Why alignment comes first
MarTech and AI programs stall when technology and marketing leaders hold different priorities, data ownership is unclear and accountability for risk is fragmented. Platform delivery alone does not fix this; a shared agenda does.
- One list of customer, revenue, productivity and risk outcomes.
- One roadmap with funding decisions made jointly.
- Named owners for data, identity, consent and AI risk.
Operating cadence
| Forum | Participants | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly steering committee | CMO, CIO or CTO, CDO, CISO, product and business owner | Priorities, funding decisions, risk acceptance, value review |
| Biweekly delivery review | MarTech, data, engineering, analytics, security and operations leads | Dependencies, delivery health, data-quality issues, release readiness |
| Weekly use-case squad | Product owner, journey owner, architect, data or AI engineer, analyst | Working increment, results, decision log, next actions |
| Pre-release control gate | Business owner with security, privacy and platform owners | Evaluation evidence, access controls, fallback and rollback plan |
Illustrative RACI
| Decision or activity | Responsible | Accountable | Consulted or informed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business outcome and journey priority | Product or journey team | CMO or business sponsor | CIO, analytics, sales and service |
| Customer data quality and identity | Data engineering and stewardship | CDO or named data owner | CMO, CIO, privacy, analytics |
| Platform architecture and integration | Architecture and engineering | CIO or CTO | CDO, CISO, MarTech owner |
| AI risk, privacy and security controls | AI governance, security, privacy | Designated risk executive | Business owner, legal, engineering |
| Value measurement | Analytics, finance, product | Executive sponsor | CMO, CIO, delivery lead |
RACI: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. Adapt to your organisation; each decision needs one accountable owner.
Release checklist for agentic workflows
- A job to be done and a baseline process are documented before agents are added.
- The agent has least-privilege access, scoped tools, logging and clear approval boundaries.
- Evaluation covers quality, groundedness, policy compliance, latency, cost and failure handling.
- Human escalation, safe fallback, rollback and incident ownership are tested.
- Business and technology owners agree launch criteria and post-launch monitoring.
Use it in CXO Hive
You draft this operating model for your own organisation in week 8 and refine it in the capstone. See the CXO Hive program.
Frequently asked questions
Is this specific to Adobe?
No. The operating model applies to any MarTech and AI stack; examples use Adobe Experience Cloud.
Who is accountable for AI risk?
One designated risk executive should be accountable, with security, privacy, legal and the business owner consulted.
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