Five surveys of marketing leaders published between November 2025 and June 2026, with about 1,200 responses between them, tell the same story: CMOs are spending on AI faster than their teams are ready to use it. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders found that 70% call AI leadership a critical goal for 2026, while 30% report mature AI readiness. This page puts the main numbers from Gartner, BCG and Deloitte in one place and sets out what they mean for an ecommerce brand of $5M to $200M. It is compiled by Brand Media Works, an AI consulting and marketing data engineering firm for ecommerce brands.
Method note
The figures come from five surveys published between November 2025 and June 2026 by Gartner, BCG and Deloitte, read on each firm's own site and recorded in the Brand Media Works competitor register on 12 October 2026. Each figure is quoted as the firm states it, with the survey's sample and dates. The response count of about 1,200 is the sum of the five samples (our arithmetic); some leaders may have answered more than one survey, and the samples differ in region, size and method. The surveys cover marketing leaders across industries, not ecommerce brands alone. Brand Media Works ran no survey of its own for this page.
What do the 2026 CMO surveys say about AI?
| Survey | Who and when | Main AI findings |
|---|---|---|
| Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey (published 11 May 2026) | 401 CMOs and marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe, January to March 2026 | 15.3% of marketing budgets go to AI initiatives. 70% say becoming an AI leader is a critical 2026 goal; 30% report mature AI readiness. 70% say internal processes are not mature enough to implement and scale AI. 56% lack the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy. |
| Gartner survey on AI automation of marketing work (published 11 May 2026) | 402 CMOs, August to October 2025 | AI-driven automation of marketing work expected to rise from 16% in 2026 to 36% by 2028. 80% say staff fear and anxiety are a barrier to AI experimentation. |
| Gartner, From Efficiency to Impact (published 18 May 2026) | Gartner research on CMOs and AI value | Only one in three CMOs see the returns they expect from AI. Organizations automating more marketing work are twice as likely to see ROI from AI. 62% say AI automation has prompted a reevaluation of key roles. |
| BCG, Moving the Agentic Marketing Transformation from Illusion to Reality (published 15 June 2026) | 300 CMOs worldwide, B2C and B2B, plus 50 structured interviews | 96% say AI is driving end-to-end transformation of their function; about a third have done the work. 42% use generative AI only to assist people with discrete tasks. 8% run campaigns in which multiple agents operate autonomously. Roughly half say marketing now leads AI investment decisions in the function. |
| BCG and the Global Marketing and Media Alliance, From Campaigns to Business Value (published 7 November 2025) | Around 60 senior marketing executives across sectors | 57% expect marketing effectiveness and 45% personalization to be among the top ways AI creates value. Only 15% of AI initiatives operate cross-functionally at scale. |
| Deloitte Growth Signals and Standards pulse survey (late 2025) | 50 Deloitte clients, on their 2025 AI investments | 2 in 3 companies have adopted three or more AI use cases in marketing and growth. More than 60% say content creation, predictive analytics and conversational AI are in place or coming soon. |
The six rows are five surveys and one Gartner research article; the response count covers the five surveys only. The Deloitte and BCG and GMMA samples are small, so treat their percentages as directional.
Where is the gap between AI ambition and results?
The same gap shows up in every survey. Gartner's spend survey puts ambition at 70% and mature readiness at 30%. BCG puts the belief that AI is transforming marketing at 96% and the share that has done the work at about a third. Gartner's research on AI value finds one in three CMOs seeing the returns they expect.
Gartner's spend survey also shows what separates the leaders. The more AI-ready marketing organizations put 21.3% of their marketing budgets into AI, against the 15.3% average, and run marketing budgets of 8.9% of company revenue, against 7.8% overall. Readiness, in Gartner's framing, is about processes and capabilities rather than tools:
However, 70% also acknowledge that their internal marketing processes are not yet mature enough to effectively implement and scale AI.
How much of marketing is actually automated?
Less than the spending suggests. CMOs expect AI to handle 16% of marketing work in 2026, rising to 36% by 2028, according to Gartner's survey of 402 CMOs. BCG found that 42% of CMOs use generative AI only to assist people with discrete tasks, just under a third have moved to agent-led workflows, and 8% run campaigns in which multiple agents operate autonomously.
The automation that exists is paying where it is real. Gartner reports that organizations automating more of their marketing work are twice as likely to see a return on AI, and that high performers are 1.4 times more likely to have teams redo or validate tasks AI has automated. The surveys point to fewer, checked workflows rather than broad experimentation: BCG and GMMA found only 15% of AI initiatives operate across functions at scale.
What does this mean for an ecommerce brand?
The surveys describe large marketing organizations, but the pattern applies at $5M to $200M, often more sharply, because smaller teams have less room for experiments that do not pay. Three practical points follow:
- Budget against readiness, not ambition. At Gartner's averages, a brand spending 7.8% of revenue on marketing and 15.3% of that on AI would put about 1.2% of revenue into AI (our arithmetic). The AI-ready group spends more, but only after the processes are in place. How much an AI consultant costs for a $20M ecommerce brand applies those averages to one brand.
- Automate a few workflows fully. The returns in Gartner's research come from automating more of the work, not from more pilots. Which marketing workflows to automate with AI first ranks the usual candidates for an ecommerce team.
- Fix the processes and data first. 70% of CMOs say their processes are not ready to scale AI. For an ecommerce brand, that usually means reporting that disagrees across Shopify, the ad platforms and email. Data engineering for ecommerce covers that step.
AI workflow automation describes how Brand Media Works turns one marketing process at a time into a checked, automated workflow.
Frequently asked questions
How much of the marketing budget goes to AI in 2026?
An average of 15.3% of marketing budgets, according to Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders. The more AI-ready organizations in the same survey allocate 21.3%.
Are CMOs seeing a return on AI?
Most are not yet. Gartner found that only one in three CMOs see the returns they expect from AI investments, and that organizations automating more of their marketing work are twice as likely to see a return.
Do these surveys apply to small ecommerce brands?
Directionally. The samples are mostly large marketing organizations across industries, so the percentages are not benchmarks for a $20M brand. The pattern they show, spending ahead of readiness, is the useful part.