Quick Answer
Meta has appointed Denise Moreno as its new CMO Meta new CMO effective immediately and Alex Schultz as the company’s first-ever Chief Data Officer. This dual tech executive appointment was announced July 1, 2026. Moreno, a 17-year Meta veteran, steps up from Global SVP of Consumer Marketing and Growth. Schultz, who held the CMO role and oversaw analytics simultaneously, moves into a newly created C-suite position focused entirely on AI-powered data infrastructure.
Both executives will report to Meta COO Javier Olivan. Moreno joins Schultz on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s core leadership team as part of these Meta leadership changes. The move signals that data and analytics are no longer support functions at Meta they now have a dedicated seat at the executive table, reflecting Meta’s broader Meta AI strategy as it spends $145 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026.
Who Is Denise Moreno?
Denise Moreno Meta CMO is a natural fit. Moreno joined Meta in 2009 as the company’s very first email marketer, making her a 17-year company veteran whose career arc maps almost exactly to Meta’s own evolution.
From that starting point in email and growth experiments, Moreno rose through Meta consumer marketing, helping launch and grow some of the company’s most important products and brands: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Oakley Meta products, and Meta Quest. Most recently, she served as Global SVP of Consumer Marketing and Growth Meta marketing leadership at scale overseeing the in-product promotions that drive user acquisition, retention, and product adoption across Meta’s family of apps.
Moreno is not entirely new to the CMO role. This Meta CMO appointment follows her having temporarily stepped in last year when Schultz was preparing for Meta’s FTC trial a clear signal that she had been identified as the succession plan well before this formal move.
Schultz described her as his “quiet right hand on growth,” crediting Moreno with promoting Meta’s AI glasses and Threads while building Meta growth leadership in e-commerce capabilities. She also helped expand Threads beyond 500 million users.
On LinkedIn, Moreno described the road ahead for AI in marketing leadership: “The way Marketing is done is in the middle of its biggest shift in a generation. AI is going to help us have scale and speed to augment human judgment.”
Who Is Alex Schultz?
Alex Schultz joined Meta in 2007, making him a nearly two-decade company veteran. Before Meta, he worked at eBay as Marketing Manager. He holds an MSc in Natural Sciences (Experimental and Theoretical Physics) from the University of Cambridge a background that shaped his deeply quantitative approach to marketing and analytics.
At Meta, Schultz held leadership roles across growth marketing, analytics, internationalization, and the CMO position. As CMO and VP of Analytics simultaneously, he oversaw marketing, product analytics, global experience, insights, and creative globally. He built and ran Meta’s data science and data engineering teams from 2015 through 2026, supporting strategy, business and competitive intelligence, user growth, and engagement. He also led the 2021 corporate rebrand from Facebook to Meta.
His new role as Meta’s first Chief Data Officer consolidates responsibilities that had been distributed user research, competitive intelligence, infrastructure analytics, and board-level insight reporting into a single executive function. The creation of a dedicated CDO role reflects how central data infrastructure has become to Meta’s AI strategy.
On LinkedIn, Schultz said: “Today, I’m excited to announce that I’m becoming Meta’s first Chief Data Officer. Over the last few years, I’ve had the privilege of leading both Marketing and Analytics. As AI has accelerated, I’ve become increasingly convinced that data, research and experimentation are going to continue to be some of the most important strategic capabilities for every company.”
What the Chief Data Officer Meta Role Actually Means
The creation of a Chief Data Officer Meta position is itself the news here, as much as the appointment of Schultz to fill it.
This Meta organizational change brings analytics directly to Meta executive leadership, rather than treating it as a support function underneath a different C-suite executive. In practice, this means Schultz’s data and analytics mandate now sits at the same organizational level as CMO.
Schultz described his immediate priorities in specific terms. His first six months will focus on building a “semantic layer” across Meta’s data warehouse organizational knowledge that gives AI models the ability to reason accurately about Meta’s business context. He called traditional automated insight generation processes “reaching their limits.”
A notable proof point for Meta executive news watchers: Analytics Agent, an internal AI tool, is now the most widely used AI agent inside Meta. Schultz’s other expanded responsibilities include overseeing user research, competitive intelligence, infrastructure analytics, and reporting insights directly to Meta’s board.
Why This Meta Leadership Change Signals an AI Strategy Shift
The dual tech executive appointments signal a structural shift in how Meta sees AI changing both marketing and data management a rare form of Meta organizational changes that creates entirely new C-suite categories rather than just reassigning existing ones.
At the marketing level, Moreno’s elevation signals a consumer-first approach. Her background is in making Meta’s own products and brands visible and compelling to end users a different emphasis from Schultz’s analytics-centric CMO tenure.
At the data level, the creation of a Meta chief data officer role is Meta’s organizational response to a structural problem: as AI becomes the center of how Meta builds products, makes decisions, and generates business intelligence, the quality of the data those AI systems rely on becomes a C-suite responsibility. The person responsible for that data needs to sit at the executive table.
Schultz articulated the strategic logic plainly: AI’s acceleration has made data, research, and experimentation more important than ever. The “context layer” organizational knowledge that helps AI models reason accurately is what separates useful AI analytics from hallucinated outputs. Building that layer is now a dedicated executive mandate at Meta.
The Reporting Structure: Olivan and Zuckerberg
Both Moreno and Schultz will report to Meta COO Javier Olivan, who has overseen Meta’s operations and growth functions since succeeding Sheryl Sandberg as COO in 2022.
Moreno’s addition to the Mark Zuckerberg leadership team is the more notable change for Meta corporate leadership watchers. Zuckerberg’s team now includes both the CMO and CDO functions directly, reinforcing that consumer marketing and data strategy operate at the highest level of the company.
This Meta company news alongside the cloud business Bloomberg reported on the same day paints a picture of a Meta executive team preparing for a significantly more complex operational structure as AI becomes central to every major business decision.
Context: Meta’s Broader Moment
The leadership changes landed on the same day that Meta shares rose 10% after Bloomberg reported the company is building a cloud computing business to sell excess AI computing capacity a significant potential revenue expansion that would position Meta as a direct competitor to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the cloud services market.
Meta is projected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, representing a significant portion of Big Tech’s more than $700 billion total outlay on AI technology. Against that backdrop, having a dedicated executive focused entirely on how the company manages, interprets, and applies its data to AI systems is less a luxury and more a structural necessity.
The two appointments together make the logic clear: Moreno handles how Meta presents its products and brand to the world. Schultz handles how Meta understands its own data well enough to make AI work at the scale it’s now investing in. Both are essential, and now both have dedicated C-suite representation for the first time.
Key Takeaways
- Denise Moreno is Meta’s new CMO, succeeding Alex Schultz after 17 years at the company. She joined in 2009 as Meta’s first email marketer and rose through consumer marketing and growth.
- Alex Schultz is Meta’s first-ever Chief Data Officer, a newly created role that elevates data and AI analytics to the executive leadership level for the first time.
- Both report to COO Javier Olivan. Moreno joins Schultz on Mark Zuckerberg’s core leadership team.
- Schultz’s six-month priority is building a “semantic layer” across Meta’s data warehouse to give AI systems accurate organizational context the foundation for reliable AI-powered analytics at Meta’s scale.
- Analytics Agent already the most widely used internal AI agent at Meta signals how seriously the company is treating AI-powered data infrastructure as a competitive capability.
- The CDO creation is the structural news. Meta is treating data management as a C-suite function, not a support function, because AI decision-making quality depends directly on data infrastructure quality.
FAQ
Who is Meta’s new CMO?
Denise Moreno, a 17-year Meta veteran who previously served as Global SVP of Consumer Marketing and Growth. She joined Meta in 2009 as the company’s first email marketer.
Who is Meta’s first Chief Data Officer?
Alex Schultz, who previously served as Meta’s CMO and VP of Analytics simultaneously. He joined Meta in 2007 and holds an MSc in Physics from Cambridge.
Who do Moreno and Schultz report to?
Both report to Meta COO Javier Olivan. Moreno joins Schultz on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s core leadership team.
Why did Meta create a Chief Data Officer role?
To elevate AI analytics to the C-suite level as data infrastructure becomes central to Meta’s AI strategy. The role consolidates user research, competitive intelligence, analytics, and board-level data reporting under one executive mandate.
What is Schultz’s first priority as Chief Data Officer?
Building a “semantic layer” across Meta’s data warehouse organizational knowledge that helps AI models reason accurately about Meta’s business context which he expects to prioritize over his first six months.
The Bigger Picture
Marketing has always been downstream of data at Meta the company built its advertising empire on the quality of its targeting infrastructure, not the creativity of its campaigns. What this leadership change reflects is that the same logic now applies to AI.
The marketing function needs a consumer-focused leader who can build and elevate Meta’s own product brands Moreno’s exact background. The data function needs a dedicated executive who understands both the technical foundations and the business implications of AI-powered analytics Schultz’s exact expertise.
Separating those roles doesn’t diminish either one. It acknowledges that both are large enough, and strategically important enough, to require full-time C-suite attention in 2026.
Moreno’s observation that marketing is in “its biggest shift in a generation” captures the same dynamic from the brand side that Schultz is addressing from the data side. AI is changing what marketing can do at scale and what data can tell you in real time. Meta has now structured its executive leadership to match.
