While nearly all chief marketing officers (CMOs) believe artificial intelligence is reshaping marketing, most have yet to fully transform their own organisations to take advantage of agentic AI, according to a new report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
The report, How CMOs are Moving Agentic Marketing from Illusion to Reality, is based on a global survey of 300 CMOs across business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) sectors, along with interviews with 50 marketing leaders.
It found that 96% of CMOs believe AI is driving an end-to-end transformation of the marketing function. However, only 8% are running campaigns in which multiple AI agents operate autonomously, while just under one-third have transformed significant parts of their function using AI agents. By contrast, 42% said they use generative AI only to assist with individual tasks across a limited number of workflows.
Transformation gap remains
The findings come as marketing leaders face increasing pressure from senior executives to deliver tangible results from AI investments. While about half of CMOs now lead AI investment decisions within their marketing functions, 94% said CEOs’ expectations of marketing have risen significantly over the past two years.
According to the report, nine in 10 CMOs believe generative AI is already changing how consumers discover and evaluate brands.
“Ninety percent of the CMOs in our survey agreed that GenAI is already reshaping how consumers discover and evaluate brands. But most marketing organizations are not yet built to compete in that environment,” said Mark Abraham, a BCG managing director and senior partner and co-author of the report. “Investment must now move beyond individual AI tools, and towards fully connected agentic operating systems built on strong data foundations, brand intelligence layers, multi-agent orchestration, and the right talent. If established brands don’t build this first, new agentic-native attacker brands will do so.”
AI spending surges
The study also found that AI spending in marketing continues to accelerate. Forty-three percent of CMOs said their companies invested more than $15 million in marketing AI this year, up from 28% a year earlier. Among the biggest investors, 41% reported significantly increasing spending on end-to-end workflow orchestration, while martech and data emerged as the top investment priority, rising by 11 to 12 percentage points since 2025.
Many respondents said those investments are already producing measurable business benefits. Nearly one-third (31%) of B2C CMOs and one-fifth (20%) of B2B CMOs reported that agentic marketing transformation has delivered a significant and measurable impact on revenue, alongside improvements in efficiency, speed and campaign cycle times.
Talent takes centre
The report identified talent development as the biggest obstacle to scaling AI across marketing organisations. Around 80% of CMOs said they are making significant investments in AI-specific upskilling programmes, while a similar proportion have introduced responsible AI and ethics training, an increase of 10 percentage points from last year.
Beyond training, many marketing organisations are also creating new AI-focused roles, restructuring teams and redesigning processes to adapt to AI-driven ways of working.
“The introduction of end-to-end agentic workflows is forcing a fundamental reset of the marketing operating model,” said Lauren Wiener, a BCG managing director and senior partner, and global head of the marketing and customer growth practice. “Marketing organizations are being redesigned around AI, and CMOs have a rare opportunity to drive enterprise value by moving early and optimizing across their own organization as well as their partner ecosystem.”
