Accenture has ended a lengthy search for its top marketing job. The consulting and technology services giant said Emma Chalwin, most recently chief marketing officer at Workday, will take over as CMO — filling a seat that has been empty since December.
Chalwin arrives with one of the deeper enterprise-technology marketing CVs in the business: multi-year stints at both Adobe and Salesforce, plus earlier roles at McAfee and tech marketing firm Macrovision.
Who is Emma Chalwin
At Workday, Chalwin ran global marketing for the SaaS company and built her narrative around what she has described as “AI as a catalyst for success.” Before that, she climbed the ladder at Salesforce, starting as a marketing leader in the London office and finishing her run in San Francisco as EVP of global field marketing. Her earlier career included a spell as Adobe’s director of brand marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
That trajectory — regional brand marketing to global field marketing to full CMO — is worth noting for anyone plotting a route to the corner office. Chalwin’s path leans heavily on demand generation and field marketing, the parts of the function closest to revenue, rather than pure brand or communications.
Why Accenture waited
The role opened up in December when Jill Kramer exited to succeed Raja Rajamannar at Mastercard. Kramer spent roughly a decade at Accenture, the last four years as CMO, a period in which the company’s brand value climbed from $12 billion to $20.9 billion and earned a place on Interbrand’s 100 Best Global Brands list in 2025.
That is a demanding handover. Chalwin inherits a brand that has already proved it can turn a services business into a measurable brand asset — and now has to keep the curve moving in a market where every consultancy, platform and agency holding company is selling the same AI transformation story.
Accenture CEO Julie Sweet framed the hire around commercial outcomes, calling Chalwin a “proven growth leader” who knows how to convert breakthrough technology into client value. Chalwin, for her part, said she was “honored” to join and pointed to organisations “reimagining growth in the age of AI.”
Why it matters for marketers
Accenture is not just a client-side advertiser; it is also a competitor to agencies through Accenture Song, and a major buyer of martech and adtech. Who runs its marketing has knock-on effects across the industry.
- The B2B CMO profile is shifting. Enterprise software marketers — Salesforce, Adobe, Workday alumni — are increasingly the talent pool for large services brands, not classic FMCG brand builders.
- Brand value is now a board metric. Kramer’s tenure showed a services firm can measure marketing in Interbrand terms. Expect more B2B CMOs to be judged on the same scoreboard.
- AI positioning is table stakes. Both the CEO’s and the new CMO’s statements led with AI. The differentiator will be proof points and client outcomes, not the claim itself.
- Long vacancies are costly signals. Nine months without a CMO at a company of this scale underlines how thin the pool is for global B2B marketing leadership — a talent gap Indian services firms and GCCs are competing in too.
What to watch next
Three things will show whether the hire lands: how quickly Accenture refreshes its brand platform, whether Accenture Song’s creative and consulting offer gets pulled closer to corporate marketing, and how much of the AI narrative shifts from capability messaging to named client results.
For Indian marketing teams — many of whom sit inside or alongside Accenture’s large delivery footprint here — the practical takeaway is simpler. The playbook Chalwin brings is field-marketing-first: pipeline, sales alignment and regional execution feeding a global brand story. That is a template worth borrowing whether your brand value is $20 billion or a fraction of it.
Source: Adweek
