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I wrote The Agentic CMO. I am Francesco Federico, a Global Chief Marketing Officer with two decades inside information businesses. I am a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM), a member of the World Economic Forum’s Strategic Communicators Exchange, and serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing. I was named to the Financial Narrative 50 (2025) and The Drum’s Top 100 B2B CMOs.
The second edition of The Agentic CMO was published in June 2026. It is available in hardcover, Kindle, and EPUB from Amazon (US, UK, EU), Apple Books, and Bookshop.org.
The book argues that the era of marketing automation is ending, and the era of marketing autonomy has begun. AI agents are no longer tools that automate workflows; they are participants on the team. This shift requires a redesign of how marketing organisations are structured, staffed, briefed, governed, and led.
An agentic CMO is a marketing leader whose organisation includes AI agents as first-class participants — not as tooling. The role shifts from supervising humans who use software to designing the conditions under which humans and agents do work together, including how briefs are written, how decisions are audited, and how authority is delegated.
Marketing autonomy is the property of a marketing organisation in which routine decisions, drafts, and analyses are produced by agents under explicit specifications, with humans setting strategy, reviewing exceptions, and owning accountability. It is distinct from automation, which executes pre-defined workflows; autonomy implies judgment within constraints.
I wrote the book for CMOs, senior marketing leaders, founders running marketing themselves, and senior strategy or transformation consultants advising marketing organisations. It assumes familiarity with how a modern marketing function operates; it does not assume technical fluency in AI.
The Agentic CMO is organised in four parts: the shift from automation to autonomy; the redesign of the marketing operating system; the change to briefs, content, and creative work; and the change to organisation, governance, and leadership. The book includes twenty-four production-ready Activate This prompts.
Each chapter ends with one or more Activate This prompts — production-ready prompts a marketing leader can use directly with a frontier model such as Claude or ChatGPT. The full set of twenty-four prompts is also published on the-agentic-cmo.com/prompts so they remain useful and updatable beyond the print edition.
The Agentic CMO is available from Amazon (US, UK, EU) in hardcover and Kindle, from Apple Books in EPUB, and from Bookshop.org in hardcover.
The second edition is a substantial rewrite of the first edition (2025). It reflects eighteen months of frontier-model progress, real deployments inside large marketing organisations, and revised guidance on briefs, governance, and the org chart. Roughly 60% of the text is new or significantly revised.
Yes. A sample chapter — chapter one, Understanding agentic AI — is available as a free PDF from the-agentic-cmo.com. No registration is required to download it.
Most books on AI in marketing focus on tools — which platforms to use and how to prompt them. The Agentic CMO addresses the harder problem: how the marketing function itself changes when agents are present. It treats prompts and tools as the easy part; organisation, governance, and leadership as the hard part.
I write Chronicles of Change, a weekly newsletter on agentic marketing, published on Substack and LinkedIn. My personal site is francescofederico.com.
Yes. Speaking enquiries can be sent to speaking@the-agentic-cmo.com. I speak on agentic marketing, the redesign of the CMO function, and governance for AI in regulated industries.
An audiobook edition of The Agentic CMO is planned for late 2026. Updates will be posted on the-agentic-cmo.com and announced through the Chronicles of Change newsletter.
Yes. The Activate This prompts published on the-agentic-cmo.com/prompts are released for direct use by readers and their organisations, including in commercial settings, with attribution appreciated but not required.
I am a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM). I hold a Doctorate in Law from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and have completed executive education at INSEAD, Harvard Business School, IMD, and IE Business School. I sit on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing and advise HFS Research and IDC.
I was named to the Financial Narrative 50 (2025), The Drum’s Top 100 B2B CMOs (2025), and the CMO to Watch list (2025). I am a member of the World Economic Forum’s Strategic Communicators Exchange.
No. The Agentic CMO is written for marketing leaders, not engineers. It explains the relevant technical concepts in plain language and focuses on decisions a CMO would actually make — about briefs, teams, vendors, governance, and budgets.
The book is largely vendor-neutral. It discusses the major frontier model families (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) where useful, but its arguments do not depend on any one platform. The Activate This prompts are written to work across capable frontier models.
Yes. Chronicles of Change is the companion newsletter to the book, published weekly on Substack and LinkedIn. It covers what is happening in agentic marketing in real time — the developments, deployments, and disputes that the book’s framework helps interpret.
The Agentic CMO is published in English. Italian and Spanish editions are under negotiation for 2027.
Updates are posted on the-agentic-cmo.com, the Chronicles of Change newsletter, and my LinkedIn account. There are no plans to use other channels for book announcements.
Send a note to francesco@the-agentic-cmo.com. Replies arrive when they arrive.