Kieran Flanagan Says B2B CMOs Are Going Away. What Does the Data Say?

Kieran Flanagan published a piece this week arguing that AI has broken the B2B chief marketing officer job in half, and put a figure on the fallout. B2B CMO roles, he writes, are down 10 percentage points over the past twelve months.

He cites nothing for it. No survey, no job-board pull, no dataset.

Somebody has counted, though, three times, and the numbers are public. So we went and got them.

What Forrester actually measured

Forrester has run an annual census of Fortune 500 marketing leadership for three years, most recently published on July 7 by VP and principal analyst Ian Bruce. Three separate measures move, at three different speeds.

The title itself is collapsing fastest. Companies using the literal words chief marketing officer went 55% in 2024, 49% in 2025, and 36% this year. That last step is a 13-point fall in twelve months.

A seat at the top table is going more slowly. Marketing leaders who sit on the executive team or report to the CEO were at 63% in the 2024 edition, 58% in 2025, and 52% now. Six points a year, twice running.

And the B2B split, which is Flanagan’s actual claim, is the slowest of the three. B2B companies with a marketing leader in the C-suite or reporting to the CEO went from 48% to 42%. Six points. B2C sat at 84% in the same census and held far steadier.

So the decline he describes is real, documented, and running for three straight years. His number isn’t one of the measured ones. It sits between the 6 points the B2B figure actually moved and the 13 points the all-company title series moved, which is what you’d expect from a figure recalled rather than looked up.

Six points is B2B losing its marketing seat. Thirteen points is every large company renaming the job. Those are different events with different consequences, and a reader who hears “10” gets neither.

The mechanism is the part that holds up

Strip the figure out and the argument survives intact, which is why it’s worth reading.

Two shifts run at once. Founders know more about marketing than they used to. They can read a dashboard, judge a campaign, and form a view without waiting for someone to explain it, so the information gap that made a senior marketing hire feel necessary has thinned out.

Meanwhile AI pulled the job toward two opposite poles. Growth work moved closer to data and systems: Semrush’s index of 126 million AI prompts is the kind of instrument that half of the job now runs on, and reading it isn’t a brand skill. Brand and positioning went the other way, leaning harder on narrative and judgment, because cheap production makes distinctiveness the scarce input. The number of people who spike at both ends is small, and it didn’t grow to meet the new spread.

So founders stop looking. Brand and product marketing go into the product organisation. Growth and demand go into sales. The hire nobody was ever satisfied with quietly stops happening.

Flanagan doesn’t think it lasts. He calls it a personnel-to-skillset mismatch rather than a structural death, and expects the next generation to grow into both halves, at which point the seat comes back.

Forrester’s own framing is close to his. Bruce’s read of the earlier census, on why the numbers cluster the way they do: “Where representation is high, tenure gets long, where representation is low, tenure goes down as well.” Average tenure is now 3.9 years, and 23% of Fortune 500 companies changed their senior marketing leader in the past year. We covered the tenure side of this when the seat was turning over every 4.1 years.

Why an uncited number is still a problem

An unsourced figure in a widely read post doesn’t stay unsourced. It becomes “a 10 point decline in CMO roles,” then a slide, then a premise nobody rechecks.

That happened while we were reporting this. A search for the claim returns summaries confidently repeating the 10-point figure as established research, and the trail leads back to the post itself. The number had already laundered itself into a fact in under a week.

None of which is a reason to dismiss him. He is describing something operators recognise, and Forrester’s three series say he is directionally right. It’s a reason to attribute the claim to him and use the measured numbers when the size matters.

What a small team should do with it

At a B2B software company under 30 people, none of these percentages describes you. The Fortune 500 census isn’t your hiring market. The mechanism still is.

Read your last two job descriptions. If one asked for advanced technical growth and strong narrative judgment in the same person, you have already met this problem, and the months that role stayed open are your own version of Forrester’s six points.

Then look at what you bought while it sat there. Most teams cover the gap with two contracts: a contractor for the technical half, an agency or freelancer for the narrative half. That purchasing pattern is the finding, and it’s what reaches agencies absorbing work that used to sit in-house.

Read this next to our piece on the marketing engineer role and the two point opposite ways at once. A new senior technical seat is being defined while the generalist seat above it comes apart. That’s what a job splitting looks like from inside.

1. Attribute the claim, cite the census. In a board deck, write “Forrester: B2B marketing leaders in the C-suite fell 48% to 42%.” Not “research shows a 10 point decline.”
2. Audit your open roles for the double spike. A description asking for both halves is the hardest hire on the market right now. Decide deliberately whether to keep waiting or split it.
3. Price the split before you need it. If the answer is two contracts instead of one hire, get the numbers now. The teams caught by this bought both halves in a hurry at whatever the market charged that week.

Flanagan may well be right that it’s temporary. Temporary still has to be staffed.