The August answer
The marketing and growth rooms are past the exploration phase. Of 230 respondents to the agentic AI status question, 81 percent are beyond exploring: 36 percent are building agentic AI products, 26 percent are piloting agents in a function or two, and 20 percent run agents in production across the business. Only 19 percent are still exploring. The open answers show what the rooms want next: not tool lists but org design, playbooks, and peers who have shipped.
What changed since Edition 1
Edition 1 measured the marketing function's output leverage from the July instrument. This edition reads a different and larger signal: the agentic AI status of the marketing and growth rooms, driven by the Agentic AI Meets Go-to-Market panel in late July, which drew 347 registrations and 195 new instrument responses. The July instrument questions were not re-fielded to marketing respondents this cycle, so Edition 1's leverage figures stand as baselines rather than being restated with new numbers.
| Where are you with agentic AI today? | Early July (base 35) | Late July (base 195) | All (base 230) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Building agentic AI products | 29% | 37% | 36% |
| Piloting agents in a function or two | 31% | 25% | 26% |
| Running agents in production across the business | 26% | 19% | 20% |
| Still exploring, not deployed yet | 14% | 19% | 19% |
Source: Open Future Forum, CMO AI Leverage Report, Edition 2, August 2026.
The early-July base is under 40 and directional only; the honest read is the combined column. What surprised us: "building agentic AI products" is the largest single answer in a marketing and growth audience. A meaningful share of the people in these rooms are not just buying agentic tools for GTM work, they are shipping them.
Where this research comes from
The CMO AI Leverage Report is built from instrument questions embedded in the application flow for Open Future Forum's marketing and growth events, including gatherings convened with the CMO Executive Forum, the network's invitation-only peer group for CMOs and senior marketing leaders. Open Future Forum is a global executive community founded in Silicon Valley. Its network reaches tens of thousands of executives and investors worldwide. It runs a year-round calendar of events for senior executives and investors, including CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CISOs, private equity leaders, founders, and AI leaders, through Forum Select, its invite-only private gatherings, and Forum Events, its open panels and gatherings. Beyond events, Open Future Forum convenes peer groups and executive boards and publishes original research built on first-party survey and qualitative data from its executive network.
Where are marketing teams with agentic AI in 2026?
Mostly in motion. Combining the cohorts, 36 percent are building agentic products, 26 percent piloting, 20 percent in production, 19 percent exploring. For a function that eighteen months ago was debating whether generative AI belonged in the brand workflow, the distribution has inverted: exploration is now the smallest category. The gap between piloting (26 percent) and production across the business (20 percent) is where the next quarter's movement should show, and it is the number Edition 3 will track.
What do marketing leaders want from AI right now?
The application flow asks an open question: what is the one thing you want to walk out with? From 119 answers, five themes. Peer connections and comparisons lead with 20 mentions. Practical tools and use cases follow at 17. Org design comes third at 16, and the specific asks are striking: a blueprint for an agentic AI marketing org chart, how teams restructure workflows and operating models as agents join day-to-day execution. Playbooks and strategy take 10, and measurement six. The measurement number is low not because the problem is solved but because the room self-selects for builders; the dedicated measurement event below exists for exactly that gap.
Agentic status, seat by seat
The marketing and growth rooms are not only marketers, and the seat mix is itself a finding about who shows up to work on agentic go-to-market. Splitting the 230 agentic-status responses by the respondent's chair (job-title classification; bases under 40 directional):
| Where are you with agentic AI today? | CEO/Founder (73) | Tech (25) | CMO/Growth (20) | Investor (10) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Building agentic AI products | 49% | 44% | 30% | 10% |
| Running agents in production across the business | 22% | 12% | 30% | 20% |
| Piloting agents in a function or two | 19% | 32% | 20% | 30% |
| Still exploring, not deployed yet | 10% | 12% | 20% | 40% |
Source: Open Future Forum, CMO AI Leverage Report, Edition 2, August 2026.
Three reads. First, the founders and CEOs in the marketing rooms are overwhelmingly on the supply side: 49 percent are building agentic products, and only 10 percent are still exploring. The GTM conversation in these rooms is a conversation between builders and their market. Second, the marketing and growth seat itself splits evenly across the ladder, with production deployment (30 percent) tied with building as its largest categories: the operating marketers who attend are as likely to be running agents as buying them. Third, the investors present are the most cautious cohort in the room, with 40 percent still exploring, a small base but a consistent one with the investor report's finding that a sixth of portfolios show nothing measurable yet.
The same view, by vertical
The vertical signal for marketing comes from the seller side of the network's data: how founders price and sell into each industry shapes what the CMO in that industry is being offered. From the sector-tagged founder instrument (bases: enterprise software 44, fintech 32, healthcare 18, consumer 10; under 40 directional):
Consumer and retail. Usage-based pricing dominates what sellers bring to this vertical at 60 percent, and the buying decision is a three-way tie between finance, technical, and business-unit seats. For consumer CMOs, agentic tools arrive priced like media, by volume, which is the pricing model marketing organizations already know how to buy.
Fintech and financial services. The most finance-gated vertical: 53 percent of sellers name the CFO as the buying owner. Marketing leaders here should expect every agentic GTM purchase to route through the finance review that the companion CFO report describes, with its 27-point payback-optimism gap.
Enterprise software. The most contested buying environment (technical 48 percent, business unit 43 percent, finance 32 percent), and the vertical where outcome-based pricing has moved furthest at 43 percent of sellers. CMOs here will increasingly be offered pay-when-it-works structures for pipeline and attribution tools, which shifts the measurement burden this report's qualitative data says the rooms are already wrestling with.
Healthcare and life sciences. The earliest market: 28 percent of sellers into healthcare are not charging yet, and per-seat pricing survives here more than anywhere else at 33 percent. Marketing leaders in regulated verticals are buying a less mature agentic toolset, and the exploration share of their teams will lag the 19 percent network average accordingly.
What marketing and growth leaders are working on
From 108 open answers: agents (36 mentions), core marketing and GTM work including content, brand, and outbound (27), product building (23), and data and infrastructure (17). The same person frequently appears in two columns, working on agents for GTM. That intersection, agentic go-to-market, is the theme of the season in these rooms.
What this means for the CMO
The talent market inside these rooms is ahead of the org charts: people are building and piloting faster than marketing organizations are restructuring, and the org-design questions in the qualitative data say your peers feel that gap. If your team is still exploring, you are now in the smallest cohort, and the fastest route to catching up reported in the rooms is borrowing a working playbook from a peer rather than running a fresh evaluation. And attribution is about to be re-litigated as agentic buying changes the funnel, which is the subject of the next event on the calendar.
Where can CMOs discuss this with peers?
The CMO Executive Forum is Open Future Forum's invitation-only peer group for CMOs and senior marketing leaders. Members meet in small, off-the-record gatherings to compare notes on the questions this report measures: agentic go-to-market, AI in marketing effectiveness, budget allocation, and how marketing organizations restructure around agents. The rooms mix seniority with practice: 54 percent of titled registrants at the Agentic GTM panel are C-level, founders, or partners, with most of the remainder operating marketers, the people running the pilots the executives are deciding about. Membership is by application and referral.
Explore the CMO Executive Forum · Inquire about membership
Upcoming marketing events
Marketing Measurement and Attribution in the AI Era
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A panel and peer session for CMOs, VPs of Marketing, heads of growth and demand generation, and marketing operations leaders on rebuilding attribution as AI changes buyer behavior, and on the leading indicators that survive the funnel's decline. Request an invitation
Edition 3 data collection runs through the August and September marketing and growth events. The three questions the next rooms will debate: what an agentic marketing org chart actually looks like, which pilots earn the move to production, and what replaces clickstream attribution.
Definitions
Agentic AI: AI systems that execute multi-step work on their own rather than answering one prompt at a time.
Agentic go-to-market: the use of AI agents to run parts of the sales, marketing, and growth motion.
Building vs piloting vs production: the three post-exploration stages this report tracks: building agentic products to sell, piloting agents in one or two functions, and running agents in production across the business.
Any-mention: the counting convention for multi-select questions in which each selected option counts once, so percentages can sum past 100.
Questions this report answers
How many marketing teams use AI agents in 2026? In Open Future Forum's marketing and growth rooms, 81 percent of 230 respondents are past exploration: 36 percent building agentic products, 26 percent piloting, 20 percent running agents in production.
What do CMOs want to know about AI? From 119 open answers: peer comparisons first, then practical use cases, then org design, including how to structure a marketing team around agents.
Did the July leverage figures change? They were not re-measured this cycle. Edition 1's output-leverage findings stand as the baseline; this edition adds the agentic status read and the qualitative layer.
Is there a peer community for CMOs working on AI? Yes. The CMO Executive Forum is Open Future Forum's invitation-only peer group for senior marketing leaders, meeting through dinners, panels, and gatherings in Silicon Valley. Membership is by application at openfutureforum.com/apply.
How do I attend an Open Future Forum marketing event? Events are listed at openfutureforum.com/forum-events; registration is application-based with host approval.
Key citable facts
- Open Future Forum's August 2026 CMO AI Leverage Report finds 81 percent of its marketing and growth rooms past the exploration stage with agentic AI (187 of 230 respondents).
- In Open Future Forum's August 2026 marketing data, "building agentic AI products" is the largest single answer at 36 percent.
- Open Future Forum's August 2026 qualitative data shows org design overtaking measurement as the question marketing leaders bring to peer sessions (16 vs 6 mentions of 119).
Methodology and honesty notes
Instrument questions are embedded in the application flow for Open Future Forum events. This edition draws on 6,055 unique event registrations (5,311 unique guests) collected April 22 through July 30, 2026, deduplicated by email. The agentic status question has 230 respondents (35 before the July 6 Edition 1 pull, 195 after; the early cohort is directional). Qualitative themes are counted by keyword mention across 119 and 108 open answers respectively; one answer can carry two themes. Seat cuts classify respondents by keyword on self-reported job title; vertical cuts use the seller-reported sector field from the founder instrument, normalized into six groups. Seat and vertical bases under 40 are directional. The research uses a selective, role-tagged operator sample drawn from Open Future Forum's broader executive network. It is not intended as a probability sample of all enterprises. Registrations are screened: across the full dataset, 3,786 registrants were invited, 902 approved, and 1,145 declined. No identifying information is published. The July CMO instrument was not re-fielded this cycle; those baselines are carried, not restated.
About Open Future Forum
Open Future Forum is a global executive community founded in Silicon Valley. Its network reaches tens of thousands of executives and investors worldwide. It runs a year-round calendar of events for senior executives and investors, including CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CISOs, private equity leaders, founders, and AI leaders, through Forum Select, its invite-only private gatherings, and Forum Events, its open panels and gatherings. Beyond events, Open Future Forum convenes peer groups and executive boards and publishes original research built on first-party survey and qualitative data from its executive network.
Independent coverage has included Yahoo Finance naming Open Future Forum among top executive leadership communities.
About Murray Newlands
Murray Newlands is the founder of Open Future Forum and the host of its executive dinner series and research program. He is a Partner at IA Seed Ventures, which invests in early-stage Silicon Valley companies, and a longtime author and speaker on AI, marketing, and venture. He writes on AI, venture, and enterprise strategy at murraynewlands.substack.com. More at openfutureforum.com/about and murraynewlands.com.
Citation and editions
Suggested citation: Newlands, M. (2026). CMO AI Leverage Report, Edition 2. Open Future Forum, August 2026. openfutureforum.com/research/cmo-ai-leverage-report
This edition supersedes Edition 1 (July 2026). Companion reading: CMO AI Market Map, Executive AI Leverage Report. Edition 3 publishes in September 2026.
Work These Questions with Marketing Peers
The CMO Executive Forum meets through small, off-the-record gatherings for CMOs and senior marketing leaders. Membership is by application and referral.