Monday Morning Impact – December 8

Published On: December 7, 2025Categories: Buzz

Gartner: 65% of CMOs Say Advances in AI Will Dramatically Change Their Role in the Next Two Years

Sixty-five percent of CMOs believe advances in AI will dramatically transform their role within the next two years, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc.

The survey was conducted online from August through October 2025 among 402 senior marketing leaders. In addition, a Gartner survey of 426 business leaders, conducted in September and October 2025, revealed 82% of leaders say their company’s identity will need to significantly change to keep pace with the impact of AI on markets.

“CMOs must prioritize becoming future-forward marketing leaders,” said Sharon Cantor Ceurvorst, VP, Research, in the Gartner Marketing Practice. “AI, market disruption, and cross-functional demands are expanding the CMOs remit, but not their resources. To stay relevant, CMOs must stop prioritizing execution and instead lead through strategic insight.”

While AI is revolutionizing personalization, content creation, and data-driven insights, many organizations struggle to realize its full potential. A Gartner survey of 413 marketing technology leaders, conducted in June through August 2025, revealed only 5% of marketing leaders who are not piloting AI agents report significant gains on business outcomes. Furthermore, for those further along the AI journey, agent capabilities aren’t yet delivering the promised business performance.

“CMOs face heightened responsibility for end-to-end customer experience and commercial outcomes, often without additional resources,” said Ewan McIntyre, VP Analyst and the Chief of Research for the Gartner Marketing Practice. “This demands a renewed focus on building hybrid human-AI teams and cultivating future-ready leadership capabilities. Leaders should emphasize human reasoning, adaptability, and the ability to architect meaningful customer experiences, ensuring their teams are equipped to meet expanded executive expectations and drive business growth in an AI-driven landscape.

“Success in this new era requires CMOs to set clear strategic direction, adapt to AI-driven customer journeys, and focus on creating authentic, differentiated value. The CMO role is evolving from influencer to designer of business impact.”

“To address this, Gartner believes that CMOs must move beyond basic AI adoption and instead re-engineer strategies, processes, and talent models—building AI-powered

organizations that seamlessly integrate human creativity with machine intelligence,” said McIntyre. “Marketing teams should proactively reimagine their brand positioning and experiences to stay relevant as leaders anticipate significant evolution in company identity.”

Gartner clients can read more in the report, “Leadership Vision for 2026: Chief Marketing Officer,” as well as find further information in the associated client webinar, The Gartner 2026 Leadership Vision for CMOs.

Channel Impact^®
GenAI is disrupting channels, while agentic buying promises to reshape purchase decision-making in ways that reduce human attention and engagement. Companies must adopt a mentality for channel strategy, ensuring every touchpoint is intentional, relevant, and distinctive to stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

Pax8 Publishes MSP Playbook for the Agentic Economy

Pax8 has announced the release of its new Managed Intelligence Provider Playbook, a guide designed to help managed service providers (MSPs) evolve into managed intelligence providers (MIPs); the architects of agentic AI-powered transformation for small and mid-sized businesses.

The resource is intended to equip partners with the tools and frameworks to monetize SMB growth leveraging AI.

“This playbook isn’t just about deploying AI tools,” said Scott Chasin, Pax8’s Chief Executive Officer. “It’s about empowering partners to become leaders in managed intelligence by delivering massive improvements and measurable business outcomes, not just technology, to their SMB customers.”

The book covers the evolution from trusted advisor to strategic partner by uncovering inefficiencies and assessing risk or process debt in order to apply intelligence to solve pressing challenges and deliver measurable outcomes. It also provides best practices on how to curate and deploy pre-vetted agents, workflows and AI-enhanced SaaS from trusted marketplaces, including the Pax8 Agent Store. Partners can also develop proprietary agent stacks and workflow automation pipelines that differentiate MIPs in vertical markets such as healthcare, finance and manufacturing. The playbook also encourages a shift from feature-based pricing to outcome-based models, tying revenue directly to client key performance indicators, like cost savings, resolution speed and customer satisfaction. Ongoing optimization, compliance and lifecycle management is also covered.

Channel Impact^®
The MIP Playbook is a practical roadmap and a companion guide to Pax8’s The Agentic Inflection Point research paper, released in June 2025 at the Pax8 Beyond Flagship conference in Denver, Colorado. That study defined the future of SMB operations, transformed by agentic labor and the democratization of enterprise-level technology access. It introduced Managed Intelligence, a new framework that enables all stakeholders in the technology ecosystem to thrive in the agentic era.

Rackspace Technology Unveils AI “Launchpad” Service

Rackspace Technology, a San Antonio-based hybrid cloud and AI solutions company, has announced “Rackspace AI Launchpad,” a managed service designed to enable organizations to evaluate, pilot and deploy AI workloads. The service can be tailored to a variety of industries, including healthcare, banking, finance, securities and insurance (BFSI), and energy.

The service promises a phased, guided approach that supports every stage of AI adoption – from proof of concept to full-scale production.

“Every enterprise knows AI will define the next decade of competition, but most are paralyzed by complexity,” said Lance Weaver, Rackspace’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, Private Cloud. “Rackspace AI launchpad eliminates that paralysis. We’ve engineered the fastest path from AI ambition to AI in production, with the security and governance that enterprises demand. This isn’t about experimenting with AI anymore.”

Rackspace AI Launchpad leverages Rackspace’s AI Anywhere, a private cloud solution that merges AI/ML capabilities with an emphasis on data security and privacy. The solution delivers managed GPU infrastructure powered by NVIDIA GPUs, Kubernetes and tooling enablement, and onboarding and operational support.

Rackspace AI Launchpad provides a phased approach that allows organizations to start with a proof of concept, pilot existing AI workloads, and when AI adoption is mature, implement and deploy AI workloads.

Channel Impact^®
Rackspace AI Launchpad is intended to help empowers organizations move beyond experimentation and into meaningful AI outcomes without the burden of building infrastructure from scratch.

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