Top 2025 Moves for CMOs and CX Leaders

The Gist

• Modern CMOs need hybrid skills. Creative flair alone won’t cut it—CMOs must also master data and tech to remain competitive.
• Budgets are bouncing back—but cautiously. Marketing optimism is up, but leaders must stay flexible as market volatility looms.
• ROI pressure is rising. Demonstrating return on investment is now a top priority—and a top struggle—for marketing leaders.
• GenAI is widespread, but governance lags. Most marketers are experimenting with AI tools, often without formal strategy or oversight.
• DX tools are finally delivering results. After years of frustration, digital experience leaders report meaningful improvements across stacks.
• Personalization is accelerating. Better data and tech are finally pushing this long-promised strategy forward.
• Customer behavior keeps shifting. Successful CX now hinges on the ability to adapt, not just predict.
• CMS platforms are surging again. AI integration is driving a renaissance in content management investments.
• AI is the new CX foundation. More leaders see AI as essential infrastructure—not just a tool—for digital experience.

The 2025 CMO and DCX Playbooks: What CMOs and CX Leaders Need to Know Now

Dom Nicastro: Welcome back to CX Decoded, the podcast where we unpack the most critical trends shaping the future of customer experience and digital marketing. I’m your host, Dom Nicastro, Editor-in-Chief at CMSWire.

Today’s episode is a special one. We’re featuring insights from not one but two groundbreaking CMSWire reports: the 2025 State of the CMO Report and the 2025 State of Digital Customer Experience Report. Our colleague Sarah Kimmel, vice president of research at CMSWire, joined us on CMSWire TV to unpack the findings—and they are must-hear takeaways for every marketing and CX leader out there.

Let’s dive into the most important lessons from these landmark reports.

CMOs Must Master Three Skill Sets to Stay Competitive

Dom Nicastro: We kick off with a reality check for marketing leaders. Creative storytelling is still critical—but it’s no longer enough. CMOs need fluency in both data and technology to stay competitive in 2025.

Sarah Kimmel: Right. So the skills that are critical for marketing leaders now are kind of in three distinct buckets. They're related to each other, but they are distinct. The first is skills related to data aggregation, integration and analysis. The second is skills related to advanced marketing technologies like DXP, CMS or gen AI. And the third is creative thinking or storytelling—your core marketing competencies.

Data is critical for ROI, which is more necessary than ever. Marketers are now being held more accountable for spend. Data hygiene and savvy are essential to use marketing tech for personalization or AI. Without clean, integrated data, you won’t get far.

Second, there’s the technology itself. 98% of marketing leaders agreed that executing strategy now requires more advanced tech skills, and 63% strongly agreed. These skills are needed not only to get value from martech like personalization and omnichannel delivery, but also for things like prompting gen AI, LLM literacy, and workflow automation.

Dom Nicastro: Modern CMOs are being asked to span three disciplines that used to be separate jobs. You need to be a technologist, a data analyst, and a creative leader—all at once. The takeaway? Build teams that complement your gaps and invest in your own cross-training.

Related Article: Examining the State of Digital Customer Experience

Budget Optimism Returns, but Volatility Lurks

Dom Nicastro: Marketing leaders have been navigating tight budgets for years. But according to our latest research, they finally saw some daylight in late 2024—though the outlook remains uncertain.

Sarah Kimmel: Two-thirds of marketing leaders say their budgets increased over the last year. Though 44% said it was a slight increase, 84% expect their budgets to increase again in 2025—and a third expect a significant boost. But here’s the caveat: that optimism was captured mostly in December and January. Since then, we’ve seen instability that might shift those expectations. Early-year optimism may not survive ongoing economic volatility, supply chain disruptions, or sudden shifts in customer behavior.

Dom Nicastro: Optimism is great—but agility is better. If you're a CMO banking on a budget bump, make sure you're prepared to pivot if macro conditions shift. This year, your budget strategy needs a backup plan.

ROI Is the CMO's Top Challenge—And Opportunity

Dom Nicastro: ROI has always been a sticking point, but now it’s an imperative. CMOs are under immense pressure to justify every dollar—and not just to prove value, but to keep their seat at the table.

Sarah Kimmel: There’s growing pressure for marketing to prove ROI, and it’s hard. More than one in three marketing leaders cite ROI measurement as their top challenge in improving customer experience. 95% say their team is under pressure to show return on marketing spend. But many still don’t have the right data, organization, or measurement skills to get there. So ROI reporting remains a big work-in-progress.

Dom Nicastro: We’re entering an era where intuition takes a backseat to attribution. If you can't measure the impact of your campaigns, someone else will decide your fate. The time to fix your ROI reporting is now—not next quarter.

Related Article: CMO Circle: Inside the 2025 State of the CMO

Generative AI Is Fast-Tracked, But Still Immature

Dom Nicastro: AI use in marketing is exploding—but strategy and governance haven’t caught up. For now, it’s full speed ahead, with one hand still reaching for the seatbelt.

Sarah Kimmel: Generative AI has one of the fastest adoption cycles we’ve ever seen. 68% of marketers used it in the past year, and another 23% plan to. But nearly one in three still have no formal guidelines or policies in place. The top use case is content generation. Strategic uses—like workflow automation and personalization—are still behind.

Dom Nicastro: This is a Wild West moment for AI in marketing. It’s not about whether you use it—it’s about how responsibly and strategically you deploy it. Without governance, you’re just gambling with a shiny tool.

Summary of Key Insights from the 2025 CMO and DCX Playbooks

This table breaks down the top findings and takeaways from CMSWire's 2025 State of the CMO and State of DCX reports as discussed on CX Decoded.

Theme	Key Insight	Implication
CMO skill sets	CMOs must now master data, technology, and creative strategy to compete.	Modern marketing leaders need cross-disciplinary fluency or team augmentation.
Marketing budgets	Budgets are rebounding, with 84% expecting increases in 2025.	Leaders should remain agile as optimism could be tempered by macroeconomic shifts.
ROI reporting	ROI is the #1 challenge for CMOs—yet most teams lack the tools or skills to track it.	Fixing ROI measurement is urgent to maintain credibility and influence in the C-suite.
Generative AI	68% of marketers have used GenAI, but most lack governance frameworks.	AI use must shift from experimentation to strategic deployment with oversight.
Digital experience tools	DX leaders finally report meaningful improvements in stack effectiveness.	Now is the time to innovate further atop more integrated, stable foundations.
Personalization	Momentum is finally building thanks to better data and behavioral insights.	Organizations must align strategy, tech, and insight to scale personalization.
Customer behavior	Rapidly shifting behaviors are outpacing traditional journey modeling.	Adaptability—not prediction—is the new CX edge.
CMS resurgence	82% plan CMS investment; many shifting to AI-integrated or composable platforms.	CMS is evolving from publishing to experience orchestration infrastructure.
AI as CX foundation	AI is now the top DCX investment; 45% say GenAI supports half or more of their work.	AI is becoming the new operating system for modern experience delivery.

DX Teams Are Finally Seeing their Tech Pay off

Dom Nicastro: After years of complaints about fragmented stacks and underperforming tools, DX leaders are finally seeing traction—and results.

Sarah Kimmel: In 2019, only 9% of organizations said their DCX tools worked well. Half said they were bad and needed major work. It’s taken years, but we’re now seeing clear signs of improvement. Teams feel their stacks are more effective and better integrated—though there are still challenges with overlap, redundancy, and integration.

Dom Nicastro: It took half a decade, but the investment is finally paying off. DX leaders—take this as a green light to go deeper. If the foundation is solid, now’s the time to innovate on top of it.

Related Article: Personalization Up, Confusion Down? Not So Fast, Say CX Leaders

Personalization Is Finally Moving

Dom Nicastro: Personalization has been a slow burn. But the fuse has finally caught—and it’s being driven by better tools and deeper behavioral insight.

Sarah Kimmel: Personalization has seen slow, incremental improvement over the last few years. But now we’re seeing real traction. It hinges on two things: understanding your customers’ behavior and having the tech to act on it. Both areas are improving. As tools and behavioral insight mature, personalization is finally gaining momentum.

Dom Nicastro: You can’t fake personalization. You either know your customers or you don’t. What we’re seeing now is the result of hard work aligning data, tech, and strategy—and it’s about time.

Customer Behavior Is a Moving Target

Dom Nicastro: Even with better tools and data, customer behavior is still the wild card. In 2025, it’s not about mastering the journey—it’s about mastering the adaptation.

Sarah Kimmel: Customer behavior is evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to model. Organizations cite “behavior changing too quickly” as the top roadblock to understanding customers. Preferences have shifted post-pandemic and continue to shift. Traditional journey models don’t hold up anymore—there’s too much variation. Many orgs also lack the in-house expertise to keep up, and budget constraints only make it harder.

Dom Nicastro: If you're still building CX strategies off last year’s behavior patterns, you're behind. The new competitive edge is responsiveness—reading change and reacting in real time.

CMS Investment Is Back—and Bigger than Expected

Dom Nicastro: Remember when people said CMS was dead? Turns out it’s having a renaissance. And AI is fueling the demand.

Sarah Kimmel: This was one of the most surprising findings. 82% of organizations plan to invest in CMS. 30% are building their own, signaling a move to composable architecture. Another 29% are buying new platforms, and 23% are upgrading. The motivation? Integrating AI and machine learning into their experience stacks.

Dom Nicastro: This is about more than content. It’s about experience infrastructure. Your CMS isn’t just a publishing tool anymore—it’s your engine for personalization, automation, and AI-readiness.

AI Is the Top Investment for DCX Leaders

Dom Nicastro: We’ll end where a lot of teams are beginning—AI as the foundation of modern customer experience.

Sarah Kimmel: AI and machine learning are now the #1 investment priority for DCX teams—something we’ve never seen before. 45% of CX and marketing leaders say generative AI supports at least half of their work. It’s become the essential glue holding together teams facing tighter budgets and higher demands.

Dom Nicastro: AI isn’t just a tool anymore—it’s the new operating system. DCX teams that figure out how to integrate AI strategically are going to outpace the rest. Fast.