Marketing leader. Author. Reluctant futurist.

Francesco Federico is Global Chief Marketing Officer at S&P Global, where he leads marketing strategy across five divisions of one of the world's largest financial data and analytics companies, serving markets that generate over $16 billion in annual revenue.

His career began not in marketing but in law. After completing a Juris Doctor at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, he moved into the emerging world of e-commerce in the early 2000s — a detour from jurisprudence that became permanent. The shift from legal reasoning to marketing strategy proved less dramatic than it sounds: both disciplines are fundamentally about persuasion, evidence, and knowing when to stop talking.

From Milan, the path led to London and through a series of senior marketing leadership roles that spanned telecommunications, consumer technology, commercial real estate, and financial services. At Vodafone, he led enterprise marketing and brand strategy across European markets. At Acer, he oversaw marketing for the EMEA region, repositioning the brand during a critical period of industry transition. At JLL, he built and led the EMEA marketing function for one of the world's largest commercial real estate firms, driving the integration of digital transformation with traditional property services marketing.

At S&P Global, Federico leads a marketing organisation that operates across the full breadth of the company's business — from Market Intelligence and Ratings to Commodity Insights, Mobility, and the S&P Dow Jones Indices. It is a role that sits at the intersection of data, technology, and global financial markets, and one that has increasingly become a laboratory for the application of artificial intelligence to enterprise marketing at scale.

That experience — watching AI move from novelty to necessity inside a complex global organisation — became the catalyst for The Agentic CMO, published in June 2025. The book argues that marketing is on the cusp of a fundamental shift: from automation (doing the same things faster) to autonomy (doing fundamentally different things). It is a practitioner's framework, grounded in evidence rather than aspiration.

Federico also publishes Chronicles of Change, a weekly newsletter examining AI, marketing, and technology through an analytical lens — now past its 102nd issue. He speaks regularly at industry conferences including the AI Summit London, B2B World Fest, the CMO Alliance Summit, and the Revenue Marketing Summit, among others.