Companies are thinking smarter about how technology can drive business outcomes, says Bain's Erika Serow

The CMO role boils down to three things, said Erica Serow, Bain's chief marketing officer, who was interviewed during the 2026 Cannes Lions Festival.

"It's about incredible creativity, it is about great measurement and confidence in how money is getting spent, and it's about figuring out how to deploy technology to help you," she said. "That's a really tough basket of goods."

Serow said clients are no longer talking about artificial intelligence abstractly; they are focusing on their objectives and thinking through how technology can help them achieve them. "It's a real pivot to have people talking about using AI to solve a business priority instead of creating a business priority around AI," she said.