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CMO AI Leverage Report

Publisher: Open Future Forum Research type: Executive benchmark report (operator-research) Audience: CMOs and marketing leaders Edition: Edition 1 Publication date: July 2026 Canonical source: https://openfutureforum.com/research/cmo-ai-leverage-report

Overview

The CMO AI Leverage Report reads how marketing, the operating function that has captured the largest functional share of enterprise AI budgets, is putting that spend to work under a marketing budget that is largely flat. Its flagship metric, the CMO AI Leverage Index, measures the share of marketing leaders who say AI now lets marketing grow output without growing headcount, agency spend, or budget. The report pairs Open Future Forum's own first-party reads with external benchmarks (MIT, Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, Menlo Ventures) to frame the gap between marketing's AI budget share and its actual operational readiness.

Methodology & Sample

First-party figures are drawn from Open Future Forum event registration records across 20+ 2026 events and a direct instrument fielded to marketing-lane registrants and an agentic go-to-market session. Sample sizes are small and explicitly labeled as early/directional: the CMO mixer instrument response base was 7, the agentic go-to-market stage question base was 25 (of 80 registrants), and the founder-buyer question base was 16. The report is transparent that registrant rooms are role-mixed (including non-CMO titles) and that these are not probability samples of all marketing organizations.

Key Findings

  • Marketing receives the largest functional share of enterprise AI budgets of any operating function (over half, per MIT), while overall marketing budgets remain roughly flat at about 7.8% of company revenue (Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey).
    • CMOs allocate around 15.3% of marketing budget to AI on average, rising to 21.3% among the most AI-ready organizations, yet only 30% of surveyed marketing leaders report mature AI readiness.
      • In Open Future Forum's own agentic go-to-market session, 21 of 25 respondents who answered were already past the exploration stage with AI agents, including 9 already running agents in production.
        • In an early read (base of 7), creating content faster and understanding customers better tied as the top perceived benefits of AI in marketing, with 2 of 7 also citing headcount-style leverage (doing the work of more people).
          • Of 16 AI founders surveyed about who owns the AI buying decision at companies they sell into, none named the CMO — buyers were instead identified as CIO/CTO or business-unit leaders, even as founders increasingly price on usage/outcomes rather than per seat.
            • The report highlights a "seat gap": marketing leaders are shifting budget toward consumption/usage-based vendor pricing (56% of CMOs, per Gartner) at the same time founders are pricing on outcomes — a convergence the report argues will eventually pull the CMO seat into the AI buying conversation even though neither side currently names the other.