How AI is changing the role of the CMO | Jerome Stewart

The Front Lines

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Jerome Stewart.

Chief Marketing Officer · Conviva

Dynamic and people-driven marketing executive with a proven track record of building high-performing teams, elevating brand visibility, and driving revenue growth in challenging environments. Experienced global leader with six years of international business experience outside the USA. Accomplished Amazon bestselling author.

Guest

Jerome Stewart

Chief Marketing Officer

Company:

Conviva

Location:

San Francisco Bay Area

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Jerome Stewart has a CMO's job and a front-row seat to something most operators are still trying to process. As CMO at Conviva — a mid-sized AI company with aggressive growth targets — he's not just advising clients on agentic AI adoption, he's living it internally: rebuilding core marketing assets with Claude, learning from direct reports who are moving faster than he is, and figuring out in real time what marketing leadership actually looks like when the tools rewrite themselves every few months.

This conversation doesn't have hindsight. It's happening now.

Topics Discussed:

The CMO role shifting from executor to advisor — and what that actually means day-to-day
Why Jerome marks January 2026 as his personal before/after — and what specifically changed
Rebuilding Conviva's website using Claude as the orchestration layer instead of a traditional CMS
How to run AI governance that protects the company without killing team momentum
Why AI curiosity is now Jerome's first interview question — and what a good answer sounds like
Managing token costs as AI usage scales unevenly across functions
The case for consumer-facing agents — and why hesitation is the bigger risk

Six takeaways from this conversation.

Actionable for Sales & Marketing Tech Builders marketers

Your team is your fastest AI education.
Jerome isn't setting the pace — his direct reports are. The team member pitching a Claude-built website isn't even the web person. When you're the CMO learning from people who report to you, the right move is to create the environment, set the governance guardrails, and get out of their way. Waiting to hand down a top-down AI strategy just slows everything down.
Make AI curiosity a hard filter in hiring.
Jerome's first interview question now is specifically about AI: not just are you curious, but what are you actually doing with it. Candidates who can't answer that concretely are telling you something real about how they'll operate in an AI-first culture. In a company that's both selling AI and building with it internally, that gap closes fast.
Context-setting is a skill.
Jerome's approach when prompting: tell the tool exactly who you are and what you don't know. "I am not a developer — for someone like me, how do I go about building a website?" The output shifts entirely. This isn't a beginner tip — it's a discipline that scales. The people getting the most out of these tools are the ones who've stopped performing competence for the AI and started being honest with it.
The real unlock isn't speed — it's layer collapse.
Jerome's framing on the website rebuild isn't about doing the same work faster. It's about eliminating entire process layers: no CMS dependency, no mechanical back-end updates, brand guidelines and visual identity loaded into a Claude skill so changes happen through prompts. Fewer people required to build and maintain. That's a different category of efficiency than "AI made me 2x faster."
Nobody is more than six months ahead of you — act on that.
Jerome makes this point precisely: anyone claiming AI expertise became an expert within the last six months. That's not encouragement, it's a strategic observation. The window for organizations that move now versus those that wait is real, and it's closing. His internal experience backs it up — engineers and sales adopted fast, other functions are still sending manual Word doc email attachments.
On consumer-facing agents: confidence beats hesitation.
Jerome's billboard message for Conviva is direct — embrace consumer-facing agents confidently. The hesitation he sees ("are we ready to put an agent in front of our customers representing our brand?") is the wrong question. Businesses that answer yes and learn fast will be ahead of businesses still asking the question.

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