CMO AI Leverage Report (Open Future Forum) — marketing AI value and adoption

Summary:

This report from Open Future Forum, an executive community founded by Murray Newlands that sells forum memberships and runs events for business leaders, focuses on how marketing teams use AI and where they say it creates value. It asks whether marketing’s AI case rests on faster content, more team capacity, better customer knowledge, or a mix. The goal is to help CMOs build a measurement framework.

The data comes from questions asked at Open Future Forum marketing and go-to-market events, not from a CMO-only survey. The stage question has 230 respondents from one event. A separate multi-select impact question has 218 respondents from two other events. Responses were deduplicated by email, keeping the latest answer. Open-text answers from three events were read informally and not turned into numbers. Data was collected through September 30, 2026.

Key findings:
• 81% of respondents are past exploration: 36% are building agentic AI products, 26% are piloting agents and 20% run agents in production across the business. 19% are still exploring.
• AI’s value is split almost evenly: 46% say it does the work of more people, 45% say it creates content faster and 43% say it helps them know the customer better.
• 11% report nothing measurable yet.
• Because the top three benefits sit within 3 points of each other, the report argues there is no single metric for marketing AI and recommends three separate scorecards: capacity, content performance and customer or commercial lift.
• Founders and CEOs lean toward building products (49%) and faster content (48%), while other respondents lean toward piloting (32%) and customer knowledge (48%).

Margin notes:
This is an industry survey from a publisher that sells executive memberships, and the report itself promotes its CMO forum. Respondents are event attendees, not all CMOs, and job roles were inferred from titles by keyword rules; the technology subgroup has only 15 and 13 respondents, so it is directional only. The stage and impact results come from different, overlapping groups and should not be combined. Impact numbers are self-reported perceptions from a multi-select question, so shares overlap and are not audited business results.