Research
CMO Radar
Executive Summary
Marketing is at an AI inflection point. Adoption is nearly universal. And the debate about whether AI delivers value is largely over.
Even so, marketing leaders tell us that value delivered so far has been meaningful without being transformational — often concentrated in efficiency gains rather than supercharging marketing effectiveness. These are real achievements, but they are not nearly enough and they do not fully capitalize on AI’s capabilities.
CMOs and their partners in the C-suite are facing many of the same challenges they were two years ago when the first Infosys CMO Radar was published. Then, marketing organizations were using a lot of AI, but not all of it strategically. There were early wins, but deeper AI integration was needed to advance.
Our new CMO Radar shows clear signs of progress, but it has been incremental. Every marketing outcome we have looked at has improved from two years ago, according to our survey of 1,503 marketing leaders from 14 industries and across eight countries or regions.
However, the benefits are widespread but often shallow. About half of marketers report only slight improvements in outcomes, and even the most successful use cases fully achieve their business objectives just a quarter of the time. More strategic outcomes, such as revenue growth, improved customer experience, brand equity, and creativity, lag behind operational gains. Most organizations have secured the easiest opportunities. What remains is harder but potentially more valuable.
Expectations are escalating quickly. A majority of CMOs expect AI to deliver transformational value by the end of 2027, with the biggest anticipated gains in lead generation and conversion, customer experience, and revenue growth. That represents a significant change from where most organizations stand today, and it is arriving on a compressed timeline. The gap between current performance and near-term ambition is wide — and closing it will require more than incremental progress.
The challenge is structural. Most organizations apply AI in fragmented ways, focusing on individual use cases rather than embedding it in workflows, decision-making, and operating models. Because adoption is fragmented, the benefits stay distributed across functions instead of translating into impact across the enterprise.
Our research points to a clear pattern among high-performing organizations: those that embed AI into their operating model, align it with enterprise strategy, and establish formal governance consistently deliver stronger outcomes and higher marketing ROI. Yet only a small share of organizations has reached this level of maturity.
Constraints have grown more urgent as expectations rise and investment accelerates. Data quality, technology integration, governance, and enterprise alignment continue to restrict scale. These are structural problems, and structural problems require structural solutions. Organizations that treat this moment as a prompt to build foundations, not just deploy applications, will be better positioned for what follows.
Marketing is entering a new phase. Each step forward in AI maturity delivers measurable gains, creating a cumulative advantage that compounds over time.
The next 18 months will serve as a proving ground. Marketing leaders are no longer debating whether to invest in AI. The question now is execution — translating investment into business impact at scale, and proving AI can deliver on the promise that justified the investment in the first place.
Marketers are caught between two AI eras: adoption and transformation.
CMO Radar 2026 Promo
Sumit Virmani on Why Marketing Stays a Human Art in the AI Era
Joydeep Mukherjee on What AI Changes in Marketing, and What Doesn't
Chapters
AI has become essential to marketing, delivering broad measurable value even as its boldest promises of autonomous, hyperpersonalized campaigns remain just out of reach.
AI has raised performance across nearly every marketing outcome, but the gains are concentrated in speed, cost, and efficiency rather than the revenue growth and brand impact leaders most want.
AI's value in marketing is wide but shallow, with half of reported gains only slight and personalization lagging furthest behind its promise.
Spending and expectations for AI are both accelerating. The next 18 months will decide whether marketing organizations can close the gap between that ambition and what AI has actually delivered.
Closing the AI maturity gap means embedding AI into workflows, decision-making, and the operating model itself, with CMOs and CIOs aligned around shared goals and agentic AI scaled deliberately.
