Marketers strain to juggle media budgets, AI and high expectations from CEOs

Ewan McIntyre, vp analyst and chief of research at Gartner, said that single figure percentage budgets were “the new normal” for advertisers following the end of the pandemic-era spending boom.

Within that share of revenue, marketers are on average allocating 15.3% to AI initiatives, the survey found. Brands across the globe now use generative AI for initiatives spanning chatbots, virtual focus groups, automated creative production, media measurement as well as agentic media planning and buying tools.

Mountainwear brand Mammut, for example, built its latest brand campaign around the tech. It’s using a Gemini-powered chatbot to to respond to negative comments made on YouTube and X and encourage users to head out into the hills (and perhaps collect the necessary boots or fleece from the brand along the way).

Mammut CMO Nic Brandenberger told Digiday the company had focused on scaling AI initiatives where they could have an impact close to the point of purchase, including AI generated product imagery for items with lots of different color variants. 

Mammut is hardly the only advertiser leaning into AI across its marketing operation. TripAdvisor, for example, now handles 40% of its customer support inquiries through AI chatbots.

“AI is now a critical part of our infrastructure, increasing the speed at which teams can build, test, and deploy,” said Matt Goldberg, president and CEO of TripAdvisor, speaking during its recent earnings call.

Isabel Perry, global svp of strategy at Dept, the agency behind Mammut’s campaign, said that companies now look to the technology to solve a broad range of issues. “On paper the budget might be 15% related to AI [but] in reality most major problems are either influenced, solved, enabled or sharpened with AI in mind,” she said in an email.

Gartner’s research backs that up; 80% of CEOs expect AI to provide a “significant degree of change.” But not all marketers believe they can meet that expectation. While 70% said that “AI leadership” was a critical goal this year, more than half (56%) of CMOs surveyed said their team lacked the budget required to meet annual objectives, and 56% said that their budgets would be cut if they missed their goals.

The difficulty of scaling up initiatives beyond the prototype stage is a likely pinch point. “Only 5% of businesses have really scaled and made an impact with AI. The rest have been stuck in pilotitis,” said Perry, referring to a widely cited MIT study published in 2025.

Lauren Chester, director of technology at Dept UK, said companies needed to find ways to break down organizational divides in order to realise the potential of the tech.

“Adoption requires close alignment across stakeholders, particularly around tooling, legal considerations, and brand governance,” she said.

Brandenberger suggested focusing on applying early lessons as projects grew. “We’ve been working early on with specialized partners to generate learnings as the tech evolves, not waiting until it covers all the needs we have,” he said.

Per Gartner’s survey, organizations leaning heavier into AI are also spending more on marketing. Organizations that allocated over 20% of their marketing budgets to AI also spend 8.9% of revenue on marketing, on average.

That could be a sign that bigger media and marketing spenders are more comfortable also investing in emerging tech, said Mike Baranowski, vp of data engineering and analytics at indie media agency Collective Measures. “Those that are more open to AI are probably more sophisticated and/or more willing to take risks,” he said.

Gartner’s McIntyre suggested the data showed marketers using the technology to drive growth were being entrusted with more resources in turn. “It may well be that they are more effective at driving growth, so they are rewarded with larger budgets,” he said.