Open Future Forum released the first edition of the CMO AI Leverage Report this week. It is a standalone report, a companion to the CFO AI Leverage Report and the Executive AI Leverage Report, and Edition 1 is now live.

I built this report because the same question kept coming up at CMO Executive Forum dinners and at our agentic go-to-market mixer. Marketing leaders wanted to know whether AI was actually letting them grow output without growing headcount or agency spend, and the founders selling into marketing wanted to know whether the CMO was becoming a real buyer. Nobody had good data on either side. So Open Future Forum went and got some.

What the Report Covers

The CMO AI Leverage Report tracks how marketing leaders are approaching AI, headcount, and agency spend in 2026. It looks at three things.

One. Where AI actually helps marketing teams today, in their own words: creating content faster, knowing the customer better, or doing the work of more people.

Two. Who is buying marketing AI. We asked sixteen AI founders who owns the purchase decision inside the companies they sell to. Not one named the CMO. They named the CIO, the CTO, and the business unit instead.

Three. How fast the marketing lane is moving on agents specifically. It turns out to be the smallest operating-executive lane we run and, at the same time, the furthest along the agent curve of any of them.

Why CMOs Are in the Room Now

Marketing holds the largest functional share of enterprise AI budgets of any operating function, more than half of it by MIT's count. That happened before the pressure to prove it caught up. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey found CMOs now allocating about 15.3 percent of marketing budgets to AI on average, while only 30 percent say their organization is actually ready to scale it.

That gap, between the size of the spend and the confidence behind it, is exactly what the CMO Executive Forum was built to track. The Forum's board includes Brandon Nader, VP of Marketing at ThinkingAI, and Fangfang Tan, Chief Product Officer at AgentWeb. Every dinner conversation this year points to the same shift. The CMO's job has moved from proving AI can make better content to proving what it lets marketing stop paying for.

How the Data Was Built

The CMO AI Leverage Report draws on direct conversations inside Open Future Forum, a private executive community founded in 2019 with more than 100 events to date. Open Future Forum runs two formats. Forum Select is our invite-only series of C-suite dinners. Forum Events are our open gatherings, including panels and mixers, where a broader group of operators and marketing leaders take part.

The report also draws on our agentic go-to-market mixer, where 25 of 80 registrants answered a stage question about how far along they are with AI agents. Twenty-one of those 25 are already past exploration, and nine are running agents in production across the business. It is not a survey pushed out cold. It is a synthesis of what marketing leaders are actually telling each other in the room, checked against the numbers they are willing to share.

A Few Numbers from Edition 1

The report leads with its flagship metric, the CMO AI Leverage Index. That is the share of marketing leaders who say AI now lets them grow output without growing headcount or agency spend. Agency spend is included because it is marketing's second labor line. A few other numbers stood out.

Among the marketers we asked where AI helps most, creating content faster and knowing the customer better tied at the top, each named by three of seven. Two of the seven also named doing the work of more people, and one said nothing measurable yet. That is the seed reading of the CMO AI Leverage Index, and it is the line the report will track edition over edition.

One more data point worth flagging. Among the AI founders we asked, not one named the CMO as their buyer today. Most still sell to the CIO, the CTO, and the business unit. But roughly seven in ten of those charging for their product already price on usage or outcomes rather than per seat, which happens to be the exact language CMOs are moving toward as they shift martech budget to consumption pricing.

Read the full CMO AI Leverage Report →

What Comes Next

This is Edition 1. Open Future Forum will publish updated editions as marketing AI budgets and buying behavior keep shifting. The attribution and agency-spend questions enter the field at the next CMO Executive Forum gathering, and no headline figure will run below 40 marketing-leader responses. If you are a CMO and want a seat at the next CMO Dinner Series gathering, reach out through Open Future Forum. If you want to compare notes on how your own numbers stack up against the Index, get in touch directly.

Read the full CMO AI Leverage Report →

FAQ

What is the CMO AI Leverage Report?
The CMO AI Leverage Report is a standalone Open Future Forum research report on how CMOs and marketing leaders buy, fund, and get leverage from AI. Edition 1 launched in July 2026 and its flagship metric is the CMO AI Leverage Index.
Who actually buys marketing AI?
Today, mostly not the CMO. Of sixteen AI founders Open Future Forum asked, not one named the CMO as their buyer; they named the CIO, the CTO, and the business unit. But with founders increasingly pricing on usage or outcomes, the buying decision is converging on the seat that owns attribution: the CMO.
How much of marketing budgets goes to AI in 2026?
About 15.3 percent on average, rising to 21.3 percent among the most AI-ready marketing organizations, on overall marketing budgets that are effectively flat at 7.8 percent of company revenue (Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey).
Is AI replacing marketing headcount?
Not yet at scale. Two of the seven marketers Open Future Forum asked named doing the work of more people as a place AI helps most, an early read, while Gartner finds labor's share of marketing budgets actually rising. The CMO AI Leverage Index exists to measure when the leverage lands.
What is the CMO Executive Forum?
The CMO Executive Forum is a track within Open Future Forum focused on marketing and growth leaders, run alongside the CMO Dinner Series. It is where much of the research behind the CMO AI Leverage Report originated.