Between January and March, Gartner asked 401 CMOs, most at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, where their money was going. In the 2026 CMO Spend Survey, they reported putting an average of 15.3% of their marketing budget into AI. Seventy percent called becoming an AI leader a critical goal for the year.
Only 30% said their organization was ready to scale what it had bought.
The money did not come from growth. Marketing budgets rose from 7.7% of company revenue in 2025 to 7.8% in 2026, and 56% of CMOs said they lacked the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy. Every dollar moved into AI came out of some other line.
Gartner did find one group pulling ahead. The marketing teams it rated AI-ready put 21.3% of their budgets into AI, and their overall budgets ran higher too, at 8.9% of revenue. Readiness, in other words, is starting to earn budget.
The leaders below sit inside that gap. Some run marketing for a $1.2 billion IT services firm. Others market an AI receptionist to plumbers, or a stablecoin to parishes. As 2027 approaches, here are 10 marketing leaders to watch.
Beatriz Gomez is CMO of Ontop, which started as a platform to hire and pay international teams.
Today it positions itself as financial infrastructure for the global workforce: one platform that connects companies hiring talent abroad with the workers who receive, spend, and grow that income.
She spent eight years at BNP Paribas before moving into startups, and she knows the bank side of a cross-border payment as well as the founder side.
Robert Tubridy, VP of Marketing at ADvendio: Robert is the VP of Marketing at ADvendio, the leading Salesforce-powered omnichannel advertising management platform.
His leadership is central to the company’s evolution into an Agentic Revenue OS, advancing solutions for major publishers, advertisers, and retail media networks by deploying specialized AI agents to automate the ad lifecycle.
ADvendio’s global growth is rooted in a unique combination of industry specialization and intelligence built on decades of deep expertise.
Tanaya Misra is Global Head of PR and Communications at Ness Digital Engineering. With 17 years of experience across communications, content, and brand building, she helps organizations shape narratives that build reputation, influence perception, and drive business impact.
Ness serves customers from 11 innovation hubs across the US, Eastern Europe and India. Misra’s work is to keep a single story running across all of them as the firm repositions around AI-driven engineering.
Anoob PT is Head of Content at Prezent Vivo, the Los Altos AI communication company valued at $400 million after its 2025 round.
He brings over a decade of years in marketing and content at SocialPilot, Writesonic, BigBasket, FreshMenu, Gupshup and SimplyHired.
His work this year has followed the company’s advancements, from new versions launched to the board appointments behind Prezent Vivo.
Aaditya Mandloi, Head of Content at StarApps Studio: Aaditya is a content and marketing strategist who has spent more than eight years helping B2B brands turn content into a source of pipeline.
His work runs from strategy and answer engine optimization (AEO) to product copy, brand voice, conversion flows and sales collateral.
The common thread is whatever a buyer needs to read before trusting a company enough to talk to sales.
Maya Mason, Interim CMO at Altorney: Few marketing leaders understand the hardest sell in technology better than Mason. Over more than two decades in the B2B tech sector, the Herzliya-based executive has built a career marketing products that are meant to work invisibly in the background: fintech infrastructure, payments, enterprise SaaS and legal technology.
Today she is the fractional CMO at Altorney, which was founded in late 2021 by brothers Shimmy and Rachi Messing, two e-discovery veterans who started together at Merrill Corporation in the early 2000s. One of its two main products, MARC, runs AI document review inside a client’s own firewall. The name carries a family story: it honors their late father, Marc Messing, an attorney, rabbi and educator who passed away in 2021. Legal buyers rarely forgive a vendor that oversells AI. Altorney’s message has been explainability, showing lawyers why a document matters as well as that it does.
Shelby Bolinger leads marketing at Cloverleaf, an AI coaching platform built on behavioral assessments such as DISC and Enneagram. She has more than a decade in HR tech and B2B SaaS, including time at Built In.
Cloverleaf is an AI coaching platform for managers and teams. It combines results from more than 13 behavioral assessments into a single profile of each person, then flags how colleagues are likely to work together, where friction may arise and how to resolve it.
The coaching arrives inside the tools people already use, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, email and AI assistants, and covers everything from daily tips to rehearsing difficult conversations.
Eddie Cullen co-founded Crescite Innovation Corporation with Karl Kilb III, Bloomberg LP’s first general counsel. Cullen, a former New York City mayoral candidate who once directed Fordham University’s incubator, markets it parish by parish and school by school.
His view is that anyone building a financial product should judge it by who it serves as well as by what it returns.
Alfredo Salkeld co-founded Upfirst, a Miami-based company providing an AI receptionist to small businesses. Before that he led marketing at SimpleTexting, which grew past 17,000 customers and was acquired by Sinch. He markets with Upfirst’s own call data. The company says 23.9% of the calls its software answers come outside business hours, and that more than half of its customers have taken at least one call in a language other than English.
Those figures do more for a home inspector on a roof than any brand campaign could. Gartner’s 30% figure is the number to watch next spring. If more marketing teams reach readiness in the 2027 survey, it will likely be because people like these figured out what AI should say to a CFO, a parish priest or a plumber, and what it shouldn’t.
