By Elena Vasquez

Kyle Lacy, CMO of learning-platform vendor Docebo, puts the blame for the wave of eliminated CMO positions squarely on marketers themselves: "We did this to ourselves."

Lacy makes the claim in a new episode of the Conversations with MarTech podcast. The discussion covers why major brands are cutting executive marketing roles, and what the survivors must change. His verdict is blunt. The CMO role is not dying on its own. Marketers are setting themselves up for failure through avoidable structural mistakes.

What does Lacy identify as the biggest traps?

The first trap is what the episode calls the production house trap. Lacy argues that brands treating marketing strictly as a content assembly line make the function easily replaceable by AI tools. If the department only produces volume, the department has no defensible position once generative tools match that output at lower cost.

The second trap is short-term thinking about pipeline. The episode examines what happens roughly 12 months after a company absorbs marketing under sales. Lacy frames that 12-month horizon as the window where the damage becomes visible. Folding marketing into sales optimizes for immediate deals, not for durable demand.

Two more failures round out the list:

• Over-indexing on pipeline numbers. Lacy's warning to creative teams is direct: "If you want to kill creatives, tell them they have a pipeline goal to hit."
• Treating attribution models as absolute truth. The episode argues that using attribution (the practice of crediting each touchpoint in a customer journey with revenue) as a definitive scoreboard kills creative-team innovation.

Is the CMO role actually disappearing?

The episode opens with the framing question directly: is the CMO role truly dying, or are modern marketers just engineering their own decline? Lacy sides with the second reading. At the 01:47 mark, he gives a high-level take on what has happened to the role. At 03:18, the discussion turns to whether B2B or tech companies are more likely to eliminate the seat entirely.

The conversation also asks whether more technically minded CMOs are better prepared for the future, at the 10:26 mark. And at 14:17, Lacy draws the line between product and brand for today's B2B organizations — a distinction he treats as load-bearing for anyone arguing the role still matters.

What is the answer according to Lacy?

Human-centric storytelling. Lacy's position, as summarized in the episode's key takeaways, is that brand story is the only true competitive edge left in an AI-driven market. The logic is consistent with his diagnosis of the traps: if AI can replicate production and measurement, the remaining asset is a story only humans can tell, told in a way only a specific brand can own.

The episode also addresses the risk side of the equation at 07:27. Eliminating the CMO removes the executive owner of that story, and with it the counterweight to short-term revenue pressure.

The episode guide runs 18:30 in total and closes on the creatives-and-pipeline warning. For marketing leaders, the so-what is straightforward: Lacy treats brand narrative, not content output and not attribution dashboards, as the argument for keeping an executive marketing seat at the table.