Editorial
Research Report
Business Leaders CX Report: What’s Working and What’s Not in AI-Driven CX
The Gist
- Budgets stall as pressure builds. Gartner finds marketing budgets flatlined at 7.7% of revenue, leaving CMOs squeezed between rising expectations and tighter resources heading into 2026.
- Tenure drops, but careers advance. Spencer Stuart reports CMO tenure at S&P 500 firms fell to 4.1 years in 2025, yet 62% of departing leaders moved into equal or larger roles.
- The new mandate is operational. CMOs who tie marketing to revenue, govern AI workflows, and lead across functions will define who advances in the 2026 restructuring cycle.
Marketers often feel that budget projection meetings these days have more in common with a chess match than a ledger. Every spending decision sets a strategic choice of resource priorities, one that determines what marketers can and cannot do for the next several quarters.
For CMOs navigating 2026, the board has been reset. Organizational restructuring, AI-driven cost reductions and persistent budget compression have changed the rules of engagement, and the CMOs who recognize that early will be better positioned for the moves that follow.
Researchers are encountering revised budget shifts more frequently. Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey found marketing budgets flatlined at 7.7% of company revenue, with over half of CMOs reporting budgets below 6%, a threshold that limits investments in talent, technology and campaign scale simultaneously. The forward-looking question for 2026 is whether CMOs will spend the year defending last year’s footprint or repositioning for a role that looks materially different by the time budgets are set again.
In this article, you will read insights from the trenches. Marketing leaders sound off on the forces bearing down in 2026 and what concrete steps CMOs can take, whether they are protecting their current job, repositioning for a new one, or building the case for reevaluating their responsibility inside the organization.
Table of Contents
- Budget Compression Is Changing How Marketing Teams Work
- The CMO Role Is Contracting and Expanding at the Same Time
- 4 Moves That Position CMOs for What Comes Next
- What CMOs Should Prepare for Through the Rest of 2026
- Navigating Career Winds for CMOs
Budget Compression Is Changing How Marketing Teams Work
Budget compression shows up in the small decisions before it shows up in the headline numbers. Campaign planning cycles shorten as approvals require stronger financial justification. Agency relationships face scrutiny, with Gartner noting 39% of surveyed CMOs planned to cut agency spend in 2025. Martech investments stall even as AI capabilities beckon for more spending, and marketers are asked to do more with tools they have not fully operationalized.
The customer experience layer absorbs the pressure with fewer resources for personalization and loyalty programming at the moment when customer acquisition costs are rising and retention matters most.
Kiran Iachwani, marketing and operations manager at PowerYourCurls.com, sees the strain in day-to-day execution.
“Right now there is genuine top-down pressure,” Iachwani says. “Many marketing executives are almost immediately requested to explain artificial intelligence spending, sometimes before the systems are mature or fully incorporated. That urgency produces strain in daily implementation, even as it sharpens the boardroom narrative.”
Ben Parker, VP of marketing for CrownTV, sees the pressure surface in how marketers rush their content operations.
“Marketers feel the pressure,” Parker says, “but the real challenge is knowing where adopting AI creates actual value versus where it’s just noise. We see marketers overwhelmed by AI tools promising everything. The winners are the ones using it strategically. My advice: deploy AI where it removes friction, such as scheduling, data analysis and personalization at scale, and keep humans where authenticity matters, including strategy, storytelling and creative direction.”
Related Article: The Top Challenges Facing CMOs in 2026
The CMO Role Is Contracting and Expanding at the Same Time
Leaders making role decisions within their organizations are redistributing marketing accountability rather than reducing it. Growth and revenue titles appearing in place of traditional CMO roles represent different accountability structures and different performance metrics. CMOs in traditional roles must demonstrate value in a framework designed for a broader mandate, while those moving into growth or revenue titles carry expanded scope with roughly the same resources.
The structural signal behind the title churn matters more than any single appointment. Spencer Stuart’s 2025 CMO tenure study put average tenure at 4.1 years, the lowest in more than a decade, yet 62% of departing CMOs moved into equal or larger roles. That combination tells a clearer story than tenure alone.
The job is being rewritten in real time, and the marketing leaders who understand the rewrite are landing on the upside of it. Gartner also finds that 65% of CMOs believe AI will dramatically transform their role within two years, which is reshaping how marketing leaders build skills and position their teams.
4 Moves That Position CMOs for What Comes Next
The distinction between a CMO who weathers 2026 and one who advances through it comes down to deliberate positioning. Each of the four moves below responds to specific conditions reshaping how marketing leadership is evaluated, sequenced from immediate tactical value to longer-term capability building. Taken together, they form a working blueprint that any CMO can begin implementing inside a single quarter.
| Strategic Move | What It Addresses | How to Execute | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connect marketing spend to revenue attribution | Budget justification under CFO scrutiny | Build a revenue influence model linking campaign spend to pipeline and closed revenue, and present findings in CFO language. | CMOs who speak in payback periods and CAC-to-LTV ratios tend to win budget reviews that brand-centric presentations lose. |
| Govern AI workflows before automating more campaigns | AI adoption without accountability | Establish measurement frameworks for AI-driven outputs; define what gets automated, what gets measured, and what gets cut. | Agentic AI requires governance architecture, and CMOs who lead that conversation own a strategic asset. |
| Expand cross-functional scope deliberately | Narrow CMO remit in restructuring environments | Partner with sales, product and IT on shared KPIs; position marketing as the customer data steward across the organization. | CMOs with cross-functional accountability are harder to eliminate and easier to promote. |
| Build a public leadership signal | Visibility during talent market movement | Publish, speak, and advise. Create a documented perspective that travels outside the organization. | CMOs with a public profile accelerate landing at the next role; 62% of departing CMOs moved to equal or larger positions. |
These moves share a common thread. They shift the CMO role from cost center manager to revenue and growth steward. The shift requires different metrics, different C-suite relationships, and concrete artifacts such as the attribution model, the AI governance framework, and the cross-functional dashboard that make contribution visible regardless of how the organization restructures around the role.
Josiah Roche, Fractional CMO at JRR Marketing, believes much of that dynamism is “pushing both customer experience and careers into a danger zone.” Roche notes the contradictions that arise in role responsibilities.
“I’m seeing strong pressure for fast AI ROI," he said. "Careers are at risk because expectations don’t match how AI value shows up. Boards want double-digit cost cuts in 12 to 24 months. The wins that actually stick are incremental: support agents handling more tickets per hour with AI drafts, better lead scoring so sales ignores low-intent leads and smarter routing of high-risk churn customers. Those gains are meaningful but not headline-grabbing, so the project sponsor can look like they’ve failed on AI even when metrics like churn or NPS are improving.”
What CMOs Should Prepare for Through the Rest of 2026
Marketing leaders are seeing preparation strategies evolve in ways that will likely solidify through the rest of 2026. The practitioner view reinforces what the data already shows: CMOs are being asked to defend AI spending while simultaneously proving that AI improves the customer experience rather than degrading it.
AI Pressure Is Outpacing Measurable ROI
Daniel Kroytor, CEO of TailoredPay, sees conflicting reports of strategy versus results among startup founders.
“As a founder, I see a lot of my peers who have their own small businesses claiming they’re crushing it with AI,” Kroytor explains. “Whether it’s optimizing their ads, creating more content, or using bots to respond to customer queries, everyone has new ideas on how to use AI to maximize output. I don’t think it really works the way everyone claims it works, and I feel the constant pressure to try out new things and automate even those things I know should not be automated because it would ruin the customer experience and cause more harm in the long run.”
Short-Term Efficiency vs. Long-Term Customer Experience
Iachwani at PowerYourCurls.com added that AI also shapes how marketers prepare the customer experience journey, and with it the strategy teams use.
“Customer experience typically suffers first when artificial intelligence is used only for short-term cost reduction,” Iachwani says. “Automation does away with nuance. Reaction times might get better while relevance decreases. Customers feel processed rather than known, and trust silently disappears. That erosion shows up later as churn, decreased lifetime value, and brand fatigue, and it is seldom visible in quarterly ROI charts. Leaders end up accountable for outcomes they did not have time to properly influence, and careers take the hit.”
Eric Nalbone, head of client strategy for Position2, is seeing the work experience evolve through AI usage.
“Our organization hasn’t experienced careers being put at risk as a result of AI, but we’re experiencing changes in how we operate and what we have humans focus on versus computers, building AI agents to enhance our workflows,” Nalbone says. “For most companies, investing in AI is no different than investing time in hiring and training new employees, and it should be viewed the same way.”
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How CMOs Are Measuring Marketing Performance — and Where AI Is and Isn't Moving the Needle
CMSWire's 2025 State of the CMO research, drawn from more than 500 marketing leaders, reveals a growing gap between the metrics that matter most to boards and the outcomes AI is currently delivering.
| Metric | What the Data Shows | Where AI Fits — and Where It Falls Short |
|---|---|---|
| ROI accountability | 69% of marketing leaders say leadership now expects fully quantifiable results for everything the department does, up from 59% in 2023. Nearly 95% say their teams are under more pressure to demonstrate return on marketing investment. | AI spending is among the first line items boards demand justification for — often before systems are mature enough to show results. |
| Customer satisfaction (CSAT) | Named by 55% of leaders as a primary performance metric, up from 42% in 2023 — now the top measurement tool ahead of business impact and revenue growth. | AI-driven automation can erode CSAT when deployed for cost reduction alone. Customers feel processed rather than known, and trust erodes before it shows up in quarterly charts. |
| Content creation and productivity | 66% of marketing leaders cite faster content creation and higher productivity as generative AI's clearest benefits to date. | These are the easiest AI wins to demonstrate — but not the ones that move the metrics boards prioritize. Efficiency gains don't automatically translate to pipeline or revenue influence. |
| Personalization and customer engagement | Only 48% of leaders cite enhanced personalization as a generative AI benefit — trailing content and productivity gains by nearly 20 percentage points. | Personalization remains the gap between AI adoption and AI value. Many teams are still refining their ability to deliver experiences that resonate rather than scale generic content faster. |
| Customer lifetime value (CLV) and churn | CLV is cited by 40% of leaders as a key performance metric. Churn and NPS improvements are frequently the real gains from AI — but rarely the ones that get reported. | Incremental AI wins — better lead scoring, smarter churn routing, AI-assisted support — move CLV and retention metrics but don't generate the headline results boards demand in 12-to-24-month ROI windows. |
Navigating Career Winds for CMOs
With so many concerns rising, what should marketing executives do? Few of these pressures will resolve in a single budget cycle, yet CMOs who focus on three core actions will see better chances for workflow and career stabilization.
- First, conduct a capabilities audit rather than a headcount audit. Map what the team produces by outcome rather than activity, which changes the terms of any restructuring conversation from cost-cutting to resource reallocation.
- Second, put AI governance on the roadmap explicitly. CMOs who define what gets automated retain agency over their team’s shape and scope, while those who let finance or IT define it inherit whatever framework lands on their desk.
- Third, evaluate whether the CMO title still matches the organizational role. Understanding the implications of a CRO or CGO restructuring is intelligence-gathering, not defensiveness.
Keeping an eye on these three actions will help marketing leaders become the calm eye in the storm of changes 2026 will bring.
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