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The Spring 2026 CMO Survey shows marketing leaders operating under growing economic pressure while AI adoption accelerates and expectations for measurable growth rise. Christine Moorman, founder of The CMO Survey, explains what the findings mean for CMOs navigating short-term demands, capability gaps, customer investment, and marketing’s strategic role.
CMOs are facing a difficult combination of expectations. Economic confidence is weak, organizations are scrutinizing spending, AI adoption is accelerating, and marketing still needs to create growth.
The Spring 2026 edition of The CMO Survey offers a useful view into how marketing leaders are responding. The survey, founded by Duke University professor Christine Moorman, included 308 marketing leaders and points to three connected challenges: Economic pressure is encouraging safer, shorter-term decisions; AI adoption is moving faster than many organizations' ability to manage it; and marketing capabilities remain important to business performance even as companies struggle to invest in them consistently.
The findings suggest that the CMO's challenge extends beyond defending a budget. Marketing leaders need to keep the organization focused on the capabilities, customers, and growth opportunities that will matter after the immediate pressure passes.
The survey's measure of economic optimism fell to 56 on a 100-point scale, its lowest level since the COVID period, when it reached 50.9. That pessimism is showing up in business decisions.
Nearly half of surveyed companies have raised prices or expect to raise them in the coming year. The pressure is especially pronounced among B2B product companies, where almost 60% reported raising or planning to raise prices, compared with roughly 30% of B2B services companies.
Growth strategy is also becoming more conservative. Nearly 60% of respondents said growth spending will remain focused on market penetration, emphasizing existing products and markets.
For CMOs, the risk is that short-term pressure begins to define the marketing strategy itself. Moorman described the pattern this way: “Marketing spending and strategy decisions remain more reactive than strategic. Marketing is fundamentally a strategic function. It has a powerful strategic role, especially around growth.”
The practical challenge is to respond to current financial realities while preserving a credible view of where future growth will come from. That requires CMOs to connect near-term spending decisions to a broader growth thesis instead of allowing each budget decision to become an isolated exercise in cost control.
AI is one of the clearest areas of momentum in the survey. Marketing's use of AI has nearly doubled over the past two years, and respondents expect AI to account for roughly half of marketing activities within the next three years.
The current use cases show how quickly AI has entered everyday marketing work:
Respondents are also reporting business benefits. Customer satisfaction improvements attributed to AI rose 10.8% year over year, while companies reported marketing overhead cost reductions of 14.6% and sales productivity improvements of 14%.
Those results make AI increasingly difficult to treat as an experimental side project. The larger issue is whether the organization can build the capabilities required to capture that value consistently.
“When we ask them where their weaknesses are with regard to AI and marketing technologies, we see this consistent message about ‘we're not hiring to manage these technologies; we're not training employees on these emerging technologies,’” Moorman said. “They tend to rate themselves most poorly on the human capital piece of it.”
Nearly 60% of respondents favor building capabilities by training current employees or hiring new ones. That puts workforce development alongside technology selection as a central part of the AI agenda.
For CMOs, the implication is clear: AI strategy needs a people strategy. Adoption can move quickly at the individual level, but sustained business value depends on skills, processes, governance, and organizational capacity catching up.
The survey also highlights a broader tension around marketing capabilities. Respondents continue to view marketing capabilities as important contributors to business performance, yet financial pressure can make the investments required to strengthen those capabilities harder to protect.
This creates a compounding problem. Organizations want marketing to become more measurable, technologically sophisticated, customer-focused, and growth-oriented while simultaneously putting pressure on the people and resources required to make those changes.
CMOs can respond by making capability investments more concrete. Instead of defending “marketing infrastructure” in the abstract, leaders can connect capabilities to the business outcomes they enable: Better customer insight, faster experimentation, stronger personalization, more efficient execution, or improved revenue productivity.
That framing matters when executive teams are deciding which investments survive a constrained environment. Capabilities become easier to defend when the CMO can explain the business problem each one solves and the growth opportunity it supports.
Another finding should get the attention of CMOs focused on efficient growth: Companies report spending considerably more on acquiring customers than retaining them.
Acquisition budgets average approximately 26% more than retention budgets.
That imbalance deserves scrutiny when economic conditions make new customer acquisition more difficult and expensive. Existing customers can provide revenue, expansion opportunities, referrals, product insight, and evidence of customer value, making the post-sale experience an important part of the growth system.
Moorman emphasized the need to keep customer satisfaction visible as an ongoing business measure. The broader opportunity for marketing is to expand its cross-functional contribution deeper into the customer lifecycle rather than concentrating resources primarily at the top of the funnel.
For CMOs, this means asking whether budget allocation reflects the full economics of growth. Customer marketing, retention, advocacy, and expansion should be evaluated alongside acquisition when determining where the next marketing dollar can produce the greatest business impact.
The survey shows CMOs taking several steps to demonstrate marketing's contribution:
These actions point toward a more rigorous model for proving value. Performance measurement tells the organization what happened. Customer data can help explain why. Experiments can provide stronger evidence about what marketing actually caused.
The opportunity is to combine these approaches rather than relying on a single dashboard or attribution metric to carry the entire case for marketing.
Customer insight is particularly important because it gives the CMO something distinct to bring to executive decision-making. Marketing can contribute a view of where demand is moving, what customers value, where friction is emerging, and which opportunities the business may be underestimating.
As Moorman put it, “More than anything, marketing is the engine for growth within a company. Who else is going to do it? It's not the CFO. The marketing leader is the one who knows where the opportunity is. We have to make sure that we really enact that role within the organization.”
The survey also captures the early impact of changing search behavior. Forty-one percent of respondents reported using generative engine optimization, or GEO.
For CMOs, that number is another signal that AI is changing more than internal productivity. It is beginning to reshape how buyers discover information, evaluate brands, and enter the buying journey.
That makes AI adoption a customer-facing issue as well as an operational one. Marketing teams need to understand how their brands appear in AI-mediated discovery environments and whether the content, authority, and customer evidence they create can be found and interpreted by both traditional search engines and generative systems.
The shift is still developing, which makes disciplined experimentation especially valuable. CMOs do not need perfect certainty about the future of discovery before testing how changing search behavior affects visibility and demand.
The Spring 2026 CMO Survey presents a marketing function caught between immediate pressure and long-term opportunity. The most useful response is to make those two horizons part of the same operating agenda.
CMOs can start with five questions:
The answers can help CMOs decide where to protect investment, where to experiment, and where to change course. They can also strengthen marketing's role in executive conversations by connecting customer knowledge and marketing capabilities directly to the company's growth strategy.
Pressure may change how marketing resources are allocated. It does not reduce the need for a clear view of where growth will come from. The CMOs who can bring that view to the organization have an opportunity to make marketing more strategically valuable when the business needs it most.
Three themes stand out: Economic uncertainty is encouraging shorter-term and safer marketing decisions, AI adoption is accelerating faster than many organizations' ability to manage it, and marketing capabilities remain important to business performance despite pressure on the investments needed to build them.
The survey reports that marketing's use of AI has nearly doubled over two years. Respondents expect AI to account for roughly half of marketing activities within the next three years, with content creation and personalization among the most common current applications.
Human capabilities are a significant constraint. Survey respondents report weaknesses in hiring and training people to manage emerging AI and marketing technologies, suggesting that technology adoption needs to be accompanied by investment in skills and organizational capabilities.
The survey shows marketing leaders strengthening performance tracking, collecting customer data, generating customer insights, and using experiments. Combining those approaches can help CMOs connect marketing decisions to business outcomes and provide stronger evidence of marketing's contribution to growth.
Explore the full Spring 2026 CMO Survey results and listen to the complete conversation with Christine Moorman for additional context.