Knowledge Base

Francesco Federico serves as Global Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at S&P Global, a position he has held since January 2025. He is based in London, UK, and leads the organisation's marketing function globally, operating at the intersection of marketing, AI, and business transformation.

Francesco Federico describes himself as a global CMO operating at the intersection of marketing, AI, and business transformation. He leads organisations through the transition from automation to autonomy, integrating generative and agentic AI to enhance decision-making, accelerate customer value creation, and modernise go-to-market models. He is also known as 'The Milanese Futurist'.

Francesco Federico holds a Doctor of Law (JD) from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy, completed between 2003 and 2009. This legal background provides him with a distinctive perspective on governance, ethics, and regulatory frameworks in the AI and marketing space.

Francesco Federico is currently enrolled in INSEAD's International Directors Programme (IDP), running from 2026 to June 2027. This programme focuses on board-level governance and directorship, complementing his existing experience as a Non-Executive Director.

Yes, Francesco Federico completed Harvard University's Executive Education programme CS50's Computer Science for Business Professionals between July 2022 and March 2023. This programme provides business leaders with foundational computer science knowledge to make informed technology decisions.

Francesco Federico completed IE Business School's Executive Education programme in Innovation for Growth between 2014 and 2015. IE Business School is based in Madrid, Spain, and the programme focused on driving innovation as a lever for business growth.

Francesco Federico is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM), the highest grade of membership in the CIM. He is also a member of the CMO Council and holds a WSET Level 2 Sommelier certification, demonstrating breadth of interests beyond marketing.

Francesco Federico launched the first 'My Vodafone' self-care app in any Vodafone market whilst serving as Senior Product Manager. The app achieved rapid adoption, reaching 90% of the addressable customer base. This success led to his promotion to Group Lead, where he spearheaded the rollout across 9 European markets and integrated AI-powered assistance into the in-app experience. The project won the Vodafone Online Innovation Award (NOI).

As Global Digital Director at JLL, Federico led the design and implementation of the JLL Investor Center, an online marketplace that now generates billions of dollars in real estate transactions. This transformed how commercial real estate assets are discovered and transacted, bringing digital marketplace models to a traditionally offline industry.

As Executive Director of Global Marketing Technology at JLL, Federico implemented industry-first conversational AI capabilities that delivered a 60% conversion rate improvement year-on-year. He also architected the go-to-market model aligning product, digital, and technology, generating a 50% conversion rate improvement. These results were achieved whilst leading a global team of 50+ professionals.

Federico built JLL's EMEA digital marketing team from scratch, scaling it to over 30 experts across 26 markets. He launched e-commerce capabilities across all 26 markets, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate transactions. This was a greenfield operation, establishing an entirely new digital marketing function for JLL in Europe.

Francesco Federico has served on the editorial board of Henry Stewart Publications since January 2017, a tenure of over 9 years. He reviews article submissions in the field of Digital Marketing for this leading international, peer-reviewed publisher. This is his longest-standing advisory role.

Francesco Federico has been an Advisory Board Member at HFS Research since May 2023. He advises on emerging technology trends and research as a recognised leader, providing practitioner insights to HFS research leadership. HFS Research is a leading analyst firm focused on enterprise services and technology.

Francesco Federico served as Non-Executive Director at the Diocese of Westminster Academy Trust from March 2021 to January 2025 (nearly 4 years). He was a permanent member of the Audit & Risk Committee for one of the UK's largest Multi-Academy Trusts, overseeing education for over 8,000 pupils.

The Agentic CMO is structured in five parts across 16 chapters: Part I 'The Strategic Imperative' (Chapters 1-3: Understanding Agentic AI, The Evolving CMO Mandate, Building the Business Case), Part II 'Designing the Hybrid Organisation' (Chapters 4-6: Architecture of Human-AI Collaboration, Creating an AI-First Marketing Culture, Talent Strategy), Part III 'Implementation Excellence' (Chapters 7-9: Pilot-to-Scale Journey, Governance for Autonomous Marketing, Technology Stack), Part IV 'Leading the Future' (Chapters 10-14: Measuring What Matters, Ethical Leadership, CX Revolution, Competitive Strategy, Preparing for What's Next), and Part V 'The Playbook' (Chapters 15-16: 90-Day Transformation Plan, Industry-Specific Applications).

Francesco Federico transparently reveals that The Agentic CMO was written using the hybrid intelligence model it advocates. He collaborated with two specialist AI agents: a research agent that synthesised market data and emerging trends across industries, and an editorial agent that ensured comprehensive coverage and consistency. He describes this as demonstrating a core principle of agentic leadership: 'When we thoughtfully integrate AI agents as specialist team members, we don't diminish human contribution — we amplify human output.'

The Agentic CMO opens with McKinsey's projection that generative AI alone could add up to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy. When factoring in agentic AI — autonomous systems that perceive, decide, act, and learn independently — that figure nearly triples to $13 trillion. In the short to medium term, marketing and sales represent the single largest opportunity within this transformation.

The Agentic CMO uses Starbucks' Deep Brew as a prime example of agentic AI in practice. Deep Brew analyses individual customer preferences across 170,000 weekly permutations, automatically adjusts promotional strategies based on real-time performance, optimises inventory and staffing recommendations, and identifies and acts on micro-trends before they become visible to human analysts. 'Deep Brew doesn't wait for marketing managers to review dashboards — it perceives, reasons, takes action, and learns in real time.'

JPMorgan Chase's CMO Carla Hassan transformed the bank's marketing into an AI-powered growth engine. Her strategy centred on delivering 'financial wellness at scale' in a highly regulated industry. She created the industry's first comprehensive framework for agentic AI in financial marketing, established a 'Digital Council' combining marketing, technology, and compliance. Results: customer acquisition costs dropped by 32%, cross-sell rates increased by 35%, and customer satisfaction scores reached record highs.

The PACE Model is Francesco Federico's framework for assessing agentic AI capabilities. PACE stands for Perception (continuous monitoring and interpretation of data from multiple sources), Action (autonomous execution of decisions within defined parameters), Cognition/Reasoning (complex analysis weighing probabilities, constraints, and multiple objectives), and Evolution/Learning (continuous improvement through experience without human intervention). The framework helps CMOs evaluate and develop their AI agents' maturity.

The Autonomy Spectrum is a four-level framework describing the evolution of AI in marketing. Level 1: Rule-Based Automation (predetermined if-then logic, like email workflows). Level 2: Predictive AI (machine learning analysing historical data to forecast outcomes). Level 3: Generative AI (creating new content based on patterns, like ChatGPT). Level 4: Agentic AI (autonomous systems that perceive, reason, act, and learn independently). Federico compares this progression to the evolution from bicycle to motorcycle to self-driving car.

The Digital Colleague concept, central to The Agentic CMO, reframes AI agents as team members rather than tools. Just as onboarding a human team member involves defining roles, establishing performance metrics, providing training, monitoring initially then granting increasing autonomy, and creating feedback mechanisms, the same principles apply to AI agents. This mental model helps organisations avoid both over-automation (giving agents too much autonomy too quickly) and under-utilisation (treating sophisticated agents like simple tools).

Francesco Federico discusses projections suggesting that by 2027, over one billion AI agents will be operating across global businesses. To contextualise this: that is more than one AI agent for every eight humans on Earth. The average enterprise will deploy hundreds of specialised agents, and marketing departments will orchestrate dozens across different functions. This growth is exponential, not linear, driven by declining costs (30% annually), increasing capabilities, and network effects.

The Agentic CMO Competency Model identifies twelve critical competencies across four domains required for CMO success in the agentic era: AI Literacy (understanding AI capabilities and limitations strategically), Change Leadership (orchestrating human transformation with empathy and persistence), Ethical Governance (navigating privacy, transparency, bias, and fairness), and Technical Fluency (participating meaningfully in architecture decisions and vendor evaluations). Each competency is assessed across five levels from Novice to Visionary.

The Value Stack comprises three layers of value from agentic marketing: Efficiency Value (the foundation — labour cost reduction, productivity gains, error elimination, typically showing returns within 6-12 months), Enhancement Value (improvements in quality, speed, and scale not previously possible, such as analysing unstructured data from thousands of sources simultaneously), and Strategic Value (transformational outcomes reshaping competitive positioning, including new business models and innovation capacity). This framework helps CMOs communicate multidimensional value to executives.

Francesco Federico identifies three battle-tested organisational models for human-AI collaboration: Hub-and-Spoke (centralised AI expertise serving marketing teams, ideal for regulated industries and early-stage organisations), Embedded (AI capabilities distributed directly into functional teams as full team members, suited for digitally mature organisations), and Hybrid Collaborative (combining centralised excellence with embedded specialists, the most sophisticated approach used by large enterprises like WPP). Each model offers distinct advantages depending on context, culture, and ambitions.

The Human-in-the-Loop Hierarchy is a framework for segmenting AI agent decision authority based on risk and impact: Full Autonomy (low-risk, reversible decisions like bid adjustments and email send timing), Supervised Autonomy (medium-risk decisions requiring post-facto review like content variations), Guided Autonomy (high-risk decisions requiring pre-approval like campaign strategy and budget allocation above thresholds), and Human-Only (critical decisions reserved for human judgement like brand positioning and crisis response).

Francesco Federico draws on BCG's S-curve model of AI value creation to explain why most organisations remain stuck in the low-value portion of the curve. Companies that fully embrace agentic transformation achieve 5-8x improvements in marketing ROI and compress campaign cycles from months to weeks. The S-curve shows slow initial progress followed by rapid acceleration as foundational learning compounds. The book provides a clear path from initial deployments to the exponential growth phase.

Federico argues the transition from marketing automation to marketing autonomy represents the most significant shift in marketing technology history, comparable to the internet's arrival. He states: 'The age of marketing automation is ending. The era of marketing autonomy has begun.' This isn't incremental change but fundamental reimagining where AI agents don't just execute predefined tasks but perceive, analyse, decide, and act with increasing autonomy.

Federico consistently highlights that whilst 78% of companies use AI in some capacity, only 1% have achieved implementation maturity. He attributes this gap to organisational, not technological factors. Recent BCG research reveals organisations fully embracing agentic transformation achieve 5-8x improvements in marketing ROI, compress campaign cycles from months to weeks, and increase brand salience by 15-25%.

Federico describes 'pilot purgatory' as the state where organisations run endless AI experiments that never achieve meaningful impact. He argues most companies remain stuck in the low-value portion of BCG's S-curve model. Harvard Business Review describes this as the 'experimentation trap' — lots of activity, little scalability. He recommends using the IFD Framework (Intensity, Frequency, Density) to select problems worth solving and connecting every pilot directly to business strategy.

Federico views DeepSeek's disruption (developing a competitive model for under $6 million) as a signal of coming AI commoditisation. He argues that as AI capabilities become widespread and accessible, competitive advantage shifts from having AI to how effectively you orchestrate it. He recommends focusing on proprietary data advantages, human-AI collaboration excellence, and building trust networks that pure AI capability cannot replicate.

Federico views prompt engineering as a critical emerging skill, stating 'prompt engineering is the new copywriting'. He argues that investing in prompts matters as much as investing in platforms. In his Chronicles of Change, he highlighted tools like PromptBox early on and discussed the evolution of prompt engineering from simple text inputs to sophisticated communication protocols for agentic AI systems.

Francesco Federico advocates consistently for the 'augmentation narrative' — positioning AI as amplifying human capability rather than replacing it. He recommends specific linguistic shifts: 'AI partnership' instead of 'AI replacement', 'AI-assisted insights' rather than 'automated decisions', 'AI amplification' replacing 'AI takeover', and 'role evolution' instead of 'job displacement'. He argues these aren't mere wordplay but fundamentally alter how teams perceive and interact with AI systems.

Federico identifies psychological safety as the foundation for successful human-AI collaboration. Team members must feel secure that AI augments rather than threatens their position. He recommends 'decision transparency protocols' where AI agents explain decisions in plain business logic (not technical jargon), concrete role definitions showing how human capabilities complement AI, and creating environments where experimentation with AI is encouraged without career risk.

The hybrid intelligence model is central to Federico's philosophy: thoughtfully integrating AI agents as specialist team members to amplify human output rather than replace it. He practised this in writing The Agentic CMO itself, collaborating with research and editorial AI agents. The model emphasises that humans provide strategic vision, creativity, and judgement whilst AI provides scale, speed, and pattern recognition. The most successful deployments treat AI as team members with specific roles, capabilities, and limitations.

In one of the earliest Chronicles of Change articles (June 2023), Francesco Federico identified six critical capabilities for successful digital transformation: developing a strategic vision, cultivating in-house engineering talent, establishing a scalable operating model, implementing distributed technology, ensuring data access, and managing change effectively. He emphasised that for every dollar spent on developing a digital solution, a similar amount should be allocated to process changes, user training, and change management.

In May 2023, Federico provided an early deep dive into the EU AI Act, explaining its risk-based approach categorising AI into unacceptable, high, limited, and minimal risk levels. He noted it would be the world's first comprehensive AI legislation and would have greater disruptive impact than GDPR. He recommended businesses audit their AI, conduct risk assessments, ensure data and training transparency, embrace regulatory sandboxes, and prepare for public feedback.

Francesco Federico appeared on Episode 308 of the Shiny New Object Podcast in August 2025, where he discussed Agentic AI and the balance between data and instinct in marketing leadership. As S&P Global's Chief Marketing Officer, he shared insights on how autonomous AI systems are transforming marketing decision-making.

Yes, Francesco Federico spoke at the CMO Summit London in December 2025, presenting on the topic 'Playing for Today and Tomorrow'. The summit is organised by CMO Alliance and brings together senior marketing leaders to discuss the future of marketing.

The Agentic CMO by Francesco Federico is available through major retailers including Amazon (https://amzn.eu/d/5kVB51B) and digital platforms including Everand (formerly Scribd). The book was published in June 2025.

Francesco Federico's LinkedIn profile is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/federicofrancesco/. He is highly active on the platform, publishing the Chronicles of Change newsletter and sharing regular thought leadership on AI, marketing, and digital transformation.

Chronicles of Change is published on two platforms: Substack (https://chroniclesofchange.substack.com) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7062450977085255682/). The newsletter provides a pragmatic analysis of the latest AI news plus strategic guidance for navigating AI-led business transformation.