A 90 Day AI Adoption Roadmap for CMOs

After a busy semester, I am using the final week of the year to put practices into place that will set me up for success when I’m back in the office in 2026. My goal is that when I turn off the lights and close the door at the end of the year, I have a plan for my top three key priorities in the new year.

If one of your big priorities next year is improving using AI in your work, these tips will help you assess where and how to implement AI and guide your team through the adoption process. After all, AI adoption is as much about change management as it is about artificial intelligence.  

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Days 1-15 – Decide. Then Deploy

As a leader, spend the first few days of the new year deciding how AI will be used in your shop. There are so many opportunities to use AI in your work that you won’t be able to incorporate them all. Instead, think about where AI makes the most sense in your organization, where it doesn’t, and broadly what would success in AI look like. Feel free to meet with your team about this but be prepared to make the final decisions.

Tip: Be direct when discussing this with your teams. Use examples to showcase where AI is appropriate and where AI is problematic.

Why this matters: Without guidance about where to use AI, teams risk experimenting in silos and don’t benefit from maximum efficiency. Additionally, team members may use AI in ways that are problematic. Finally, adoption can stall if there’s no uniform approach to the tool.

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Days 16-30 – Focus on the Solution

The goal of AI is to make life easier. Use that mantra to help you focus your efforts. Where are the biggest challenges within your marketing organization? Is there a particular process that takes too long? Is there duplication of efforts? The better your understanding of what you’re trying to fix, the more likely that you’ll be able to incorporate AI to help address the issue. Once you have a firm grasp of the solutions needed, engage your team to help. They can be a fantastic resource to brainstorm how AI can help.  

Tip: Review as many of your marketing processes as you’re able during this time to maximize the amount of support that AI can provide.

Why this matters: Focusing on the solution helps ensure that any AI adoption is practical and serves a business purpose for the organization. Too often, we see all the things that AI can do and are tempted to deploy it in ways that may not be strategically advantageous.

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Days 31-45 – Build Confidence. Together

Chances are the team you’re leading has different comfort levels with AI. As the leader, it’s your responsibility to help everyone get comfortable with the tools and how they will be deployed. A great first step might be to meet with team members to understand their familiarity with AI tools and how they can be used in their specific tasks. By the end of this time, hopefully each team member will have a baseline awareness of AI, knowledge of which tools are best suited for their specific tasks, and an understanding of how to execute the task in the AI platform.

Tip: MarComm teams may have generational divides, be sure to offer trainings and workshops to give everyone lots of practice in using the tools.

Why this matters: AI has a strong barrier to entry. It’s intimidating for many, so this is the point where using AI can most easily break down. Focusing on building confidence will help the team get comfortable and increases the likelihood that adoption happens.

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Days 46-60 – Work on Assessment  

Too often in higher education we focus on output. We did “X” thing. This becomes problematic when using AI. AI increases the volume of output. When output is the goal, we feel incredibly productive without ever assessing whether we achieved our business goals. With some of the time saved from AI, it is important to better examine the impact of the work. AI makes it so much easier to fall into the trap of staying busy, so it is imperative that we slow down and build mechanisms to assess if our efforts are working.

Tip: Map your work into inputs, outputs, and outcomes to track whether the AI use is helping your team impact the organization’s business goals. If it’s not, don’t be afraid to discontinue that use case.

Why this matters: AI is a tool that helps our teams be more efficient. As leaders, we have a responsibility to use some of the time savings to reinvest in our teams to help them get better. Additionally, honing our assessment skills also helps showcase the strategic value that marketing leaders have to the organization.

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Days 61-90 – Locked and Loaded

During the final month, it is important to formalize the new processes. After you’ve seen what worked, finalize those processes and make sure they continue in the future. Depending on your organization, that may be as easy as setting a new norm for the team, or you may want to formalize it even more through a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).

Tip: Bring the team back together for this step to get their feedback about how to best formalize the process. Having them involved in the conversation will help lock in those processes.

Why it matters: Taking the time to formalize the process with your team helps ensure the changes become part of the culture. Missing this step creates the possibility that the team could fall back into old habits that do not involve using AI.

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Making the Most of the Moment

The new year offers an opportunity to reset processes, try new things, and begin fresh. This makes it a great time to incorporate AI into your daily work, and I hope this roadmap offers a path for you to lead your team to adopt AI more fully into your daily work.  

I can’t wait to see how you’re embracing AI in 2026!