My feed is awash with posts claiming that the marketing function and its team are being replaced by AI. I’m not convinced.
Particularly if you are leading a business with a market capitalisation somewhere between £50m and £500m. These businesses rarely suffer from having too many resources. Teams are lean. Budgets matter. Growth expectations remain high. Every investment ultimately needs to earn its keep.
That makes AI important, but not for the reason the loudest headlines suggest.
The wrong question is about headcount
“How many jobs can we remove?” is a cost question disguised as a transformation strategy. It may produce a saving. It does not automatically produce a better business.
The more valuable question is: how much more capable can we make the organisation?
Can AI help a five-person marketing team access some of the capability of a fifteen-person team? Can it improve customer insight, sharpen the proposition, accelerate research and create better sales intelligence? Can it remove repetitive execution so experienced marketers spend more time on the decisions that influence revenue, margin, customer value and investor confidence?
AI increases capacity. Leadership decides where that capacity creates value.
There is a value gap, not a tool gap
The evidence suggests businesses are not short of AI tools or ambition. They are short of the operating maturity required to turn them into value.
Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found that 70% of CMOs see becoming an AI leader as critical, but only 30% report mature or fully developed AI readiness. The average CMO is already allocating 15.3% of the marketing budget to AI. Investment is running ahead of the data, processes, governance and talent needed to scale it.
The sample was weighted towards companies with more than $1bn in annual revenue. That makes the finding more, not less, relevant to a mid-market leadership team: if much larger organisations are struggling to operationalise AI, buying another tool will not close the capability gap by itself.
McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI survey makes the distinction even clearer. Eighty per cent of respondents say AI has improved their individual productivity and 50% say it helps them make better decisions. Yet only 37% attribute any positive EBIT impact to AI and just 6% qualify as high performers, defined as reporting at least 5% EBIT impact and significant value.
People are getting faster. The enterprise is not always getting better.
Activity rises, but the commercial consequence remains unclear.
Capability rises where it can change growth, margin or customer outcomes.
For mid-market businesses, focus is the advantage
A £50m–£500m market capitalisation is not a neat proxy for revenue, budget or operating model. But it is a useful strategic lens. Businesses at this scale often have enough complexity to need real capability, without the specialist teams and capital available to a global enterprise.
They cannot win an AI arms race by buying the most technology. They can win by applying it with more focus.
That means starting with a commercial constraint rather than a list of possible use cases. Perhaps customer insight is too slow. The proposition is not landing. Sales teams lack useful intelligence. Marketing spends too much time producing and too little time learning. The answer should begin there.
This is where the leaders pull away. BCG’s 2025 research found only 5% of businesses were “future-built” for AI, while 60% reported little material value despite substantial investment. The future-built group achieved five times the revenue increases and three times the cost reductions of other companies. They were not simply automating old work. They were improving decisions, redesigning how work happened and reinvesting the gains.
What the executive team should ask
This is not a marketing technology discussion that the rest of the leadership team can delegate to the CMO. It is a business design and capital allocation discussion. Each executive should bring a different challenge.
Start with the strategic constraint, not the attraction of the technology.
A saving is not leverage until the business makes a deliberate choice about reinvestment.
More intelligence is useful only when it improves proposition, prioritisation, conversion or customer value.
If AI is added without removing low-value work, the function becomes busier rather than more capable.
Track revenue, margin, cycle time, retention, win rate or decision quality, not just volume of output.
The CMO role gets bigger, not smaller
If AI takes more execution off the marketing team’s desk, the expectation of marketing should rise.
PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer, based on close to a billion job advertisements and thousands of company reports, found that industries most exposed to AI achieved three times higher growth in revenue per employee than the least exposed. PwC is careful not to claim simple causation. The pattern still matters: the prize looks more like augmented capability than automatic workforce removal.
For marketing, that should mean less time policing campaigns and assembling dashboards. More time understanding customers, shaping propositions, aligning sales and marketing, challenging growth assumptions and influencing the commercial agenda.
Someone still has to decide where to apply the leverage. Someone has to connect customer truth to business strategy, decide what the brand can credibly own and align the organisation around the answer.
That makes an experienced CMO more important, not less.
The aim is not a smaller marketing function. It is a more consequential one.
Sources and further reading
- Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey. Survey of 401 CMOs and marketing leaders across North America, the UK and Europe.
- McKinsey, The State of AI: Global Survey 2026. Evidence on productivity, decision quality, EBIT impact and workflow redesign.
- Boston Consulting Group, The Widening AI Value Gap, 2025. Research on future-built businesses and material AI value.
- PwC, 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer. Analysis of job advertisements, skills and revenue per employee across AI-exposed industries.