The future CMO is the Chief Integration Officer.

“We’re a matrixed organization.”

I’ve heard some version of that sentence for most of my career. It has become one of corporate life’s great catch-all explanations for why something is difficult, slow or seemingly impossible to fix.

The reality is that most large organizations need some form of matrix. Specialization is unavoidable, but the matrix itself isn’t necessarily the problem. The seams in the matrix are. And with the proliferation of channels, technology, data and now AI, there are a lot more seams to manage.

I think this creates a much bigger opportunity for the CMO. Not to own more functions, but to become the executive who helps connect them around the customer.

In other words, the Chief Integration Officer.

We still build too much from the inside out

Organizations naturally see the world through their structures, budgets, systems and KPIs, then project those realities onto the customer. Here’s how we’re organized, here’s who owns what, and now please figure out how to navigate us.

Customers don’t care that Sales and Service report to different executives or that Billing runs on a legacy platform. They bought something from one company and expect to deal with one company. Yet we routinely make them do the integration work.

This inside-out thinking even shapes customer behaviour. Businesses complain that customers have become promotionally driven, but who trained them? We discount to hit quarterly targets, clear inventory or drive traffic, then act surprised when customers learn the pattern and wait for the next deal.

Our internal financial calendar became their buying behaviour.

I saw this firsthand at TELUS

While at TELUS, as the company was moving from challenger toward the top of the Canadian telecom market, we placed enormous focus on Customer First.

One of our key measures was Likelihood to Recommend, essentially our version of NPS. We discovered something perplexing: overall scores weren’t where we wanted them, yet many individual departmental interactions scored quite well.

The problem was the baton passes.

A customer could have a good interaction with Sales and another with Service, but the transfers and handoffs between them could be painful. Each function could hit its KPIs while the customer still walked away frustrated.

That lesson has stayed with me.

A matrix doesn’t necessarily fail inside the boxes. It often fails in the whitespace between them.

Start with the customer, then design the organization

The alternative sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly still uncommon: start with what the customer is trying to accomplish, identify the moments that matter, then work backwards into the organization.

Customer → Need → Experience → Organization.

Rather than designing the experience around the organization we’ve inherited.

And we don’t need to reinvent everything. Most customers just want the basics to be easy and done right. I don’t need my telecom provider to surprise and delight me when I change my plan. I need them to change my plan, simply.

Get the fundamentals of Product and Service right, then identify the moments where your Signature, the behaviours and experiences that make your company distinctly yours, can create meaningful differentiation.

So why the CMO?

The organization isn’t going to reorganize around every customer journey, nor should it. Finance, Technology, Operations and HR will continue to have specialized mandates. But someone needs to connect those capabilities around a common customer experience.

If the CMO remains primarily responsible for campaigns, communications and what I jokingly call the corporate arts and crafts table, I understand why people question the future of the role.

But I think its potential mandate is much bigger.

The modern CMO should be among the people who understand the customer best, synthesizing insights from across the business and translating them into how the company goes to market and delivers value.

That requires strong connections to HR because employees deliver the experience, Finance because customer outcomes need to translate into commercial performance, and Technology because digital platforms, data and AI increasingly shape how the business operates. Product, Sales, Service and Operations are equally important.

The CMO doesn’t need to own these functions. They need to help integrate them.

In some ways, we’ve been here before

In traditional CPG, Marketing sat at the centre of the business, with P&L responsibility and deep involvement across Finance, Sales, Supply Chain, Product and communications.

Early in my career at Unilever, one day I could be working through a SKU efficiency analysis, the next discussing bottle wall thickness in the plant, and then sitting with an agency evolving our communications platform. You were the nucleus connecting the pieces around the consumer and the business.

If you’ve spent your career in CPG, that probably sounds obvious. But in many other industries, Marketing became increasingly specialized around communications while responsibility for the broader customer and commercial experience fragmented.

Maybe the future of the CMO is, in some ways, a return to its past.

From communications to integration

This isn’t about building a larger Marketing empire. It’s about recognizing that brands are shaped by the cumulative experience of what a company does, not simply what it says.

Your product, service, employees, technology and increasingly AI all shape that experience. Communications still matter, but they’re only one part of the equation.

The matrix isn’t going away. The challenge is making sure customers don’t have to understand the complexity of the company behind their experience.

The future CMO shouldn’t just manage how the company communicates. They should help integrate how the company delivers.

And maybe it’s finally time to retire “we’re a matrixed organization” as the excuse for why we can’t.