Nearly 70% of marketing leaders believe agentic AI will be transformative, but its effectiveness remains elusive as the technology evolves.
The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) position is at a turning point, necessitating a fundamental rethinking of the role, according to the Capgemini Research Institute’s CMO Playbook, “From complexity to clarity: How CMOs can reclaim marketing to build competitive edge.”
Expectations for CMOs are at an all-time high, yet they face several difficulties, including limited control of the martech budget, shrinking budgets, diminishing strategic influence, and integrating AI.
More than half (55%) of marketing executives claim that these efforts are now sponsored by IT with little marketing oversight, despite strong optimism regarding the impact of generative and agentic AI.
Budgets are decreasing while CMOs’ duties are growing. According to the report, marketing spending has decreased to an average of only 5% of business income over the last two years. In just two years, the proportion of CMOs participating in crucial decision-making has decreased from 70% to 55%.
Even while Gen AI is becoming more popular in marketing, it is now utilized for digital advertising, consumer segmentation, and content creation.
Just 15% of marketing executives claim that their department automates low-value operations. Most teams continue to concentrate on manual activities, which limit their time for customer interaction, brand development, and innovation.
According to the survey, real-time data is not utilized by current martech and data strategies to provide seamless consumer experiences. Merely 18% of marketers firmly concur that they are effectively tailoring consumer interactions to increase engagement and results.
This emphasizes that to fully utilize AI for increased business value, marketing and technology leadership must work together more closely, integrating CIO knowledge of technology with CMO understanding of consumer strategy.
“CMOs today are expected to drive growth and meet sales targets, whilst also being experts in data and AI – they must now market to both humans and agents. But many lack the resources, control or clarity to manage these growing demands. AI tools offer great potential but often fail to deliver results as budgets, strategy and technology aren’t fully aligned,”
said Gagandeep Gadri, Managing Director frog, part of Capgemini.
“This is a pivotal moment for marketers to rethink their function’s core purpose and reposition it not just as a support department but as a driver of customer experience and enterprise growth to create real business value.”
