AI Will Replace Marketing Jobs As CMO Budgets Stagnate, Says Gartner | AdExchanger

Monday, May 12th, 2025 – 6:30 am

It’s official: AI is coming for marketing jobs.

CMOs’ ad budgets are flat this year compared to last year, according to Gartner’s annual CMO Spend Survey. Fifty-nine percent of CMOs said they don’t have enough budget to execute their strategy this year. Overall, brand marketing budgets will average 7.7% of company revenue in 2025, the exact same percentage Gartner reported in last year’s survey.

As a result, CMOs are looking for efficiency wherever they can find it. They’re cutting headcount and scaling back their agency partnerships and mar tech investments while ramping up the use of generative AI and machine learning.

Among the 402 CMOs and brand marketing execs Gartner surveyed between February and March, 39% said they’re seeking to reduce labor costs this year as they look to do more with fewer resources.

Gartner also surveyed CMOs on the top five strategies they’re pursuing to boost marketing productivity, and AI was a top response. Forty percent are using AI to automate tasks like creative generation and ad ops, and 37% use AI agents or custom bidding algorithms to improve the efficiency of their ad spend. Just 1% of CMOs said AI isn’t a priority.

Meanwhile, 22% said generative AI makes them less dependent on ad agencies for creative and strategy.

Cutting costs with AI

Taking those numbers together, it’s fair to say that AI is indeed replacing human marketing jobs, said Ewan McIntyre, Chief of Research and VP at Gartner for Marketers, who led the CMO Spend Survey.

Many CMOs are using AI as a “pure cost play,” McIntyre said, an approach he advised against. “We have to not get carried away by the sense that AI can let you cut out a whole bunch of people in your workforce.”

But at the same time, marketers are under pressure to use AI for cost savings. “There’s a push from the CEO down to transform operations” in ways that will actually yield cost reductions, he said, and CEOs are “very hot on AI’s transformative power.”

Because AI improves human productivity, McIntyre said, the increased use of AI by marketers “inevitably does mean that we may need less people to do some things.”

In other words, don’t expect CMOs to be doing much hiring this year.

Cutting tech, protecting ad spend

Cost-cutting will also impact marketing technology investments.

Among the Gartner survey respondents, 33% said shifting resources from low-ROI to high-ROI activities will be a top five strategy for boosting productivity this year. Which means cutting investments in mar tech that don’t have a demonstrable impact on the brand’s bottom line, McIntyre said.

During past periods of economic uncertainty, like during the COVID pandemic, CMOs devoted a larger part of their budgets to mar tech while pulling back on ad spend, McIntyre said. The belief was that technology would accelerate brands out of the challenges they were facing, he said.

Heading into this year, however, marketers seem more protective of their ad spend to maintain their share of voice, he said.

Within the 7.7% of revenue that makes up the average brand’s marketing budget, CMOs are devoting 2.4% to ad spend, he said. That’s up from 2.1% devoted to ad spend last year, when marketing budgets also represented 7.7% of revenue on average.

“That 0.3% masks millions of dollars for the average respondent to our survey,” considering the median revenue for respondents was about $6 billion, McIntyre said. “So it’s a pretty good time for ad spend.”

In the past, “no CMO was going to get fired for spending more money on technology,” he said. “But there is now a sense that tech has to deliver ROI, and that there’s bloat and redundancy in the tech stack.”

That’s not to suggest that marketers have fallen out of love with tech, he added. They’re still looking to AI for efficiency gains. And 41% of CMOs told Gartner they consider using data, analytics and measurement to optimize campaigns to be a top five productivity strategy this year – the highest percentage for any strategy.

Doing more with less, irrespective of tariffs

But what’s the reason ad budgets are looking flat this year anyway? The Trump administration’s expansive tariff policy comes to mind.

However, McIntyre said, the budgets reflected in the Gartner survey were mostly set toward the end of 2024. While brands had baked impacts from Trump’s tariffs into those projections, the survey was taken before the administration announced the full scope of its proposed tariffs in April and before President Trump made several changes to that announced policy, stoking greater uncertainty.

So the results of the survey suggest a much more complicated picture than tariffs causing a pullback in CMO budgets.

In fact, McIntyre said there’s been an ongoing trend to scale back on marketing expenditures.

Marketing costs haven’t been spared from inflation, he said. CPMs are going up, search and cost-per-click strategies are more expensive and marketers who apply more data layers to target and measure see their fees rise, too.

However, McIntyre added that there’s every reason to expect the tariff situation will put more downward pressure on brands’ 2025 budgets than is reflected in this survey.

For example, a quarter of respondents expect to spend at least 10% of revenue on marketing this year. Which “feels like a precarious place to be” given the uncertainty in the economy, he said.

Plus, survey respondents in verticals that could be at risk from supply chain disruptions and continued policy changes – namely, CPG, manufacturing and pharma – saw their average marketing budgets jump from 6.7% of revenue in 2024 to 9.7% in 2025. But they set those budgets last year when they were expecting consumer confidence to remain high, McIntyre said. Consumer confidence is now trending in the wrong direction.

“The ongoing challenge when it comes to budgets and geopolitics,” he added, “is do we get to keep hold of that 7.7%?”