Andrea Brimmer, the Chief Marketing Officer of Ally Financial, speaks with a matter-of-fact tone when she questions whether her job title still fits. “I’m not even sure the title chief marketing officer captures [my role] adequately anymore,” she says. At the Detroit-based digital financial services company, Brimmer’s responsibilities have expanded far beyond traditional advertising. She now oversees communications, user experience, creative services, customer acquisition, and an internal product innovation studio called TM Studio. Her time is split between thinking about how large language models understand the firm and contemplating television commercials. She frames marketing’s contribution in terms any CFO would recognize: pricing power, long-term investment decisions, and revenue.

Brimmer’s journey reflects a larger transformation inside corporate America. Artificial intelligence is changing the way consumers discover companies, compressing what marketers long called the purchase funnel into a single query. When someone types, “I have 10,000 extra dollars. What should I do with it?” into an AI assistant, that question carries clear commercial intent without naming any institution. Companies now compete to become the recommendation that AI systems generate after evaluating thousands of signals about reputation, product quality, authority, and customer experience.

When Brimmer became Ally’s CMO in 2015, her department had fewer than 40 people. The bank had no social media team, no CRM organization, no meaningful digital marketing capability, no sponsorship strategy, and, by her recollection, only one person working in digital marketing. Over the next decade, she built a new 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 function around customer intelligence.

The urgency of that transformation has only intensified with generative AI. Brimmer cites data from AI search analytics platform Scrunch, which found that Ally was the most-mentioned bank in response to unbranded banking queries across major AI assistants every month from January 2025 through July 2026. Maintaining that position, she says, requires understanding how AI systems assemble corporate reputation. “If somebody has a horrible customer experience, that’s going to hurt us in the LLMs,” she explains. “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.”

Her point carries implications far beyond marketing. Customer service, communications, product quality, and employee experience all contribute to a company’s external reputation. The recommendation an AI delivers reflects the enterprise’s accumulated behavior rather than the output of any single campaign. That reality has forced Ally to reorganize internally. Brimmer has assembled scrum teams focused on an “AI-first mindset,” feeding information into large language models, correcting misinformation, and studying intent signals that reveal what consumers are actually trying to accomplish.

Every customer interaction, product launch, employee review, earned media mention, and operational decision becomes another signal AI systems use to understand a company. Brand becomes machine-readable, and organizations with stronger reputations gain an advantage each time AI decides which companies to recommend. “Brand has never been more important than it is right now,” Brimmer says.

That perspective also explains why she frames marketing in financial rather than creative terms. “Please don’t think of marketing as an expense,” she says. “Think of marketing as a driver of revenue.” Asked how she would defend her budget to Ally’s CFO, Brimmer points to pricing power. Customers who trust Ally’s brand are less likely to make decisions based solely on price, giving the company greater flexibility in pricing its products.

Marketing’s influence doesn’t end there. Through Ally’s TM Studio, an internal innovation group that reports to marketing, customer research also shapes product development. Teams go directly to consumers to understand the problems they need solved, then design products around those insights. For example, customer research found that people were saving simultaneously for vacations, weddings, college tuition, and future vehicle purchases, yet most banks still required separate accounts for each goal. TM Studio turned that insight into savings buckets, allowing customers to create multiple personalized savings goals within a single account.

For Brimmer, products like savings buckets illustrate how the marketing function has expanded beyond campaigns into customer intelligence and product strategy. It’s also why she believes the title “chief marketing officer” has yet to catch up with the scope of the job. As AI continues to reshape the financial industry, Brimmer’s role serves as a blueprint for how marketing can evolve into a central driver of business strategy.