The “AI CMO” Is Here. But Is It Really a CMO?
Singapore-based Okara just made headlines with what it’s calling the world’s first AI CMO. The marketing industry is nervous, but maybe not for the right reasons.
There’s a new name circulating in marketing circles this week: Okara. The Singapore-based startup just launched what it’s boldly labelling the “world’s first AI CMO” — a platform that, upon entering your website URL, deploys a team of AI agents to help you get traffic and grow your user base.
Social media lit up. Marketing news channels buzzed. Some CMOs, marketing directors, and managers started sweating. Others quietly opened the website.
So what’s actually going on here? Is this the beginning of the end for the Chief Marketing Officer as we know it? Or is “AI CMO” just a very good piece of brand marketing — ironic, given the territory?
Let’s break it down.
What Okara’s AI CMO Actually Does
To be fair to Okara, it’s a genuinely useful product. Here’s what it does out of the box:
SEO & Search Visibility It runs a full site audit — health checks, backlinks, on-page issues, Core Web Vitals — and delivers a daily feed of five high-impact SEO recommendations, each with step-by-step fixes and copy-paste code snippets. That alone would save a small marketing team hours every week.
GEO Scoring (Generative Engine Optimisation) This is arguably its most forward-looking feature. It tracks how your brand appears in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini — measuring visibility, sentiment, and average position. In an era where more users are asking AI instead of Googling, this is a genuinely novel and important signal.
Social & Community Agents Okara deploys specialist agents for Reddit, Twitter/X, and Hacker News — monitoring conversations, identifying relevant threads, and writing responses or comments on your behalf. For early-stage startups trying to build organic community presence, this is the kind of grunt work that usually falls through the cracks.
Content Generation An AI Writer Agent handles content creation to support your broader marketing activity.
Competitive Intelligence The platform can compare tools, extract pros and cons from reviews, and build competitive matrices — useful for positioning and battlecard work.
Lead Generation Signals It identifies buying intent signals on social platforms and maps journalists and creators who cover your market.
What It Doesn’t Do - And Why That Matters
Here’s where the “CMO” label starts to wobble.
Conspicuously absent from Okara’s feature set is everything that makes a CMO a CMO, rather than a marketing manager or a marketing executor.
No marketing strategy. Okara doesn’t help you define your positioning, sharpen your brand narrative, or identify your ideal customer profile. It doesn’t ask why you’re going to market, or who you’re really going after. It assumes those decisions have already been made and gets to work on the distribution.
No campaign planning. There’s no mechanism to map out a campaign architecture — sequencing, channel mix, timing, budget allocation. It runs its agents continuously, but there’s no strategic blueprint governing what it’s optimising toward.
No post-campaign reporting or analysis. This is perhaps the most glaring gap. Real CMOs live and die by the debrief. What worked? What didn’t? What was the cost per acquisition? Which channel drove the highest-quality leads? Okara doesn’t appear to synthesise this into structured learnings or reports.
No performance measurement or attribution. Without closing the loop — tying marketing activity to business outcomes — you’re flying blind. Execution without measurement isn’t strategy. It’s noise.
No optimisation informed by results. A CMO doesn’t just run campaigns; they iterate. They kill what’s not working and double down on what is. Okara’s agents run on autopilot, but there’s no feedback engine that adapts based on what’s actually converting.
No forward-looking recommendations. “Here’s what we should do next quarter, based on what we learned” is one of the most valuable things a CMO brings to the leadership table. It’s nowhere in Okara’s current feature set.
In short: Okara automates the doing. A CMO’s most important job is the thinking.
Why “AI CMO” Is a Misnomer - And a Smart One
Let’s call this what it is: Okara’s product name is itself a masterclass in marketing.
By calling it an “AI CMO,” they’ve generated enormous attention, positioned themselves as category-defining, and sparked exactly the kind of industry conversation that fills top-of-funnel. It worked. You’re reading about it.
But the framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What Okara has actually built is closer to an always-on AI growth engine — a platform that automates distribution across SEO, social, and content with impressive coordination. That is genuinely valuable, particularly for startups and lean teams without a full marketing function.
Calling it a CMO, though, conflates execution with leadership. And that conflation is dangerous — not because AI isn’t advancing rapidly, but because it obscures what human marketing leadership actually provides.
The Case for the Human CMO
The nervous energy in the industry this week is understandable. But it’s misplaced — at least for now.
Here’s what no AI CMO, Okara or otherwise, can replicate today:
Instinct built on pattern recognition. Experienced CMOs carry years of market intuition. They’ve seen what happens when you reposition too early, or when a brand over-indexes on performance at the expense of equity. That pattern recognition — knowing when something feels off before the data confirms it — doesn’t exist in any current model.
Stakeholder management and internal influence. Marketing doesn’t happen in isolation. A CMO aligns Sales, Product, and the C-suite around a coherent go-to-market story. They negotiate budgets, manage competing priorities, and build the internal consensus that makes campaigns actually happen. AI agents have no political capital, no relationships, and no seat at the table.
Brand stewardship under pressure. When a crisis hits — a product recall, a cultural misstep, a competitor move — the CMO makes judgment calls that carry reputational weight. What do we say? What do we not say? When? To whom? These are decisions that require human accountability and nuanced judgment that no algorithm can reliably provide.
Creative vision and emotional intelligence. The best marketing doesn’t just optimise — it moves people. It finds the unexpected angle, the insight that reframes the category, the campaign that lands in culture. AI can generate volume. It cannot, yet, generate genuine creative surprise that comes from deeply understanding what it means to be human.
Strategic foresight. A CMO is always playing two games simultaneously: executing for today and preparing for tomorrow. Scanning for shifts in consumer behaviour, emerging channels, category disruption. Building brand equity that will matter in three years, not just Q3. That long-horizon thinking is absent from any tool optimising for traffic and clicks.
The full campaign lifecycle. Perhaps most importantly: a great CMO doesn’t just launch campaigns — they evaluate them rigorously. Post-campaign reviews, honest assessments of what failed, institutionalised learnings that make the next campaign smarter. This reflective, iterative loop is the engine of sustained marketing effectiveness. It requires curiosity, intellectual honesty, and the courage to admit what didn’t work. These are very human qualities.
The Honest Assessment
Okara has built something genuinely useful. For a bootstrapped startup, a solo founder, or a small team without marketing headcount, it punches well above its weight. The SEO engine, the GEO tracking, the community agents — these are practical tools that solve real problems.
But a CMO it is not.
A CMO is a strategist, a leader, a brand steward, a budget holder, a performance evaluator, and a cultural translator — all at once. They set the agenda; they don’t just execute it. They define success; they don’t just chase metrics. And critically, they close the loop — learning from every campaign, feeding those learnings back into strategy, and making the next effort smarter than the last.
AI will absolutely reshape what CMOs do. The best marketing leaders are already using tools like Okara to free up their teams from repetitive execution, so they can spend more time on the work that actually requires human judgment.
But the framing that AI can replace the CMO function — rather than augment it — is premature. And in a world where trust, authenticity, and brand meaning matter more than ever, perhaps permanently so.
The marketing industry shouldn’t be nervous about Okara.
It should be paying attention to what it’s actually built — and thinking clearly about what only humans can do.
What do you think? Is the “AI CMO” label just hype, or is this the direction we’re heading?
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This article also appears on Substack as one of C9 GENYSYS's long form insights series. Read more here.