More than half of CMOs admit they cannot afford to execute the strategy they have been asked to deliver. That is the headline finding from Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, released this week.
Marketing budgets crept up to 7.8% of overall company revenue, up from 7.7% in 2025. That is not growth. That is rounding error. Meanwhile, 56% of CMOs say their organisation lacks the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy, and 54% report insufficient resources across the board.
The survey, conducted among 401 CMOs and marketing leaders across North America, the UK and Europe between January and March 2026, paints a picture of a profession caught between ambition and arithmetic.
The average share of marketing budgets now allocated to AI initiatives, according to Gartner
Why it matters
The gap between what CMOs are expected to deliver and what they are funded to deliver is getting harder to paper over. Flat budgets with rising expectations mean something has to give. Either the strategy shrinks to fit the budget, or the CMO finds ways to make every dollar work harder.
This is where the AI conversation gets interesting. CMOs are allocating an average of 15.3% of their budgets to AI initiatives. That is a meaningful chunk of spend. But the readiness data suggests most of it is being invested ahead of the team's ability to use it. Only 30% of marketing organisations report mature AI capabilities.
That creates a dangerous dynamic. Budget flows into AI tools and platforms before the processes, skills and data infrastructure exist to extract value from them. The result is spend without return, which makes it even harder to justify budget increases in the next cycle.
For Australian businesses, the pattern is familiar. Marketing budgets here track similar ranges to their global counterparts, often tighter. The constraint is the same. The difference is that Australian marketers operate in a smaller market with fewer scale advantages, which makes waste less forgivable.
What to do about it
The budget is not growing. The expectations are. That gap is the CMO's real strategic problem.
