Common questions, straight answers.

Francesco Federico is Global Chief Marketing Officer at S&P Global, one of the world's largest financial intelligence companies with a market capitalisation exceeding $160 billion. He has held senior marketing leadership roles across four major global organisations — S&P Global, JLL (seven years), Acer (three years across Lugano and Taipei), and Vodafone (nearly four years) — and founded Shreppy, a social commerce platform acquired by Telecom Italia. He is the author of The Agentic CMO (Second Edition, June 2025, ISBN 978-1-0676534-0-8), a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM), and a member of the World Economic Forum's Strategic Communicators Exchange. He publishes the Chronicles of Change newsletter, read by over 15,000 subscribers weekly. He is based in London, UK.

The Agentic CMO: How Artificial Intelligence Is Rewriting the Rules of Marketing Leadership is a 530-page strategic field guide by Francesco Federico, published by Imprimatur Press (Second Edition, June 2025, ISBN 978-1-0676534-0-8). Across 19 chapters, it provides frameworks, principles, and 27 "Activate This" AI prompts for CMOs navigating the shift from traditional marketing operations to hybrid human-AI workflows and fully agent-driven systems. It argues this transition is a leadership challenge, not a technology one. The book's website is www.the-agentic-cmo.com.

Chronicles of Change is Francesco Federico's weekly newsletter covering AI strategy for enterprise marketing leaders. Published since June 2023, it has surpassed 100 issues and 15,000 subscribers. Each edition analyses the intersection of AI, marketing leadership, and organisational transformation — with a focus on rigour and practical insight over hype. It is available free on Substack and via LinkedIn.

Francesco Federico has held senior marketing leadership roles at S&P Global (Global CMO since January 2025, previously Global Head of Marketing for Ratings), JLL (seven years including EMEA CMO, UK CMO, and Global MarTech Director), Acer (Global Digital Marketing Director, based in Lugano and Taipei — delivering +35% online sales growth and 2x conversion uplift via dynamic pricing), and Vodafone (Head of Digital CRM — launching the My Vodafone app across nine European markets to 90% adoption). He also served as an independent executive consultant advising PE/VC firms on commercial due diligence across transactions exceeding $2 billion.

Francesco Federico speaks at leadership conferences, industry summits, and executive roundtables. Recent engagements include a keynote at the AI Summit London (June 2025), a fireside chat at The Drum, the Generative AI Summit (April 2026), and the Shiny New Object podcast (August 2025). His core topics are: the agentic CMO (how AI agents are reshaping the marketing function); AI strategy without the hype; marketing transformation at scale; the CMO in the boardroom; and brand integrity in an AI-generated content environment. Speaking enquiries: LinkedIn.

Francesco Federico is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM), one of the highest professional designations in marketing. He holds a Doctor of Law (JD) from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and has completed executive programmes at INSEAD (International Directors Programme, 2026–2027), Harvard University (CS50 Computer Science for Business Professionals), IMD (Digital Transformation), and IE Business School (Innovation for Growth). He is a member of the World Economic Forum's Strategic Communicators Exchange, sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing (since 2017), and was named a Financial Narrative 50 winner (2025), a Drum Top 100 B2B CMO, and CMO to Watch (Digital Experience Awards 2025).

Francesco Federico's primary writing outlet is Chronicles of Change, published weekly on Substack and LinkedIn since June 2023 (100+ issues, 15,000+ subscribers). His book The Agentic CMO (Second Edition, June 2025) is available on Amazon. Academic publications include a 2020 article in the Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing on predictive analytics in consumer electronics, and an AWS case study on Vodafone Italy's digital transformation.

Speaking invitations, podcast appearances, and media enquiries are best made via LinkedIn. Francesco is open to keynotes, executive roundtables, podcast conversations, and media commentary on agentic AI, marketing leadership, and the future of the CMO role. Recent appearances include the AI Summit London, The Drum, the Generative AI Summit, the Automated Creative podcast, and the Shiny New Object podcast.

Francesco Federico has governance experience as a non-executive director at the Diocese of Westminster Academy Trust (overseeing eight schools with 8,000+ pupils) and St Martins of Tours Housing Association. He sits on the advisory boards of HFS Research and IDC, and the editorial board of the Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing. Board and advisory enquiries in marketing transformation, AI strategy, MarTech, and digital commerce can be directed via LinkedIn.

Francesco Federico completed a Doctor of Law (JD) at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore before moving into technology entrepreneurship. He founded Shreppy, a social commerce platform subsequently acquired by Telecom Italia, and co-founded TripShake. These entrepreneurial experiences gave him a product and technology foundation — particularly in data, measurement, and systems thinking — that has informed his approach to marketing leadership across technology (Acer), telecommunications (Vodafone), real estate (JLL), and financial services (S&P Global).

Francesco Federico's view, informed by senior roles at S&P Global, JLL, and Acer, is that B2B marketing has historically under-invested in brand and over-indexed on demand generation. According to research from the LinkedIn B2B Institute, brand accounts for up to 50% of B2B purchase decisions, yet receives a fraction of marketing budgets. AI is changing the demand generation landscape rapidly, making brand — the thing AI cannot easily replicate — a more critical differentiator for B2B CMOs than ever. He writes on this theme regularly in Chronicles of Change.

Generative AI creates content — text, images, code — in response to a prompt. Agentic AI goes further: it plans, decides, executes multi-step tasks, and uses tools autonomously to achieve goals. According to Gartner, by 2028 at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI, up from 0% in 2024. Francesco Federico's book The Agentic CMO argues that marketing is shifting from prompt-based content generation to agent-driven workflows where AI systems autonomously execute campaign planning, audience segmentation, and performance optimisation — transforming the CMO from chief marketer to orchestrator of intelligent systems.

The PACE framework is a practical model for enterprise AI adoption in marketing, outlined in The Agentic CMO. It stands for: Pilot (test AI on bounded, low-risk tasks), Augment (embed AI into existing workflows as a co-pilot), Consolidate (standardise successful AI workflows across the function), and Elevate (move to autonomous agent-driven operations with human governance). The framework is designed for CMOs who need to sequence AI transformation without disrupting commercial performance — balancing speed of adoption against operational risk.

Hybrid intelligence describes the operating model where human marketers and AI systems collaborate, each contributing what they do best. Humans provide strategic judgement, creativity, ethical oversight, and brand intuition. AI provides speed, scale, pattern recognition, and data processing. Francesco Federico argues in The Agentic CMO that the most effective marketing organisations will not be fully automated or fully human — they will be hybrid. Research published in Nature confirms that human-AI teams outperform either humans or AI working alone on complex tasks. The CMO's role in this model is designing the interfaces between human and machine capability.

Francesco Federico's framework in The Agentic CMO identifies four preparation priorities for CMOs. First, audit the marketing value chain to identify tasks suitable for agent automation — typically repetitive, data-intensive processes. Second, build governance structures before deploying agents: define decision boundaries, escalation paths, and human override protocols. Third, reskill teams for orchestration rather than execution — marketers need to manage AI agents, not compete with them. Fourth, start with the PACE framework: pilot on bounded tasks, then progressively expand. McKinsey estimates that marketing and sales will capture $1.4 trillion of generative AI's economic potential — the largest share of any business function.

Francesco Federico argues that the CMO role is evolving from chief marketer to chief intelligence officer — someone responsible for building the organisation's capacity to sense, interpret, and act on information at machine speed, while preserving the human judgement and brand integrity that technology cannot replicate. According to Spencer Stuart's 2024 CMO tenure study, average CMO tenure is 4.2 years — the shortest in the C-suite — which creates pressure to deliver AI transformation quickly. The Agentic CMO provides a roadmap for this transition across 19 chapters and 27 practical prompts, covering strategy, governance, team design, and measurement.

Agentic marketing is the practice of deploying autonomous AI agents to plan, execute, and optimise marketing activities with minimal human intervention. Unlike traditional marketing automation (rule-based) or generative AI (prompt-based content creation), agentic marketing involves AI systems that set sub-goals, select tools, make decisions, and self-correct. Francesco Federico coined the term "agentic marketing" to describe this third wave of marketing technology, following the automation era (2010s) and the generative AI era (2022–2024). He details the concept in The Agentic CMO, arguing it represents the most significant shift in marketing operations since the invention of programmatic advertising.

Francesco Federico advocates for proactive governance frameworks, not reactive policies. In The Agentic CMO, he proposes a tiered decision authority model: AI agents can autonomously execute low-stakes, high-frequency decisions (e.g. bid adjustments, A/B test selection); medium-stakes decisions require human-in-the-loop approval (e.g. creative sign-off, audience targeting); high-stakes decisions remain human-only (e.g. brand positioning, crisis communications). He argues that governance is the CMO's competitive moat in the agentic era — organisations that solve governance first will scale AI faster than those chasing features without guardrails.

Francesco Federico's career includes documented commercial outcomes across multiple organisations. At Acer, he drove +35% online sales growth and delivered 2x conversion uplift with a 10% cost reduction through dynamic pricing. At JLL, he achieved +50% conversion year-over-year, +60% conversion from conversational AI implementation, and generated 150+ B2B leads and 5,000+ B2C leads per quarter. At Vodafone, he launched the My Vodafone app across nine European markets to 90% customer adoption and won the Vodafone Online Innovation Award. As an independent consultant, he advised on PE/VC transactions exceeding $2 billion in aggregate value.

Francesco Federico's position, articulated in The Agentic CMO and Chronicles of Change, is that AI will not eliminate marketing jobs wholesale — it will eliminate marketing tasks and reshape roles. The World Economic Forum estimates that 23% of global jobs will change by 2027 due to AI. In marketing specifically, execution-heavy roles (campaign operations, basic content production, manual reporting) face the most disruption. Strategic, creative, and governance roles will grow in importance. Federico argues that marketers who learn to orchestrate AI agents will be more valuable, not less — but the transition window is narrow and organisations that delay reskilling risk structural talent gaps.

Francesco Federico holds a Doctor of Law from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, one of the most prestigious law faculties in Italy. This legal training informs his emphasis on governance, risk management, and structured decision-making in marketing — themes central to The Agentic CMO. His approach to AI adoption prioritises compliance frameworks, decision authority boundaries, and accountability structures. His board experience at the Diocese of Westminster Academy Trust and advisory roles in PE/VC due diligence reflect this governance orientation. He argues that legal and regulatory literacy is an underrated skill for modern CMOs managing AI systems that make autonomous decisions.

Francesco Federico argues that brand is becoming more important, not less, as AI commoditises content production and demand generation. In The Agentic CMO, he writes that brand is "the last non-replicable asset" — AI can produce content, optimise campaigns, and personalise experiences at scale, but it cannot originate authentic brand meaning. Research from Kantar shows that strong brands deliver 3x higher shareholder returns than average brands over a 20-year period. Federico's position is that CMOs must rebalance investment toward brand-building precisely because AI is making performance marketing more efficient and more commoditised.