Meta has restructured its top marketing and data leadership, promoting long-serving chief marketing officer Alex Schultz to the newly created role of chief data officer and elevating marketing veteran Denise Moreno to CMO.
The changes land at a pivotal moment for Meta as it pushes its AI glasses into the mainstream and competes against rival large language model developers.
Schultz, who joined Facebook, now Meta, in 2007 and has served as CMO since 2020, said the move reflects a widening gap between AI’s appetite for data and the company’s existing capacity to generate it.
“AI is creating effectively unlimited demand for insights, while the traditional ways we generate those insights are reaching their limits,” Schultz wrote on LinkedIn. “My focus in this new role will be helping transform how Meta learns and makes decisions in the AI era.”
In his new role, Schultz will be in charge of Meta’s use of data and AI to understand its business worldwide. Instead of leaving data analysis as a smaller job buried inside another department, Meta is now giving it its own dedicated boss at the very top of the company.
Schultz attended Cannes Lions, where he discussed AI adoption with fellow marketers and the use of chatbots to engage customers.
READ MORE: It’s time to reserve your WhatsApp username
READ MORE: Meta launches AI smart glasses in Australia
The CMO transition
Schultz led Meta’s marketing function through several major shifts, including the company’s 2021 rebrand from Facebook to Meta and its early push into the metaverse.
While Meta’s core advertising business continued to grow during his tenure, the metaverse strategy struggled to gain traction and the company’s broader AI rollout has faced setbacks.
Moreno, taking over as CMO, framed the leadership change in the context of a broader industry shift toward AI-driven marketing.
“The way marketing is done is in the middle of its biggest shift in a generation,” Moreno wrote on LinkedIn.
“AI is changing how fast we can learn, create, and reach people. The teams that win won’t be the ones that hand everything to the machine. They’ll be the ones that pair AI’s speed and scale with human judgment and taste, knowing which idea is actually right.”
The leadership reshuffle comes as Meta reportedly looks beyond its own apps and devices for AI growth.
According to a Bloomberg report, Meta is preparing to rent out its AI computing power to other businesses, putting it in direct competition with Amazon and Microsoft.
In simple terms, Meta has spent huge amounts of money building the computer systems needed to run its own AI – and it’s now looking at ways to make money by letting other companies use that same infrastructure, too.
Main image: Alex Schultz