Meta Names Alex Schultz as First Chief Data Officer for AI

Meta named its chief marketing officer Alex Schultz as its first chief data officer, a newly created seat built around AI analytics across the company. Vice president of consumer marketing and growth Denise Moreno, a 17-year Meta veteran, will take over as CMO. Both executives confirmed the change on LinkedIn on Wednesday, July 1, 2026, per the first published account of the CDO role.

Schultz, who joined Facebook in 2007 and has held the CMO title since 2020, will now run Meta’s global AI analytics and continue leading the company’s infrastructure analytics teams. Meta shares were up 10% in afternoon trading, helped in part by a separate Bloomberg report that Meta is building a cloud business to sell excess AI computing capacity. The leadership change lands as Meta projects capital expenditure of as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, the largest infrastructure plan in the company’s history. Axios first reported the appointment.

From CMO to Meta’s First Chief Data Officer

The new seat is built around the part of Schultz’s portfolio that has been quietly outgrowing marketing for years. In his LinkedIn announcement, Schultz said AI is creating “effectively unlimited demand for insights.” He keeps the VP of analytics title and adds Chief Data Officer to a brief that now spans user research, competitive intelligence, and reporting insights to Meta’s board, per Schultz’s full LinkedIn announcement of the new role.

Both Schultz and Moreno will report to chief operating officer Javier Olivan. Moreno will also join Schultz on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership team, per Axios.

The shift formalizes a portfolio that has been in motion for years. Schultz took on the CMO role in 2020 and has run both marketing and analytics since. He helped steer the launch of Threads and the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, and has been Meta’s public voice on AI inside its ad and creator businesses. In November, he defended the sector’s AI investment level to Business Insider, calling it “aggressive, but not crazy.” At Cannes Lions last week, Meta rolled out AI announcements across creative tools, creator marketing, and shopping formats that Schultz was part of.

What the Seat Covers (And What Schultz Is Racing to Build)

The CDO role sits where Meta’s data warehouse meets its AI product roadmap. Schultz told Axios that the most urgent item on his agenda is constructing a “semantic” layer across Meta’s data warehouse so the company can make sense of data flowing across all of its products. He expects that work to dominate the next six months. Underneath that sits what Schultz calls the “context layer” of Meta’s AI system, the organizational knowledge that lets AI models draw accurate inferences from data that already lives inside the company. Both layers, in his telling, are about turning Meta’s data sprawl into something AI agents can actually use. The full scope of what the seat owns sits in five buckets.

In a LinkedIn post this week, Schultz pointed to early progress, naming Analytics Agent, which he said is now the most widely used AI agent inside Meta. He called ongoing work to modernize the analytics infrastructure foundational.

• AI analytics across Meta’s global operations
• Meta’s infrastructure analytics teams
• User research
• Competitive intelligence
• Reporting insights to Meta’s board

Meet the New CMO, Denise Moreno

Schultz did not have to look outside Meta for a replacement. Denise Moreno has spent roughly 17 years at the company, most recently as global senior vice president of consumer marketing and growth. She temporarily stepped into the CMO chair last year when Schultz was preparing for Meta’s FTC trial, a quiet run that positioned her for the permanent move.

In his LinkedIn post, Schultz called Moreno his “quiet right hand on growth,” crediting her with promoting Meta’s AI glasses and Threads and building out the company’s e-commerce push. Her brief in the new role is product-led, focused on how Meta’s apps and products perform in the market.

Her top task, per Axios, is making Meta’s apps and products perform well in the market. She is also a key figure behind Threads crossing 500 million users. In her own LinkedIn announcement, Moreno put the moment in generational terms. Her promotion continues a run in which Moreno led in-product promotions across Meta’s family of apps, including the early push behind Threads and the marketing muscle behind Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses.

AI is changing how fast we can learn, create, and reach people. The teams that win won’t be the ones that hand everything to the machine.

The line is from Denise Moreno, Meta’s incoming CMO, writing on LinkedIn on July 1, 2026.

The $145 Billion Build That Made the Role

The data function at Meta has been growing up for years, in step with the bill. Meta raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from an earlier forecast of $115 billion to $135 billion. Earlier this year, Meta laid off roughly 8,000 employees, about 10% of its workforce, while moving more than 7,000 workers into newly created AI-focused teams, including one called Central Analytics. Meta’s 2025 capex was $72.2 billion, and 2026 free cash flow growth has been tracking well below revenue growth, the gap investors read as the cost of the AI buildout, per the $145B capex and supplier trade-off. The restructuring touched roughly the same workforce that Schultz’s new data organization will pull from, per the $145B AI push and the 8,000 layoffs it triggered.

Schultz’s appointment also lands against Meta’s wider push to route half of its content and ad reviews through AI, a target the company has tied to funding the AI build, per the AI content moderation push that funds the build. The Central Analytics team Schultz will oversee is one of the new units the layoffs helped fund. The promotion pulls data infrastructure out of the back office and puts it on the same leadership table as the products it feeds. Schultz will now own the analytics function that the $145 billion build will rest on.

Now Meta Wants to Sell Its Extra AI Compute

The CDO appointment is one of two AI bets Meta put on the table on July 1. The other is a cloud business.

Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Meta is preparing to sell excess AI computing capacity to outside customers. The shape of the business is still loose, but the outlines are visible. Meta is not yet saying which customers it would court first. The company is also keeping the door open to expand into adjacent services tied to its models. Meta is weighing access to its hosted AI models in a model similar to Amazon’s Bedrock service, plus raw compute rented out from its own data centers and AI chips.

The pitch is that Meta’s internal AI buildout has produced surplus capacity it can monetize. Investors are already treating the cloud push as the cleaner near-term story for the stock. The CDO appointment is the longer bet, committing Meta to a single point of accountability for the analytics layer that the $145 billion build will rest on. The two announcements landed on the same day.

Meta shares were up 10% in afternoon trading on the day of the announcements, with the cloud report and the CDO news both cited as drivers. The Bloomberg cloud story and Schultz’s LinkedIn post landed within hours of each other. Retail sentiment tracked the move across the day.

The First Six Months

Schultz has a public list of what success looks like. Building a semantic data warehouse is the first priority.

At Cannes Lions in late June, Schultz told Business Insider that the key to avoiding AI slop is the same as avoiding bad results in any area, competence at using the tool. He laid out three categories for AI’s role in marketing: AI-only content, AI-enabled creators, and advertisers who refuse to use AI at all. The framing matters because the CDO role will own the data behind all three. The test for the role is whether the data side can keep up with the marketing side’s experiments.

Six months from now, the CDO seat will be judged on whether Meta’s data warehouse can power the AI agents that Meta is selling to advertisers. Schultz joined Meta in 2007 and has run analytics under three different titles over the past two decades. The first Chief Data Officer slot is new; the workload is not. Meta has not said whether more hires will follow, but the data org has been quietly adding headcount inside Central Analytics and the analytics platform teams for most of this year. Schultz said in his LinkedIn post that the work is “only at the beginning of what’s possible.”

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Meta creating a Chief Data Officer role now?

Meta’s data operations have outgrown their place under marketing. The new seat sits on Meta’s leadership team alongside CEO Mark Zuckerberg and reports up through COO Javier Olivan. Meta is projecting capital expenditure of as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, the largest infrastructure plan in the company’s history.

What does the CDO own that the CMO role did not?

Schultz’s CMO brief covered marketing, product analytics, and the launch of Threads and the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. The CDO brief formalizes the data half of that portfolio and adds user research, competitive intelligence, and reporting insights to Meta’s board. The marketing half now goes to Denise Moreno. Schultz’s title is Chief Data Officer, and he keeps his existing VP of analytics title alongside it.

How does the CDO appointment connect to the cloud business Bloomberg reported?

Both announcements landed on July 1, 2026. Bloomberg reported Meta is preparing to sell excess AI computing capacity to outside customers, including access to its hosted AI models in a model similar to Amazon’s Bedrock service. The CDO appointment places a single executive over the analytics layer the new cloud business will run on.

Who is Denise Moreno?

Moreno is a 17-year Meta veteran who most recently served as global senior vice president of consumer marketing and growth. She temporarily stepped into the CMO chair last year while Schultz prepared for Meta’s FTC trial. She was also a key figure behind Threads crossing 500 million users. Her promotion keeps the marketing function on the same leadership team as the new data function.