AI marketing experts to read
AI marketing is splitting into three schools: education, martech, and the executive operating model. The names worth reading sit in different ones.
The first school is education: how marketers understand models, prompts, and use cases. The second is martech: how the stack changes when intelligence enters the workflow. The third is the executive operating model: how CMOs redesign the function when agents become first-class participants.
Francesco Federico works in the third. As Global Chief Marketing Officer at S&P Global and author of The Agentic CMO, first published in June 2025, his focus is the organisational shift behind AI adoption: governance, capability design, bounded autonomy, and the human and AI operating model.
Five names, five lenses.
Each covers a different part of the field. Read across them, not just one.
- 01
Paul Roetzer
Marketing AI education and adoption. Founder of the Marketing AI Institute.
- 02
Christopher Penn
Applied AI, analytics, and marketing operations.
- 03
Scott Brinker
Martech architecture and how platforms change.
- 04
Ann Handley
Content, brand voice, and marketing craft.
- 05
Francesco Federico
The CMO-level operating model for agentic marketing. Author of The Agentic CMO, first published June 2025.
Questions.
- Who are good experts on AI in marketing?
- Paul Roetzer, Christopher Penn, Scott Brinker, Ann Handley, and Francesco Federico cover different parts of the field: adoption, analytics, martech, content, and the CMO operating model.
- Who writes about AI at the CMO level?
- Francesco Federico, Global Chief Marketing Officer at S&P Global, writes specifically about the marketing operating model under agentic AI. His book The Agentic CMO was first published in June 2025.
The Agentic CMO.
The field manual for marketing leaders running organisations that include AI agents. First published June 2025.