June 2026 · Anthony Sogg

Nobody Got Fired for Blaming AI

Why AI literacy will decide which CMOs survive 2027.

Gartner put a number on something a lot of marketing leaders are feeling and not saying out loud. Sixty-five percent of CMOs expect AI to dramatically change their role in the next two years. Only 32% think their own skill set needs to change much to meet it (Gartner's words, not mine). Read that twice. The same people who see the wave coming believe they can ride it on the board they already own. And I think I have a humility problem...

The future isn't rosy either. Gartner's forecast is blunter still: by 2027, a lack of AI literacy will rank among the top three reasons a CMO gets replaced at a large enterprise. Not budget. Not pipeline. Literacy. (Where have I heard that before?)

And the floor is already moving under them. A Spencer Stuart survey reported by the Wall Street Journal in December found 36% of CMOs expect to cut headcount within 12 to 24 months through AI or redundancies, climbing to 47% at companies above $20 billion in revenue. At the biggest firms, 37% say their CEO and CFO want at least 20% of costs gone inside two years. Meanwhile the 2026 Gartner CMO Spend Survey has leaders pouring 15.3% of budget into AI while only 30% say they are ready to scale it. The money is moving faster than the competence.

Here's the big but, though. That's the cited cause, but it's not accurate.

The two deceptive issues

Primarily, workforce reductions because of AI are both a great example of begging the question and burying the lede. This AI-washing is an attempt by corporations to not raise alarm over margin protection, cost-cutting, and team restructuring, in some cases caused by surging resource demands during the pandemic.

The three-card monte here isn't doing much to endear leadership to their human intelligence. Worse still, there aren't many, if any, ROI wins to write home about correlated to workforce reductions. In fact, our friends at Gartner predict that 40% of agentic projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to high cost, unclear business value, and inadequate risk governance. Gulp.

Secondarily, we have a Pointy-Haired Boss issue. My Dilbert fans will understand, but effectively we have leaders who are overly confident, underprepared, and wielding dangerous power over the "AI-native future" of their offices.

Remember that 32% of self-aware CMOs? They'll be fine. It's the 68% that are going to have a not-so-fun time very soon. That's because this technological leap forward is changing decades of best practices over and over and over again.

A quick tangent. In the most recent issue of HBR, there were multiple articles about how change feels "harder than ever" to keep up with. Their solution? Make change a skill everyone has and embraces, to ride the waves of change at all times. This is ungovernable change. The article that followed? Building stakeholder trust amid unpredictability.

And? So? Therefore?

It's not enough to have a performative and limited understanding of what these technologies can do. The nitty-gritty, nerdy technical bits plus the butterfly effects are required reading. Literacy isn't enough.

Literacy, at a minimum, is understanding what an AI-enabled system is and is not capable of. 68% of those leaders aren't even there. They're still spouting vitriol about AI-ing all the things without understanding how one-dimensional and potentially dangerous that negligence can be.

At best, the opportunity cost is deriving a slightly incorrect insight. At worst, it's a bigger process roadblock, a PR nightmare, or severe delays in achieving success because the AI layer was set up without connected or clean data, or without a true problem to solve.

Being able to delve multiple dimensions deep, asking correlative questions and building strong hypotheses, are the skills CMOs and their teams need to master. That unlocks the true power of pattern recognition and improved CX. In other words, rewiring marketing workflows around agentic AI is not agent-additive. It's reformatting process so humans expand curiosity, smart question formation, and impactful judgment that an agentic system cannot ever hope to replicate.

Humility to the rescue

The 32% that will survive and win will do so by being the most human. Knowing when to confidently say "I don't know," "explain it to me," and "how does this impact everything up and down stream" will thrive. Those that claim to know... the writing is on the wall. I hope they're literate enough to read it.

Anthony

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