Marketing leaders inside midmarket companies are under real pressure to adopt AI, but the path forward in a corporate structure looks nothing like what’s being described on LinkedIn. Before the platforms, the pilots, or the productivity gains, there’s a more fundamental question: do you have the executive peer relationships in place to make any of it happen? This article looks at what AI is exposing about the relationship gaps that have been quietly eroding inside corporate marketing organizations, and why the one with IT may be the most consequential one to address right now.
She crossed her arms before she answered.
I’d just asked a VP of Marketing how often she met one-on-one with a key executive peer. Not a loaded question, technically. But she knew that I was really asking whether that relationship was working. The set jaw, the pause before the careful answer. I’ve learned to read the room in these moments. The words are rarely where the truth lives.
One of the first things I do when I step into a marketing organization is probe the relationships, and specifically, who’s talking to whom at the executive level, and how honestly.
What I find, often, is quiet erosion.
It doesn’t start with an obvious conflict.
More like a peer whose involvement slows things down more than it moves them forward.
So gradually, without any formal decision, the collaboration shrinks to the minimum required contact. The Marketing leader’s life gets easier because more gets done. And the relationship calcifies into something that functions on the surface and delivers almost nothing underneath.
In legacy companies with long-tenured executive teams, this is more common than anyone admits. And maybe until now, it was manageable. The gap was there but not load-bearing.
AI has changed that math.
I’m working with two very different organizations right now, and the contrast is clarifying.
One is a startup. The CEO has fully embraced AI. New platforms, cloud-connected workflows, they’re hiring now for AI literacy, agents running in the background of everyday work. The pace of change is fast because one person can say yes. Decision made. Next.
The other is a midmarket corporate B2C. Smart people with a genuine interest in what AI could do for their Marketing operation. And a reality that looks nothing like the LinkedIn version of urgent AI adoption.
There’s a committee. There’s a Microsoft-driven Copilot rollout because IT is already there and that’s the direction the infrastructure points. There are security discussions, trepidation at the executive level, leaders who’ve put a toe in at the margins, editing an email, but haven’t yet leaned in beyond that.
I’m not saying the corporate path is wrong. The caution is often legitimate; the structure exists for reasons.
But here’s what the breathless AI content on your feed isn’t telling you: in a corporate environment, the AI you adopt is not solely your call. IT needs to be comfortable first. The organization must have made, or be making, a directional decision, and that decision is almost certainly being driven from IT outward, not from marketing inward.
Which means if you don’t have a solid relationship with your executive IT peer, you’re not getting this conversation off the ground.
The quiet erosion matters now in a way it didn’t before.
The relationship that felt like a low-grade friction problem is now sitting between you and your AI strategy.
Marketing transformation doesn’t just happen inside the marketing department; it takes involvement from all your executive department peers. The leaders who are moving right now invested in those peer relationships before they needed them.
If you’re carrying AI ambitions inside a corporate structure and the IT relationship isn’t there, that’s not a technology problem.
That’s the first problem.
