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Marketing capabilities — the complex bundles of skills, processes, and organizational know-how that enable companies to implement customer-related activities and adapt to marketplace changes — are rated by marketing professionals as important to business success. At the same time, artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of content creation, customer targeting, and performance measurement. Responsibilities such as managing generative engine optimization (GEO) are emerging as vital online capabilities that did not exist even two years ago.
Eighteen years ago, one of us (Christine) launched The CMO Survey, polling marketing executives about the state of the industry and their organizations. In January 2026, we conducted the 35th edition of the survey, which received 308 responses from marketing leaders at for-profit U.S. companies. The results are troubling.
It’s our assessment that two critical things are happening right now. The first is that the requirements of effective marketing are shifting faster than at any point in The CMO Survey’s history, led by the need to figure out where and how to incorporate AI capabilities. The second is that the state of the marketing profession is not ready for this moment. Instead, marketing teams are systematically undermining their own ability to build the capabilities important to their success.
This is not a minor inconsistency. We see a pattern — visible across budgets, hiring, organizational behavior, and strategic priorities — that raises fundamental questions about how companies today are making decisions about investing in marketing capabilities. Our prediction is that this soft commitment to what we believe is critical marketing know-how will cost organizations competitively if it is allowed to continue as it is today.
Underinvestment Looms Large
Nearly 60% of marketing leaders reported that their primary approach to building marketing capabilities is through internal training and hiring rather than via external partnerships or acquiring other companies. This preference hasn’t changed since we last asked about it in 2020, despite six years of dramatic shifts in what successful marketing requires. And despite this reliance on internal resources — and surveyed leaders’ belief that marketing capabilities are important to business success — getting financial support for capability building remains a challenge.
In particular, when we look at what companies are actually doing to support that stated commitment to training and hiring, the details tell a story of underinvestment. Training and development budgets have declined steadily for years and now stand at just 3.8% of marketing spend — down from a pre-pandemic high of 5.8% in 2019. Marketing head count growth has dropped sharply, falling more than 50% from last year’s rate. And when asked what capability is most lacking in their organizations, the most common response from marketing leaders was not a skill deficit but inadequate resources: not enough people, time, or budget to make existing capabilities function effectively.
Strategic intent and resource allocation point in opposite directions. Companies say that they build their capabilities through people, but they are systematically reducing or slowing their investment in those same people. We call this disconnect the marketing capability paradox.
A closer look at agility and skills investment illustrates this contradiction. Seventy-one percent of marketing leaders in our survey said that agility is key to their organization’s success. Marketers reported performing reasonably well at this, able to quickly revise priorities and shift resources in response to change. But at the same time, they reported that their weakest-rated activity across all agility dimensions is “building the capabilities that facilitate agile marketing actions.”
Companies see themselves as good at reacting to change, but they are weaker at building the organizational foundation that would make those reactions less costly and more effective. This distinction — between responding to the present and investing in the future — is a troubling signal that runs through every dimension of how marketing capabilities are managed in organizations.
Seven Barriers to Capability Building
Cuts in training and declines in head count are the most visible symptoms of this paradox, but other data hints at larger structural challenges. From our survey results, we identified seven interconnected forces that are working against capability development. Understanding them together reveals why this problem is so resistant to easy solutions.
There is a serious gap between the adoption of technology and marketing teams’ preparedness for using it. Technology adoption is outrunning organizational readiness. Companies are investing in technology faster than they are building the human capacity to effectively use it, which means each new tool widens the capability deficit rather than closing it. One survey respondent succinctly described their biggest barrier to maximizing the impact of marketing technology as “attracting the right talent, retaining them, and keeping them up to speed on changes happening.”
Asked to rate elements of their marketing technology activity on a 7-point performance scale (where 1 is going “poorly” and 7 is doing “very well”), survey respondents didn’t give even one activity a score above 5. Performance levels have not improved over the past two years, even as marketing departments have scaled up their deployment of AI tools. The two lowest-rated activities — hiring employees to manage marketing technologies (3.7) and training employees on emerging marketing technologies (3.9) — are the very ingredients needed to close the gap between deployment and effective use of technology.
This is not a minor issue. AI use in marketing activities has nearly doubled since 2024, from 13.1% to 24.2% today. Respondents projected that AI will account for more than 50% of all marketing activities within three years as it increasingly delivers measurable improvements in sales productivity, customer satisfaction, and marketing overhead costs. Gains from AI are rising year over year, but the people power to keep pace is not.
Too many marketers have a structural orientation toward the present. Every year since 2019, marketers have reported in our surveys that they devote roughly 68% of their time to managing the present and 32% to preparing for the future. This ratio has held constant across the COVID-19 years, the digital transformation era, and now the AI revolution. This tells us that the ratio is not a situational response to any particular economic pressure but a structural orientation that is remarkably resistant to change.
But capability building is inherently a future-oriented investment. It requires sustained attention, a multiyear commitment, and a willingness to accept near-term costs for long-run returns. In an environment where organizations have consistently prioritized the present over the future for the past seven years, that kind of investment cannot take root. As one respondent noted, “There is little time for future thinking. We have a strategy, but our actions are tactical and short term, making it difficult to prove effectiveness.”
Current economic pressures are intensifying a co
