I used an AI CMO for 30 days. Here's what actually happened.
The honest starting point: I was skeptical. "AI CMO" sounds like a category built for a demo, not a business. The test was simple — hire it, use it for a real month of actual marketing work, and see what breaks.
Week 1: the interview mattered more than I expected
Setu's whole pitch is that you interview before you hire — no sales call, just a live chat with the actual employee. I used it to stress-test positioning questions I'd normally save for a second-round interview: how would you handle a shrinking budget, what would you cut first, what's your read on our category. The answers weren't generic marketing-speak — they were specific to what I'd described about the business, which is the bar that matters. A canned answer here would have ended the experiment before it started.
Week 2–3: real output, real correction cycles
This is where most AI tools fall apart — the first draft is fine, the fifth draft hasn't improved. What was different here: after uploading a brand voice doc and correcting a couple of early misses (too formal, wrong emphasis on a feature nobody asked about), later output actually reflected the correction. Whether that's "memory" in some deep sense or just good context engineering doesn't matter for the result — the trend line pointed the right direction, which is the only thing that matters in a real workflow.
Where it needed a human: anything requiring a judgment call with real stakes attached — a pricing change, a partnership decision, language that could be read as a claim we couldn't back up. The action-approval flow (it proposes, you approve before anything goes out) is doing real work here, not just theater.
Week 4: the actual verdict
Thirty days in, the honest answer is: it's not a replacement for a CMO who owns the whole strategic relationship with a board. It is a genuinely useful replacement for the specific, constant grind of execution — the campaign briefs, the weekly reporting, the first-draft everything — that eats most of a marketing hire's actual week regardless of their seniority.
At $49/month against what a real marketing hire costs fully loaded, the question isn't "is this as good as a human." It's "is this good enough to be worth trying before spending six figures on a hire I might get wrong." For that question, 30 days was enough to say yes.