Alex Schultz is moving from chief marketing officer to a new role focused on AI analytics, while Denise Moreno steps up as CMO
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Meta $META has named its chief marketing officer, Alex Schultz, as the company's first chief data officer, with Alex Schultz telling Axios about the change on Wednesday. Vice president of consumer marketing and growth Denise Moreno has been elevated to CMO.
Overseeing AI analytics across Meta's global operations is the central mandate of the new position, along with retaining leadership of the company's infrastructure analytics teams. Alex Schultz noted that his portfolio had grown well beyond marketing in recent years, taking on analytics, user research, competitive intelligence, and direct reporting of insights to Meta's board.
Alex Schultz told Axios that constructing a "semantic" layer within Meta's data warehouse ranks as the most urgent item on his agenda — work he expects to dominate the coming six months and that would allow the company to make sense of data flowing across all its products. Anchoring Meta's approach to data analytics, he said, is what he called the "context layer" — accumulated organizational knowledge that allows AI models to draw accurate inferences.
Denise Moreno brings extensive experience running Meta's in-product promotional efforts, and her work was a contributing factor in Threads reaching the 500 million user milestone, according to Axios. Ensuring that Meta's products and apps perform well in the market sits at the top of her agenda in the new role. The reporting line for each executive runs to Meta chief operating officer Javier Olivan, and Moreno is also set to gain a seat alongside Schultz on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's leadership team.
The moves reflect a broader push at Meta to treat data and analytics infrastructure as a core executive function rather than a support operation beneath another C-suite leader.
Meta has been reshaping its workforce and spending significantly around artificial intelligence. The company laid off roughly 8,000 employees earlier this year — about 10% of its workforce — as part of a restructuring framed around funding its AI ambitions. At the same time, more than 7,000 workers were moved into newly created AI-focused teams, including one called Central Analytics. Meta's projected capital expenditures for 2026 run as high as $145 billion, according to Reuters.
Schultz's tenure at the company dates to 2007, during which time his work has spanned brand strategy and initiatives such as WhatsApp's privacy campaigns.
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