In 2026 most CMOs are under two pressures at once: flat budgets and high expectations for AI.
What Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey found
Gartner surveyed 401 CMOs and marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe between January and March 2026, mostly at companies with over $1 billion in revenue:
- Marketing budgets are flat at 7.8% of company revenue (7.7% in 2025).
- CMOs put an average 15.3% of their marketing budget into AI initiatives.
- 70% say becoming an AI leader is a critical goal for 2026, but only 30% report mature or fully developed AI readiness. Seventy percent say their internal marketing processes are not mature enough for effective AI.
- 56% say they lack the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy.
- The more AI-ready organizations spend 21.3% of their marketing budget on AI, and get a bigger budget: 8.9% of revenue.
Gartner's Ewan McIntyre put the risk plainly: CMOs may "invest in AI tools faster than they build the data foundations, processes, governance and talent required to scale them."
What "readiness" means in practice
Readiness is not a tool. It is the things that let tools pay off:
- Data that is connected, clean and consented.
- Processes that are documented, so AI can be built into them.
- Governance: brand rules, approvals, disclosure and IP checks.
- Skills: people trained to use and check AI.
- Measurement: a way to prove what AI changed.
Why it matters for the budget
If readiness lags, extra AI spend tends to buy licences that go unused, pilots that can't scale and content nobody can approve fast enough. The AI-ready organizations spend more on AI because they can use it — the spend follows readiness, not the other way round.