EMEA CMOs bet big on AI amid budget uncertainty

Facing another year of budget pressure, European CMOs are betting that AI is their golden ticket to doing more — and doing it better — for less.

A recent Serviceplan Group survey of more than 800 senior marketers across EMEA shows just how fast sentiment is shifting: 67% expect AI to be the defining marketing topic in 2026, up sharply from 48% in 2025 and 32% in 2024.

Yet those same marketers remain split on whether budgets will rise, fall or stay the same, as this year’s economic headwinds persist.

With budgets in flux, EMEA CMOs are moving fast to embed AI deeper into core operations, chasing increased efficiency and cost savings. “This is what really is concerning CMOs, that they need to bring AI to life and show that it’s efficient, that it can work,” said Julia Zimmermann, executive partner at Future Marketing, part of Serviceplan Group.

The mandate for 2026 is clear: Move on from experimentation into integrations at scale and make AI the backbone of modern advertising.

With today’s AI tools explicitly designed for ease of use, “the biggest challenge is not technology,” noted Jacqueline Casini, senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications at Rolls-Royce Power Systems AG.

“It’s giving people the time and structure to learn together, to build the confidence needed to move from ‘playing with AI’ to systematically integrating it into marketing and communications.”

AI in the real world

While only 17% of EMEA CMOs ranked brand-building as next year’s defining topic, it still appeared alongside return on investment (ROI), data-driven marketing and customer experience as a critical focus. It’s not that AI is replacing these fundamentals — marketers want AI to amplify them.

“The challenge is in operationalizing AI at scale,” said Namrata Balwani, CMO at TPConnects Technologies.

The experimentation phase of AI brought Rolls-Royce improvements in research, social listening, content creation, data-driven marketing, communications planning and reporting. But “the biggest impact will come from integration, not experimentation,” Casini said.

Casini pointed to three areas where the ambition and potential impact will most benefit a global, diversified organization like Rolls-Royce:

1. Decision intelligence: “AI will help us understand markets, customer behavior and message effectiveness with a level of granularity we’ve never had before — and in real time. For a company that serves such diverse industries, this will profoundly reshape how we plan, prioritize and allocate resources across the globe.”

2. Personalization at scale: “AI will enable us to tailor content, stories and touchpoints far more precisely. Not only to regions or sectors, but to specific buying roles, business needs and intent signals within each of our application markets.”

3. Smarter campaign steering: “The most transformative shift will be how we design, run and optimize campaigns. With better analytics, predictive modeling and AI-supported insight work, we’ll be able to launch faster, adjust earlier and measure impact more accurately across the entire funnel.”

At TPConnects Technologies, Balwani’s marketers are already using AI in content generation, analytics and automation. That’s resulted in a growing share of inbound leads coming from AI-driven channels, she said. Predictive analytics help identify high-intent segments to improve attribution models for better understanding of customer acquisition costs, channel performance and sales velocity.

“We’re trying to automate the operational load, so the team can focus on creativity, customer insight and strategic storytelling,” Balwani said.

Justifying AI investment

Budget uncertainty aside, few CMOs are struggling to justify bigger bets on AI.

“We can justify AI investment in three ways. AI reduces waste: better targeting, cleaner data, smarter content production. AI improves revenue visibility: more accurate forecasting, attribution and pipeline metrics. And AI protects speed,” Balwani said.

“When you can show that AI shortens cycles, improves CAC/LTV [customer acquisition costs to lifetime value] ratios and strengthens conversion quality, the conversation becomes about efficiency, not experimentation,” Balwani added.

For CMOs, the year’s earlier conversations asking “Why AI?” have shifted to “How fast can we scale it?”

“I personally stand clearly on the side of strategic investment — especially when it comes to AI,” Casini said. “I see it as an investment in capability, speed and resilience. And in an uncertain economic climate, that’s exactly what you need.”