Everyone's AI ambition is nobody's position

Gartner’s latest survey of 401 chief marketing officers, mostly at firms with more than a billion dollars in revenue, puts marketing budgets at 7.8% of revenue this year. Last year the figure was 7.7%, and Gartner calls the change effectively flat. Inside that flat line, AI now takes an average of 15.3% of the marketing budget. At the organisations that rate themselves AI-ready, it takes 21.3%.

The number I keep coming back to is a different one. Seventy per cent of these CMOs call becoming an AI leader a critical goal for 2026. Thirty per cent describe their AI readiness as mature.

Read that as a brand strategist would. When seven in ten of your peers have written the same goal into their plans, it is not a position. It is the cost of staying in the category. You have to reach it, and reaching it sets you apart from nobody, in the same way that a checkout that works sets no retailer apart.

None of this is an argument against the spend. Parity is worth buying, and falling below it is expensive. The trouble is the framing. “AI leader” describes how a marketing function runs. It says nothing about what the brand means to the person buying. A budget conversation held in those terms will measure readiness and call it progress.

Kantar argues in this year’s BrandZ that standing out as meaningful and different has become more important for brands, not less, as machines increasingly surface and weigh content. That is Kantar’s own position, and Kantar sells brand-equity measurement. It also fits how the situation works. When a model decides which brand to mention, a brand that is simply a fluent example of its category gives it no reason to pick that one.

So the two findings sit badly together. The machines that increasingly stand between a brand and its buyer reward difference. The tools most firms are buying to reach those machines are, by design, very good at producing the competent average. Fluency is cheap now. A reason to be chosen is not.

What the survey leaves out matters just as much. Gartner gives no split between brand-building and performance spend, so nobody can claim from this data that AI is eating the brand budget, and I won’t. What the data does show is that 56% of these CMOs say they lack the budget for their 2026 strategy. When the allocation is flat and the strategy is already short of money, every line has to say what it buys.

So the useful question about the 15.3% is not whether the firm is AI-ready. It is what the spend will make the brand different at. If the honest answer is that it makes the team faster at what everyone else is already doing, the line is buying parity. That is a legitimate purchase, as long as nobody books it as brand.