Where is your marketing org on its AI journey?
At Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo, marketing leaders plotted where their organizations are with AI today and where they expect to be in a year. Add yours and see how you compare.
Mark today in red and next year in green.
Move up as AI becomes more embedded across your marketing organization. Move right as your AI uses more of your brand, market, customer, and competitor context.
What marketing leaders showed us at Gartner
Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo brought together CMOs and senior marketing leaders with the biggest budgets and best teams in the industry. At Booth 429, most of them put their red dot in the same place as everyone else: lower and left of where they want to be.
Readiness doesn't track with size or seniority. The largest orgs often face the most friction, from legacy systems and compliance to the coordination cost of embedding anything new at scale. Scrappier teams sometimes move faster because they have less to protect.
Almost every green dot sits higher and to the right than its red one. The ambition is clear and consistent. The distance between the two is a human curve, not a technology one.
A board full of red dots isn't cause for anxiety. It's a picture of how much potential is still on the table.
Capability moves the dot. Context makes it stick.
Moving from generic tools to full context means people deciding what data matters, how agents should behave, what the brand stands for, and where judgment stays with a person. The orgs racing ahead without that scaffolding will move fast and pay for it later. The ones pairing AI capability with human context are the ones whose green dots will actually stick.
Start closing the distance“What the team has built with BlueOcean is a magical layer that puts us in the center of the story. We don’t have to guess. We can feel the story, because we’ve got enough signal”
Tim Hoppin, Global Head of Brand and Creative