilding the teams it shed. Intuit cut 1,800 people to fund AI, then hired 1,800 in different roles. These aren’t AI success stories. They’re accountability stories. The value was coming from a smaller core of people than anyone wanted to admit.

And here’s why almost no CMO will say this publicly: admitting your department was bloated is admitting you built it that way. That the “center of excellence” was sometimes a center of overhead. That’s a career-threatening admission in an industry that still rewards the appearance of scale.

But it’s the truth. And the CMOs who survive are the ones willing to act on it.

In my final stretch at Autodesk, I started seeing the machine for what it was. The team was good. They were focused on impact. The direction wasn’t wrong. The problem was the size itself. Annual marketing planning ran with twenty-five people in the room. Cross-team collaboration turned into a slog. A campaign that should have taken weeks to launch took six months. That’s what an over-resourced organization actually feels like from the inside, not chaos, just friction. And friction at scale becomes drag. The team could have moved at the speed the business needed. The structure wouldn’t let it. That was the wake-up call.

So when I joined, the first thing I did was hold the campaigns. Foundational messaging needed sharpening. Tech debt needed cleanup. Data infrastructure needed work. I could have skipped straight to the flashy stuff: make noise, spend the brand dollars, blanket the airports with billboards and light up Times Square. That’s the celebrity-CMO playbook. Instead, I built the foundation, because if marketing isn’t having a measurable impact on the business, why is anyone there?

That decision, infrastructure over flash, is the one most CMOs won’t make. It’s not exciting. Nobody wins awards for getting a website to benchmark or a data layer to actually report cleanly. But it’s the difference between a marketing org that drives compounding outcomes with a tight core of strategists and one that mostly manages itself.

The 100-person marketing department is going away. Not because AI replaces those people, but because AI makes it impossible to hide the fact that most of them weren’t driving results in the first place. What replaces it is smaller, senior, and ruthlessly accountable: every person tied to whether the company grows, every role earning its existence on impact rather than on scope. The CMOs who built the empires know this day is coming. Most of them just aren’t willing to say it.

About The Author Of This Article

Colin Piper is CMO at BuildOps. He spent a decade in enterprise marketing at Autodesk before deciding to build the opposite.

About BuildOps

BuildOps is an AI-native platform for commercial contractors. Built for the complexity of large-scale commercial work, it replaces disconnected tools and manual workflows with a single system that runs every job from quote to close.