CMOs are buying AI that their organization isn’t ready for

CMOs are pouring money into AI, but most marketing organizations still are not ready to make those investments pay off.

That’s one of the clearest findings from Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey, which found that CMOs now allocate an average of 15.3% of their marketing budgets to AI initiatives. At the same time, only 30% say their organizations have mature or fully developed AI readiness capabilities.

In other words, marketers are buying the tools faster than they are building the infrastructure needed to support them.

According to Gartner, 70% of CMOs say becoming an AI leader is now a critical goal for 2026. The problem is that the same percentage also admits their internal processes are not mature enough to implement and scale AI effectively.

Readiness lags well behind readiness

That gap between ambition and operational readiness is becoming one of the defining tensions in enterprise marketing right now.

“CMOs recognize AI’s potential as a force multiplier for growth, efficiency, and transformation, but most marketing organizations are not yet built to capture that value,” Ewan McIntyre, VP analyst and chief of research in the Gartner Marketing practice, said in a release.

Many companies still lack the governance structures, data foundations, workflows, and talent models needed to operationalize AI at scale. That creates a situation in which organizations can deploy AI tools quickly but struggle to integrate them into repeatable, measurable business processes.

The companies further along in AI maturity already appear to be separating themselves from the pack.

According to Gartner, organizations with mature AI readiness allocate 21.3% of their marketing budgets to AI initiatives, significantly above the overall average. Those companies also tend to have larger marketing budgets overall, averaging 8.9% of company revenue compared to the broader survey average of 7.8%.

More importantly, Gartner says those organizations are pairing AI spending with stronger operational discipline and budget flexibility.

Marketing budgets remain flat

Overall marketing spend rose only slightly year over year, moving from 7.7% of company revenue in 2025 to 7.8% in 2026. Meanwhile, 56% of CMOs say they do not have enough budget to execute their strategy, and 54% report lacking sufficient resources.

CMOs are increasingly being forced to decide which programs to cut, which workflows to automate, and where AI can realistically improve efficiency or performance. The challenge is that AI initiatives often require broader organizational change than many companies initially expect.

The survey finds a broader trend emerging across martech: AI readiness is becoming less about access to models and more about organizational coordination. Most large enterprises can now buy similar AI capabilities. Competitive advantage increasingly comes from how effectively companies connect those tools to their data, operations, processes, and teams.

Or, put more simply, the AI race is starting to look less like a technology problem and more like a management problem.

Recommended Articles

You could already have the data AI needs to deliver value

May 11, 2026

Winning the next era of local visibility: How AI is changing local search

May 11, 2026

AI use and fatigue growing among consumers

May 8, 2026

Methodology

The survey, conducted between January and March 2026, included 401 CMOs and senior marketing leaders across North America and Europe, most of whom worked for companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue.