The CMO Title Is Disappearing Across Asian Telecom. Here's Why.

Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison just made its clearest statement about where marketing belongs in a modern telecom company: not in brand, but in growth.

The Indonesian operator has appointed Apoorva Mehrotra as its new Chief Growth Officer (CGO), a role that didn't exist before. It absorbs everything the Chief Marketing Officer used to do, plus product development, pricing, and commercial strategy across all consumer lines. The CMO position, vacant since Vivek Mehendiratta left for Singtel earlier this year, will not be refilled.

That's not a hiring gap. That's a deliberate organizational choice.

What the CGO Role Covers

The CGO title sounds like a minor rebrand. It isn't. Under Indosat's structure, Mehrotra owns the corporate brand, the IM3 product brand, marketing campaigns, communications, commercial strategy, product development, pricing, and customer segmentation. All of it under one person.

Previously, functions like product development and pricing sat in separate silos from the brand and marketing team. The CGO model assumes those walls make no sense in a telecom business running on AI-driven personalization. If you're using algorithms to price data plans for 300,000 distribution outlets, you need one executive who can align the product, the offer, and the message at the same time.

Indosat's timing is deliberate. The company posted its highest-ever quarterly revenue in Q1 2026: IDR 15.2 trillion (~US$871 million), up 12% year-on-year. Net profit jumped 26%. Customer spending per user rose 15%. Data traffic grew more than 25%. The company is performing. The CGO appointment is how it plans to keep performing.

The CMO Title Is Quietly Disappearing Across Asia

Indosat isn't doing something unusual. It's doing something faster than most.

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Forrester's 2025 research found that only 49% of Fortune 500 companies' top marketing executives still hold the "CMO" title, down from 55% just a year earlier. The share of Fortune 500 companies with any marketing executive in the C-suite fell from 63% to 58%. The CMO isn't just being retitled. In many cases, the role is being dissolved into broader commercial leadership.

Across Southeast Asia's telco sector, the pattern is playing out in real time. Singtel hired two of the region's most prominent former CMOs in early 2026 for roles without the CMO title: Mehendiratta (ex-Indosat CMO) became Chief Customer Officer, while Derrick Heng (ex-Telkomsel CMO) became Chief Commercial Officer of Singtel's digital services division. Telkomsel, meanwhile, replaced Heng with a Marketing Director, not a CMO.

The effect is the same across all three moves. Marketing gets placed underneath a commercial or customer-growth mandate. Brand strategy becomes a function of revenue targets.

The Signal Indosat Is Not Broadcasting

Indosat's official narrative frames Mehrotra's role as a natural evolution toward its "AI North Star" strategy: embedding AI across operations, building new digital business models, and powering Indonesia's national AI infrastructure through its Sahabat-AI large language model.

That framing is accurate, but incomplete.

The unstated signal is that the CMO model was inadequate for what Indosat needs now. A CMO runs campaigns. A CGO runs the commercial engine. When AI can handle segmentation and personalization, the rationale for a standalone brand chief weakens. The CGO model only works when AI carries the operational load underneath it.

McKinsey research on telco AI transformation notes that leadership structure, not technology alone, determines whether AI programs succeed or fail. Mehrotra's appointment is Indosat's structural answer to that problem.

Not every APAC telco is making the same call. Globe Telecom in the Philippines appointed Roche Vandenberghe as a new CMO in early 2026, keeping the traditional structure intact. The CGO transition remains a strategic choice, not an industry mandate.

But with Indosat's Q1 numbers and Singtel's parallel moves, momentum is clearly building. Southeast Asia's telcos are quietly deciding that marketing is too important to leave with marketers.