The conversations I’ve had with marketing leaders this year feel different. The novelty rush around AI has faded. The tools are still becoming more impressive and useful, but the mood has shifted from wide-eyed experimentation to something more grounded. People want to know what actually works, what doesn’t and what needs to change before AI becomes a dependable part of their marketing toolkit.
Four ideas keep coming up when CMOs talk about 2026.
1. AI is starting to look like infrastructure rather than a toy
Throughout 2025, I combed through stacks of research on corporate AI programs and found a consistent pattern. About 95% of GenAI pilots failed to show clear P&L impact once the dust settled. In most cases, the technology did what it promised. The surrounding systems are what failed. Pilots were bolted onto broken processes, scattered data and teams that didn’t understand how to properly approach AI tools.
Many organizations sped up work that was already inefficient, which created faster motion without better outcomes.
“Governance and systems ARE what separates the AI shotgunners from the strategists.”
In October, I spoke with a CMO for a B2B SaaS brand who told me that of all the AI use cases they had experimented with, the ones with the most impact were systems rather than just prompts.
This has been my experience as well.
I also spoke with the head of a research firm’s AI Task Force, and his primary issue was reigning in rogue AI use that wasn’t following any kind of usage policy. Governance and systems. This is what separates the AI shotgunners from the strategists.
As a result, going into 2026, CMOs are asking harder questions.
- Where does AI belong in our operating model? I see more companies dividing work into a Lab for rapid experiments and a Factory for scaled, governed workflows.
- What data are we willing to trust AI with? The pilots that worked had one thing in common: strong proprietary or verified data with clear governance instead of just relying on whatever the public internet could offer.
- Are our teams sharpening their skills or leaning too heavily on the tools? Some analysts expect a lot of large organizations to introduce AI-free skills assessments in the next few years. It reflects a growing anxiety that writing, analysis and strategic thinking are weakening. We take an extremely human-first approach to AI to help prevent this.
Results in 2026 will come from spending more time and effort strategizing, planning and building systems rather than just throwing everything at AI and seeing what sticks. Fewer side projects. More infrastructure.
2. Your next customer might not be a person
A second theme has come up repeatedly this year: the buyer is changing shape. Actually, they’re ghosts in the machine.
Some analysts believe that by the end of the decade, as much as 90% of B2B purchasing could be handled by AI agents, representing more than 15 trillion dollars in spend flowing through machine-to-machine channels. That idea feels like a natural continuation of procurement software, recommendation engines, algorithmic feeds and personal AI assistants. These new tools compound on one another and the impacts will likely grow exponentially.
“If your offer is not machine-readable, many buying agents will behave as if it does not exist.”
At the same time, nearly half of internet traffic is already non-human. It is distorting engagement and perception metrics and gives teams a false sense of what their audience is doing.
The shift in traditional SEO
With algorithms curating choices for buyers, persuasion has to start earlier and it has to take a different form. The emerging discipline is enhancing traditional SEO for better visibility in AI answers. In simple terms, make your products and offerings legible to machines and prove value so that your content continues to be sourced.
If your offer is not machine-readable, many buying agents will behave as if it does not exist.
The three agent conversations CMOs keep having
I see teams walking through the same trio of agents again and again:
- Agents for marketers: These are the internal copilots that help teams plan and create.
- Agents for customers: Service bots that answer questions and solve problems.
- Agents of customers: Personal AI assistants acting as autonomous buyers or gatekeepers. This is the one most teams are not ready for. Are AI Agents part of your ICP yet?
Preselection is becoming the whole game
In B2B, four in ten buyers say they already have a favorite vendor in mind before they start a formal search. As AI handles more of the early journey, that initial preference becomes more important.
This is why CMOs are putting more energy into peer communities and practitioner networks. Buyers trust people they know more than they trust content feeds, and many B2B brands are increasing influencer and community budgets to show up in those circles. On the technical side, clean, well-structured data and documentation are becoming a first impression for machines.
Done poorly, algorithms forget you exist.
Done well, you can become the default choice for both humans and their agents.
3. The CMO and CFO are rewriting the relationship
Marketing’s responsibilities keep expanding, but the wallet is not moving with them. Recent benchmarks show budgets holding at roughly 7.7% of company revenue, well below previous peaks. Leaders are expected to do more with the same or less, and that has strained the CMO-CFO relationship.
Only one in five of those partnerships is seen as genuinely collaborative. Support for long-term brand investment has dropped more than ten percentage points in a year. 84% of CMOs say ROI is now the primary budget metric, which pushes them toward short-term tactics even when they know brand equity pays the bigger dividend. And around 85% of B2B marketers still struggle to link their performance directly to revenue.
This is the efficiency trap. If CMOs talk about efficiency without tying it to growth or enterprise value, their budgets start to look like variable cost instead of strategic fuel.
The CMOs who are sleeping better heading into 2026 are reframing the discussion. They lead with unit economics rather than channel dashboards. They describe brand and performance as demand creation and demand capture. A B2P perspective helps make that case clearer by grounding the work in how people actually move toward decisions.
The role is shifting from brand guardian to co-author of the P&L. That does not turn a CMO into a CFO, but it requires speaking finance fluently.
4. Customers are living in Treatonomics and Whycation mode
On the demand side, the consumer mindset is stretched thin by AI hype cycles.
People feel tired, hyperconnected and conflicted. The data reflects that tension.
“In an environment saturated with machine-generated content, people fall back on what feels familiar, verified, aligned with their values and consistently delivered.”
Travelers are taking more Whycation trips. They want emotional purpose, not just a break. Most of them value both low-friction digital check-ins and the safety of trusted brands.
Treatonomics is showing up too. About a third of consumers are willing to use short-term debt for small pleasures that offer quick joy.
Price sensitivity is messy. People say they will pay more for brands they genuinely like, but undifferentiated brands risk losing up to one-third of their customers when they raise prices.
Family decision-making is changing as well. In travel, about seven in ten parents say their kids help plan the trips.
Despite digital overload, almost 70% of marketers believe brands should invest more in physical experiences to break through the noise.
For CMOs, brand has become the trust filter. In an environment saturated with machine-generated content, people fall back on what feels familiar, verified, aligned with their values and consistently delivered.
In many categories, brand is the only reliable differentiator.
A Practical 2026 Agenda for CMOs
Across all of the research I reviewed, and the conversations I’ve had with leaders, a simple pattern shows up. The CMOs gaining ground are doing five things.
- Rationalizing the AI portfolio. Shut down pilots that have no path to the P&L. Start with use cases, not tools.
- Building a machine-readable business. Treat product data, pricing, availability and service policies as strategic assets. Create well-structured data that help both humans and agents understand what you offer.
- Rewriting the CMO-CFO script. Walk in with CAC, LTV and payback rather than impressions. Align on a few primary metrics and debate about strategy instead of definitions.
- Designing for Treatonomics and Whycation behavior. Create offers around emotional campaigns. Combine digital experiences with physical human experiences.
- Protecting the human premium. Creativity, judgment and narrative are still human territory. Make sure teams can think, write and decide without a model doing the heavy lifting. If all AI tools were turned off tomorrow, how would your team do?
What the CMO Job is Becoming
When I put all this together, the role looks different than it did even a few years ago. The CMO is turning into a value orchestrator, someone who can make the brand legible to both humans and machines, translate marketing choices into financial terms, connect AI capabilities to actual workflows and safeguard the parts of creativity that AI cannot imitate.
The AI hype cycle may be cooling, but the opportunity has not. The challenge for 2026 is to build a marketing organization that stays smarter than its tools and more human than its data.
If you’re ready to modernize your marketing organization with the right mix of clarity, creativity and AI fluency, start a conversation with Noble Studios.
