Today we’re publishing the CMO AI Market Map, Edition 1 — a companion to the CMO AI Leverage Report inside the Enterprise AI Buying & Budget Index, Open Future Forum’s research program on how executives who hold AI budgets are actually buying and funding AI.
Where the Leverage Report reads the CMO seat itself, the Market Map reads the supply side: a workflow-based map of 64 AI vendors selling into content, creative, campaigns, SEO/GEO/AEO, analytics and attribution, lifecycle, social, and the agentic/copilot layer — paired with first-party demand signals from 55 application-stage survey responses collected around an Open Future Forum marketing and growth session. We don’t score vendors. We don’t rank them. We show where the supply is crowded and where the room actually stands on deployment.
What’s in it
The clearest signal is that marketing buyers are past the exploring stage. After setting aside 16 respondents who build AI products themselves, 29 of the remaining 39 buyers were already piloting or running agents in production — only 10 were still exploring. This community does not need convincing that marketing AI exists. It wants to see a workflow working.
The second finding is what people actually asked for. Asked what they wanted to walk out with, 13 of 29 open-text answers pointed to real use cases running in production, more than any other theme, ahead of failure modes and controls, peers and networking, and ROI over hype. The through-line is proof, not pitch.
Why we built this
Vendor lists are everywhere. What’s missing is the demand side: who’s actually deployed, what they wanted to see before buying, and where builders and buyers sat in the same room without being the same audience. This edition is an early one — it carries two findings from one session instrument, with budget, sign-off, and return-window questions returning in a later edition once they’re fielded. We’d rather publish a small, honest read than a large one that overreaches the base.
The Market Map sits alongside the CMO AI Leverage Report as a release in the Enterprise AI Buying & Budget Index. Each report carries a stable URL so the vendor categories and the demand read can be cited and compared edition to edition.