Marketing technology (“martech”) has moved from a supporting role to center stage in the past year, fundamentally reshaping what chief marketing officers (CMOs) do day to day. From retail aisles to bank boardrooms, 2025 proved that CMOs across industries must leverage data, automation, and AI-driven insights to stay competitive. Martech now consumes nearly a third of marketing budgets on average, and 75% of CMOs plan to boost these investments further to fund AI, automation, and data tools. This surge comes even as overall marketing spend remains flat at about 7.7% of company revenue – a level many CMOs still find insufficient to meet growth targets. The mandate is clear: do more with less, and do it smarter.
“AI won’t replace marketers, it will replace those who ignore AI,” says Rahul Das, CMO of HubSpot India. His blunt warning reflects a prevailing sentiment in the industry. Over the past year, martech adoption has accelerated as marketing leaders embrace artificial intelligence not as a buzzword, but as a practical tool for better results. In one survey, more than 75% of CMOs reported using AI in digital marketing to boost ROI, enhance personalization, and streamline campaigns. In India especially, executives have near-universal buy-in – 99% of Indian business leaders now view generative AI as vital to success. Across sectors like consumer goods, finance, and tech, CMOs are betting big that martech can make their teams faster, more efficient, and more customer-centric.
Doing More with Less: Martech Amid Budget Pressures
If 2024 was defined by budget caution, 2025 was the year CMOs doubled down on martech to square the circle of flat budgets and high growth expectations. A Gartner survey revealed marketing budgets held steady at about 7.7% of revenue in 2025, unchanged from the prior year. Over half of CMOs still say this isn’t enough to execute their strategies. In response, marketing leaders turned to technology for productivity gains. Generative AI emerged as a force multiplier, delivering tangible returns in speed and cost-efficiency. Nearly half of CMOs reported time savings from GenAI initiatives, 40% saw improved cost efficiency, and over a quarter noted greater content output capacity. Tellingly, only 1% of CMOs said AI wasn’t a priority, a sign that virtually everyone now sees it as essential.
With paid media eating up roughly 30% of marketing budgets, many CMOs sought to free funds elsewhere by automating tasks and reducing external spend. About 39% plan to cut agency costs, in part because 22% found that generative AI tools let them handle more creative and strategy work in-house. Similarly, four in ten CMOs aim to streamline their own teams to eliminate inefficiencies. The savings are being reallocated into technology: martech and data capabilities now claim 31.4% of the total marketing budget on average. That slice is poised to grow – three in four CMOs globally expect to increase martech spend going into 2026, prioritizing AI, automation and data activation tools. In other words, even with wallets tight, CMOs are investing in the tech that helps them “do more with less”.
Personalization at Scale Across Industries
Martech’s most visible impact for CMOs has been the ability to personalize customer engagement at a scale and granularity impossible a few years ago. Data-driven personalization is now a strategic asset: 75% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy from brands that deliver tailored content. In turn, brands that excel at personalization are seeing outsized rewards – they’re 48% more likely to exceed revenue goals than peers. Over the past year, companies in retail and FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) demonstrated how AI-powered personalization can drive growth. In India, Mondelez’s Cadbury brand worked with WPP to launch an AI-driven Diwali campaign, customizing 130,000 unique ads featuring Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan promoting local stores. The campaign turned a national celebrity endorsement into thousands of personalized neighborhood messages, an effort that earned global accolades and reportedly boosted sales for small businesses.
In e-commerce and retail, recommendation engines and predictive analytics have become mainstream marketing tools. Fashion and grocery retailers now use AI to predict trends and individualize offers in real time, increasing conversion and basket sizes. One striking example comes from the footwear retailer Bata, which deployed AI-based video analytics in stores to track shoppers’ emotional responses. Those insights helped Bata optimize in-store product placements, leading to smarter inventory allocation and better conversion rates. FMCG giants are also capitalizing on martech for one-to-one engagement. Unilever, for instance, has experimented with AI-driven regional campaigns – a recent effort in India used local language sentiment analysis to boost engagement by 40% through culturally tailored content. These cases underscore how CMOs in consumer-facing sectors are harnessing martech to deliver “hyper-personalized” experiences at scale, turning customer data into more relevant messaging across channels.
Even in traditionally conservative sectors like banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), personalization and data-driven targeting have taken hold. Marketing chiefs at banks are using AI models to segment customers and personalize product recommendations – say, pre-approved loan offers or financial tips – based on an individual’s behavior and life stage. One leading Indian insurer’s CMO shared that generative AI now enables them to send personalized video messages to individual policyholders, something that would never be feasible through manual effort. The result is more meaningful, customized touchpoints that improve customer satisfaction and retention. Across industries, this push toward personalization is elevating the CMO’s role from mass-market storyteller to curator of individual customer journeys – a shift made possible only by modern martech platforms.
Automation and AI Boosting Marketing Efficiency
Beyond personalization, CMOs are seizing on martech’s power to automate campaigns, crunch data, and optimize decisions at lightning speed. Marketing automation and AI analytics have become standard parts of the toolkit, allowing leaner teams to punch above their weight. A global study in 2025 found the average enterprise marketing department now runs 62 different tools in its martech stack – from CRM and email automation to social listening, ad bidding, and analytics dashboards. Juggling such a vast array of software might sound unwieldy, but marketers are learning to integrate best-of-breed solutions: 86% of CMOs now prefer a composable “stack” approach, selecting specialized apps that can be stitched together for agility and precision rather than relying on one monolithic suite. The modern CMO effectively acts as a systems integrator, orchestrating various platforms (often with the help of marketing ops teams) to create a unified engine for campaigns and customer outreach.
The payoff is a dramatic increase in speed and responsiveness. Routine tasks – from audience segmentation to A/B testing ads – are increasingly handled by AI agents that work 24/7. In India, marketing teams report that AI already powers up to 40% of their daily work on average, taking over labor-intensive chores like crunching campaign metrics, generating content variations, and monitoring social trends. This allows human marketers to focus on strategy and creativity. Take the example of Swiggy, a food-tech company, which used AI algorithms to automatically optimize its ad creative and spending in real time. The system served highly personalized push notifications and dynamic promotional offers to users, which significantly boosted customer retention for the platform. Cases like this illustrate how CMOs are leveraging automation not just to save time, but to actually improve marketing outcomes by reacting faster than any manual process could.
AI tools are also delivering insights that inform smarter decisions. Advanced analytics can predict customer churn, calculate the true ROI of each campaign, or even forecast which product a specific customer is likely to want next. These capabilities have made marketing more of a science. Over 70% of CMOs say AI “agents” – autonomous programs that can analyze and act on data – will fundamentally reshape marketing in the near future, and many are already experimenting with such agents for things like media buying and lead nurturing. Some forward-leaning CMOs even anticipate that within two years, AI-driven automation could handle up to half of all marketing execution tasks currently done by people. While that estimate may be bold, it speaks to the dramatic efficiency gains martech is bringing. In practice, what it means is that the marketing department of 2026 might accomplish with a dozen people what used to require fifty, by heavily augmenting human teams with AI co-workers.
CMO 2.0 – From Brand Storyteller to Data-Driven Orchestrator
As martech transforms marketing operations, it is also elevating the role of the CMO into something more cross-functional and strategic. In the AI-powered era, CMOs are increasingly expected to be chief architects of growth, fluent in technology and data while still guiding creative brand vision. “A CMO partnering with a Chief AI Officer can bridge the gap between the technical aspects of AI and the human touch required in marketing,” observes Nalin Jain, CMO of Godrej Capital. This sentiment, shared by many modern marketing heads, highlights how the job now entails marrying cutting-edge tech with timeless customer insight. CMOs today find themselves collaborating more closely with CIOs, CTOs and data scientists as marketing and IT strategies converge. In fact, less than 40% of CMOs currently control their own martech budgets outright, as tech spending becomes a shared endeavor with IT. In response, top companies are breaking down silos – some have even created joint CMO-CTO task forces or “centers of excellence” to ensure marketing goals align with the IT roadmap.
The new CMO playbook requires a blend of skills. Marketing leaders still need creative and brand-building acumen, but they must also be comfortable evaluating AI platforms, interpreting machine-learning outputs, and managing tech-enabled teams. Geetanjali Chugh Kothari, CMO of Future Generali India Life Insurance, describes her job now as being the “orchestrator” of a human–machine marketing effort, ensuring that AI capabilities are aligned with business goals to enhance campaign precision. “The CMO acts as the orchestrator of this collaborative effort,” Kothari explains, making sure that “AI initiatives align with broader business objectives and effectively harness the expertise of diverse teams.” In practical terms, this means CMOs are instituting AI training for their staff, reorganizing teams to include data and tech specialists, and infusing analytics into every decision. A Boston Consulting Group analysis noted that AI is “repositioning the CMO as a chief growth architect” who co-owns areas like technology adoption and data strategy. In 2025, more than ever, the CMO’s remit extends well beyond communications – it touches product innovation, customer experience, and enterprise strategy, all through the lens of data and technology.
Despite the learning curve, most marketing leaders appear optimistic about martech’s impact on their effectiveness. In one global survey, 91% of marketers said AI has boosted their efficiency, and 93% agreed it helps them organize work better – but critically, those benefits are greatest when CMOs and tech teams work in tandem towards shared goals. The success stories of the past year bear this out. When CMOs embrace analytics and AI, and CTOs or CIOs embrace customer-centric thinking, companies unlock new value. For example, Indian banks using AI-driven credit models found marketing and IT had to jointly refine these tools – marketing ensured the models made customer-friendly offers, while IT maintained the data integrity and algorithms. Such collaborations have blurred the line between traditional CMO and CTO territories, giving rise to what many call the “AI-first CMO”. This tech-savvy CMO is as comfortable discussing data pipelines and cloud infrastructure as they are reviewing an ad storyboard.
From personalization to automation, martech is dramatically improving the CMO’s ability to drive growth. Marketing chiefs in 2025 are achieving levels of efficiency and effectiveness that redefine what a marketing team can do. Campaigns are more targeted and measurable, mundane tasks are automated, and marketing strategy is informed by richer insights than ever before. Perhaps most importantly, martech is freeing CMOs to focus on higher-order strategy – designing seamless customer experiences and steering business growth – rather than getting bogged down in manual campaign management. As one CMO put it, the goal now is to “move from big ideas to a big loop of continuous optimization”, where data and AI help refine marketing tactics in near real-time. In the year ahead, the CMOs who thrive will be those who master this loop, balancing human creativity with machine intelligence. Across retail, BFSI, FMCG, tech and beyond, the message is the same: the CMO’s job description is being rewritten by martech, and the next generation of marketing leaders will be defined by how well they wield these new digital tools.
Disclaimer: All data points and statistics are attributed to published research studies and verified market research. All quotes are either sourced directly or attributed to public statements.
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