CMOs are buying AI across eight categories, led by content generation, campaign automation and a fast-growing agentic layer. Sales and marketing together take the largest functional share of enterprise AI budgets in the benchmarks the CMO AI Leverage Report tracks, and CMOs allocate 15.3 percent of marketing budget to AI on average, rising to 21.3 percent at the most AI-ready organizations.
What AI tools CMOs are buying
The CMO AI Market Map organizes the buying landscape into eight workflow categories across 64 vendors: content generation and copywriting; creative, brand and design; campaign and performance marketing; SEO, GEO and AEO; marketing analytics and attribution; lifecycle, email and CRM; social and community; and the agentic and copilot layer. The striking finding is how far along buyers are: among 39 marketing buyers surveyed, 74 percent were piloting or running agents in production. Marketing buyers are deployed, not exploring.
How much CMOs are spending on AI
The budget picture has a tension in it. In the benchmark data the report tracks, sales and marketing together receive the largest functional share of enterprise AI budgets, more than 50 percent, and AI now takes 15.3 percent of the average marketing budget, 21.3 percent at the most AI-ready organizations. But overall marketing budgets are flat at 7.8 percent of company revenue, and labor's share of the marketing budget rose from 21.9 to 24.5 percent year over year. AI spending is growing inside a budget that is not, which is why every AI purchase is displacing something else, and why a majority of CMOs say they lack sufficient budget for their 2026 strategy.
Who controls marketing AI budgets
The same seat gap that shows up in finance and security shows up in marketing: zero of sixteen AI founders surveyed named the CMO as their primary buyer. Founders sell to CIOs, CTOs and business units, even as the CMO's stack absorbs the tools. Pricing is shifting under the CMO too: roughly 70 percent of AI founders who charge use usage-based or outcome-based pricing, and 56 percent of CMOs have shifted martech budgets toward consumption-based models, which changes how marketing budgets need to be forecast and governed.
Which categories are growing
Three categories carry the growth. The agentic and copilot layer is the newest and fastest moving, consistent with how many buyers already run agents in production. AI search visibility, the SEO, GEO and AEO category, is growing because discovery itself is moving into AI answers, and CMOs are being asked how their brand shows up there. And content generation remains the volume workhorse: in the CMO AI Leverage Report data, content creation speed and customer insight development are where marketing leaders most often say AI helps.
What is being squeezed
With budgets flat, growth in one line means pressure on another. The squeeze lands on point tools that a platform or an agent can absorb, on agency spend for work that in-house AI now produces first drafts of, and on seat-based licenses as consumption pricing spreads. Readiness is the brake on all of it: only 30 percent of CMOs report mature AI readiness, and 70 percent say internal processes are not mature enough to scale AI, so consolidation is happening faster than transformation.
The research behind the answers
These findings come from the CMO AI Leverage Report and CMO AI Market Map, built from registration and survey instruments across Open Future Forum's events, with response bases stated and small-base findings labeled directional. The same questions are discussed off the record inside the CMO Executive Forum, where marketing leaders compare what is actually surviving their budget reviews.
Last updated: August 11, 2026
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The CMO AI Leverage Report and CMO AI Market Map are built on first-party data from marketing leaders at Open Future Forum events.