Gartner has released survey findings showing that 65% of chief marketing officers believe advances in AI will dramatically change their role within the next two years.

The number is striking less for its size than for its direction. Two years is a short planning horizon for a C-suite role that many companies have spent the past decade defining around brand stewardship, campaign management and agency oversight. If nearly two-thirds of marketing leaders expect their job description to change fundamentally by 2027, that expectation will shape hiring, budgets and organizational structure now — not later.

What the survey says

The headline figure is straightforward: 65% of surveyed CMOs told Gartner that AI advances will dramatically change their role in the next two years. Gartner did not frame this as incremental adoption of another marketing technology. The word "dramatically" carries weight, and the two-year window puts the expected shift squarely inside current budget cycles.

For context, enterprise technology shifts rarely register this kind of consensus among senior executives. When a supermajority of a C-suite population agrees that their own role — not just their tooling — will transform, that signals expectations have moved past experimentation and into planning.

Why CMOs see it this way

Marketing has been an early target for generative AI deployment, and the reasons are structural. Content production, personalization, segmentation and media buying are all high-volume, pattern-heavy activities where machine assistance cuts cost and time. That puts marketing closer to the blast radius of AI-driven workflow change than functions such as legal or facilities.

The CMO role itself sits at the intersection of creative direction, data analytics and revenue accountability. AI compresses the production side of that equation while raising the stakes on the analytical side. A marketing chief who once supervised agencies and approved campaigns increasingly supervises model outputs, data pipelines and automated customer journeys.

Whether that constitutes a "dramatic" change or a continuation of the shift toward data-driven marketing that began with digital advertising is a fair question. CMOs have been told for a decade that their role was being transformed. What differs now is the speed and the breadth of the technology involved.

What it means for budgets and teams

A 65% expectation figure has practical consequences. Marketing leaders who expect their role to change dramatically tend to act on that expectation: they retrain teams, restructure agencies, renegotiate vendor contracts and shift budget lines toward AI-enabled capabilities.

Vendors in the marketing technology sector will read the survey the same way. Expect more AI features positioned at the CMO level rather than at the practitioner level, and more enterprise agreements that bundle AI capabilities into existing martech stacks.

The skeptical read

Survey expectations are not outcomes. Executives routinely overestimate the pace of technological change in two-year forecasts — and underestimating organizational friction is a chronic error in technology planning. A CMO can expect dramatic change and still face the same integration costs, data quality problems and change-management resistance that slowed previous waves of marketing technology.

There is also a definitional question. "Dramatically change their role" can mean anything from adopting new tools to a full redefinition of the position. Without finer granularity in the responses, the 65% figure measures sentiment more than it measures a concrete transformation plan.

Bottom line

The Gartner survey captures a real shift in how marketing leadership views AI: not as another tool in the stack, but as a force that will reshape the job itself within a current planning cycle. Two-thirds consensus on that point among CMOs is a signal worth watching — for martech vendors, for agencies, and for anyone who reports to or hires a chief marketing officer.

The test will come in the budget data. If the expectation is genuine, marketing spend on AI capabilities, data infrastructure and retraining should rise visibly over the next several quarters. If it does not, the 65% figure will look like another round of AI enthusiasm outrunning execution.