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Vineet Mehra, Chime’s Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, has been named to both Forbes’ list of the World’s Most Influential CMOs and Business Insider’s list of Most Innovative CMOs — recognition reflecting his work at the intersection of brand-building and growth.
Mehra’s view is that marketing’s role is expanding, not contracting, in the AI era, requiring leaders who can connect brand, product, data, and commercial outcomes in ways that weren’t previously possible, while building teams that can move faster without sacrificing judgment.
Here’s how he thinks about that shift, what it means for Chime’s approach, and what it requires of the next generation of marketing leaders.
1. How is the role of the CMO evolving in the era of AI?
I truly believe we’re in the new golden age of marketing. The mandate of the CMO to drive sustainable growth remains the same, but AI now enables us to move faster and smarter than ever.
In this golden age, the role has never carried more accountability or influence – connecting brand, product, tech, and finance, speaking the language of every function, and delivering measurable value for the business.
At Chime®, I’m the Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, which reflects how we see the marketing function as an engine of growth that helps shape demand, sharpens product-market fit, and creates measurable business value. That means aligning every part of the business around growth in a way that is durable, differentiated, and deeply connected to what our members actually need.
AI is fundamentally redefining how we accomplish this by breaking down silos, unleashing creativity, accelerating experimentation, and enabling personalized growth at scale. But we’re not unique in this. In a world where everyone will ultimately have the same machines and the same algorithms, the company that wins is going to be the one with a brand story that’s different. The fuel for the golden age isn’t automation. It’s human imagination. This has always been the differentiator. Now, it’s more important than ever.
Ultimately, the strategic jobs to be done by the CMO haven’t changed. Build a great team. Build a world-class brand. Build a durable growth engine. AI is how we do those jobs more efficiently, faster, and at higher quality.
2. What does it take to build an AI-native marketing organization that accelerates output without compromising on taste, judgment, or creativity?
The goal isn’t to use AI to produce generic marketing outputs faster, it’s to encode what is distinctive about Chime’s brand so the system scales our judgment. At Chime, that starts with a clear point of view on who we serve, what we stand for, and what “good” looks like creatively before a single workflow is automated.
One of the most important investments we’ve made is building a dedicated team of AI leads inside the marketing org who own our most critical AI initiatives end-to-end. We map our top jobs to be done, then find multiple tools to compete for each one. We get in early, we co-develop, and we earn influence over where the product goes. We’re not experimenting randomly. We’re solving high-priority problems and ensuring we’re building capabilities that compound over time with the right tools.
As these tools become more available to everyone, our brand becomes the moat: our brand standards, proprietary context, feedback loops, and the human taste behind the work. For example, our in-house Creative team are tastemakers who are at the forefront of AI adoption. They’re not prompt engineers. They’re creative leaders who know when and how to use these tools in service of the stories we’re looking to tell, and the creative judgment stays human. It frees the team to spend more time on the work that actually matters: the ideas, the cultural instincts, and the storytelling that no model can replicate.
Over the last year, AI has significantly increased our team’s content output by over 300% while cutting production time by more than half. What used to take ten hours from concept to campaign now takes about four, and testing volume is up threefold. These efficiency gains have empowered teams to focus on higher-impact creative strategy and storytelling, turning speed into substance rather than simply scale.
3. Chime is Instagram’s most-followed U.S. banking brand. In an era when culture is moving faster and anyone can create content at scale with AI, how does Chime continue to stand out and create real impact?
The most valuable currency for brands today is attention and relevancy, and the best brands and businesses know how to convert attention into durable revenue and growth. When culture accelerates, meaningful participation wins out over volume. The brands that win recognize culture, respect it, and scale it through taste, experience, and performance.
For Chime, we’re continuing to build our branded entertainment presence by going deep into the subcultures and microcultures where our members already live.
Our “Ball on a Budget®” series is a perfect example. We didn’t show up in women’s basketball with a logo. We tapped directly into the subcultures around tunnel-fit fashion and financial confidence that WNBA fans were already part of — and challenged athletes to build a tunnel-worthy outfit for $300 or less. That’s culturally specific, community-driven, and completely on-mission for our brand. It’s meaningful participation.
Our episodic series interviewing athletes, musicians, and influencers with their moms is another proof point. Whether it’s Cooper Flagg and his mom talking about the real financial decisions behind his rise from rural Maine to the NBA, or NASCAR driver Toni Breidinger reflecting on the sacrifices behind her racing career — these are stories that go places a 30-second spot never could. They’re episodic, human, and build the kind of affinity that compounds over time.
We’ve never treated Social like a broadcast channel. Social is where our community lives and where culture moves fastest. When we run #WhyIChime® on X, we trend #1. Our engagement rate runs 3x the financial services benchmark. That happens because we stay authentic, stay invested in the conversation, and give our members something worth participating in, not just consuming.
Beyond Social, our sports partnerships with Portland Fire, MLS, and the teams and athletes within the NFL and NBA allow us to expand our storytelling and show up in our members’ everyday lives at scale, not through logo placement, but through narrative ecosystems built around communities and cultural momentum.
And lastly, we’re excited to be developing new, original streaming programming. Brands that don’t entertain and keep interrupting will simply not win in the future.
4. Chime hit $2.2 billion in revenue, grew 31% year-over-year, surpassed 40% unaided brand awareness, and went public in 2025. What are the strategic priorities for the brand from here?
The next chapter for us is about deepening primacy, not just growing awareness. Our ambition is to become the primary financial partner for mainstream America — not a side account, but the relationship people trust with their paycheck, spending, savings, and long-term financial progress.
That means moving Chime from challenger to category leader, and making sure every brand and product moment reinforces the same idea: Chime helps people make financial progress and removes friction. It also means shifting perception from a strong alternative to the first choice — and defining what a better banking relationship should look like for everyday Americans.
As our platform expands, the brand has to create coherence. Across spending, saving, borrowing, credit building, investing, and AI-powered guidance, people should increasingly understand Chime as one integrated relationship. And as a public company, our mission hasn’t changed, but the bar has. We have to be more rigorous about what we say, what we launch, and how every decision ladders back to durable value creation.
Ultimately, the brand priority is trust. In financial services — especially in an AI era — trust is what makes deeper relationships, broader adoption, and long-term growth possible.
5. What are 5 things modern marketers should be doing if they want to become a future CMO?
There’s never been a better time to be a marketer! The landscape is shifting fast, consumer attention is harder to earn, expectations are higher, and AI is changing the way we work, but that’s exactly what makes this moment so energizing. Marketing today sits in one of the most interesting seats in any company. We are part art, part science, part storytelling, part systems thinking. We build brand and drive growth. We shape perception and influence product adoption. We use creativity, data, technology, and human insight all at once. That’s what makes this era so special.
- Trade the career ladder for a career jungle gym: I’m a big believer in chasing experiences and learning, not titles. The marketers who will thrive now are the ones who stay curious. To embrace this moment of tremendous evolution in our industry, a career full of horizontal experiences, not traditional career ladders and job titles, is the key to staying relevant. You want to make yourself dangerous across the entire modern marketing funnel, from brand strategy and creative storytelling to direct response, data science, lifecycle marketing, and martech.
- Become an AI Conductor: Executional marketing — media buys, segmentation, creative iterations — is already being automated. Future CMOs aren’t running campaigns, they’re conducting fleets of AI agents alongside humans. Start learning now: what stays human (storytelling, ethics, brand judgment), and what gets augmented.
- Learn to speak CFO: It’s a really important skill to be able to talk the language of the CFO. Every marketing dollar is going to be scrutinized like a capital investment. If you’re not fluent in LTV, CAC, payback periods, and fully-loaded P&Ls, you won’t survive the next planning cycle. The CMO who can’t walk into a board room and defend spend with the rigor of an investor is going to lose the seat at the table.
- Build community, not campaigns: The strongest CMOs are building ecosystems of belonging — customer communities, co-created products, tokenized loyalty. Community is becoming the tip of the spear for brand growth, not a nice-to-have.
- Become a Cultural Decoder: TikTok trends rise and fall in days, not quarters. It’s important that you become a daily trend spotter, catching early signals and translating them into competitive advantages, or you’ll miss the window for your brand to think and act.