"I'm not even sure the title chief marketing officer captures [my role] adequately anymore."

Andrea Brimmer, CMO of Ally Financial, states this matter-of-factly. At the Detroit-based digital financial services company, the executive — once measured primarily on advertising campaigns — now oversees communications, user experience, creative services, customer acquisition, and an internal product innovation studio.

She spends as much time considering how large language models perceive the firm as she does evaluating television commercials, and she articulates marketing's value in terms any CFO would appreciate: pricing power, long-term investment decisions, and revenue.

The transformation of Brimmer's role mirrors a broader shift underway across corporate America. Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how consumers discover companies, collapsing what marketers traditionally understood as the purchase funnel into a single query.

As large language models increasingly distill a company's reputation into a single recommendation, influence within the enterprise has shifted toward the executive who best understands the customer.

When Brimmer became Ally's CMO in 2015, the department had fewer than 40 people. The bank lacked a social media team, a CRM organization, any meaningful digital marketing capability, and a sponsorship strategy. By her recollection, a single person handled digital marketing.

Over the next decade, Brimmer built capabilities reflecting a fundamentally different vision of marketing's role. She brought communications under her remit, established a consumer research and product incubation team, expanded into user experience, and reorganized the entire function around customer intelligence.

Generative AI has accelerated the urgency behind that transformation by changing how services and products are surfaced to consumers. A customer might now ask an AI assistant: "I have 10,000 extra dollars. What should I do with it?" The question carries clear commercial intent without naming any financial institution or banking product. Companies now compete to become the recommendation that AI systems produce after evaluating thousands of signals related to reputation, product quality, authority, and customer experience. The shift extends well beyond traditional search engine optimization, where companies optimized for keyword-driven results pages. In AI-mediated search, there is often only one answer — making the top recommendation disproportionately valuable.

Brimmer cites data from AI search analytics platform Scrunch showing that Ally Financial was the most-mentioned bank in response to unbranded banking queries across major AI assistants every month from January 2025 through July 2026. Sustaining that position, she says, demands a deep understanding of how AI systems assemble corporate reputation. For a branchless digital bank like Ally, which relies on online channels for customer acquisition rather than physical footprints, visibility in AI-generated recommendations carries particular commercial weight.

"If somebody has a horrible customer experience, that's going to hurt us in the LLMs," she says. "If we repossess somebody's car the wrong way, that's going to hurt us in the LLMs. If we don't show up as a good citizen in the world, that's on us. If we don't treat our employees with care and love, that will show up."

The implication extends well beyond the marketing department. Customer service, communications, product and service quality, and employee experience all feed into a company's external reputation. The recommendation an AI system delivers reflects the enterprise's accumulated behavior — not the output of any individual campaign or department.

That reality has driven Ally to reorganize internally. Brimmer has assembled scrum teams focused on what she calls an "AI-first mindset," feeding information into large language models, correcting misinformation, and studying intent signals that reveal what consumers are genuinely trying to accomplish.

Every customer interaction, product launch, employee review, earned media mention, and operational decision becomes another data point AI systems use to evaluate a company. Brand becomes machine-readable, and organizations with stronger reputations gain an advantage each time AI determines which companies to recommend.

"Brand has never been more important than it is right now," Brimmer says.

This perspective also explains why she frames marketing in financial rather than purely creative terms. "Please don't think of marketing as an expense," she says. "Think of marketing as a driver of revenue."

When asked how she would defend her budget to Ally's CFO, Brimmer points to pricing power. Customers who trust Ally's brand, she argues, are less likely to make decisions based solely on price — giving the company greater flexibility in how it prices its products.

Marketing's influence extends further still. Through TM Studio, Ally's internal innovation group that reports to marketing, customer research directly shapes product development. Teams engage consumers to understand the problems they need solved, then design products around those insights.

One such research effort revealed that people were simultaneously saving for vacations, weddings, college tuition, and future vehicle purchases, yet most banks still required separate accounts for each goal. TM Studio translated that insight into "savings buckets" — a feature allowing customers to create multiple personalized savings goals within a single account.

For Brimmer, products like savings buckets demonstrate how the marketing function has expanded well beyond campaigns into customer intelligence and product strategy. It is also why she believes the title "chief marketing officer" has yet to catch up with the true scope of the role.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.