Almost a year ago, I recommended to CMOs that they “hire an economist or chief economist» to address a perfect storm of challenges including changing consumer behavior, rapid technological advancements and economic uncertainty.
Earlier this month, nearly 200 economists and technology leaders signed a letter to policymakers warning that AI “could lead to risks, including large-scale job losses.” Crucially, the letter calls on policymakers to do more to understand and respond to potential disruption from artificial intelligence.
Very few CMOs have hired an economist or chief economist. And I’m skeptical that policymakers can act as quickly as artificial intelligence, which is transforming the economy faster than any previous technology. So, as most managers, directors and executives plan their 2027 marketing budgets sometime after Labor Day, they may want to remember what poet June Jordan wrote in 1978: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” What should they do?
They should start by using an audience research tool to find out who their target customers are, what they do, and why they do it.
Then they should create a prompt like this:
“Based on original reporting, research, data analysis, or assessments from authoritative and trustworthy sources with industry experience and expertise, should I consider moving my budget to entirely new categories? Yes, I know this could trigger the dreaded agency reorganization or overhaul. But now is the time to analyze what works and what doesn’t, without fear or favor. How should I proceed over the next six weeks before I have to submit my budget for 2027?”
Then they need to enter this prompt into Google to compare what AI preview and AI mode recommend. They should also enter this same prompt into ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to evaluate what all three recommend. Additionally, they must verify facts, ground truth, and seek receipt of all recommendations made by search and AI tools.
Finally, they should adopt David Ogilvy’s old-fashioned practice of “taking a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret,” which he recommended in his classic book, Ogilvy on advertising.
I did most of this last week, although I updated Ogilvy’s suggestions. Instead, I found critical data, market trends, strategic insights, and tactical advice.
The channel categories inherited from most 2026 budget models measure a version of the customer journey that is disappearing. Ewan McIntyre, the Gartner analyst who leads the company’s CMO spending survey, put a number on how quickly. CMOs now assign 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI initiatives, but only 30% say their organization is actually ready to increase this investment. At the same time, awareness and conversion now require 62.6% of total media spenda jump of more than 10% since 2024, while loyalty and retention spending fell from 29% to less than 15% of the total. McIntyre’s data found one exception to this change. More AI-mature organizations are retaining a larger share of their spend on loyalty and retention rather than pursuing acquisitions, suggesting that less mature organizations are over-indexing on what AI can most easily measure and automate. This is not a contradiction. This is a reallocation already underway, and most budget models have not caught up with it.
Christine Moorman, who runs The CMO Survey at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, found something pointing in the same direction from an entirely different source. The 35th edition of its survey, conducted in January among 308 marketing executives, found that generative engine optimization (GEO) is already being used in businesses. four out of ten companiesa category that did not exist in his survey until recently. At the same time, she found no marketing technology activity scoring higher than 5 on a 7-point performance scale. It is precisely in this gap that a budget reorganized by function, and not by traditional channel, wins its place.
So instead of wondering which channel gets the most money, I think CMOs should build their 2027 budgets around five functional categories.
AI visibility and citation management. This replaces part of the SEO line, but not all of it. The job is no longer just about ranking a page. This benefits from being included in the answer itself, followed by something closer to what I call Quote Share of voice than by keyword ranking.
Trust verification. I wrote in mid-July that only 28% of Americans trust AI search results. This discrepancy now constitutes a budget line, not a footnote. The brands that fund the work of structuring their facts, credentials, and reviews so that an AI model can verify them are the ones that close that trust gap before a competitor does.
Distribution engineering. This is where the DIRHAM 2.0 framework I taught in Dubai this spring and it’s actually worth its keep. Content created once and delivered simultaneously across owned, earned, and AI-crawled surfaces, instead of being funded on a channel-by-channel basis, is a budgetary decision as much as a production decision.
Human judgment and editorial control. Gartner’s own data indirectly argues in favor of this element. The work went from an average level 21.9% of marketing budgets to 24.5% this year, even as 43% of CMOs told Gartner they plan to reduce labor expenses. The CMOs who win this argument internally are the ones who can show what a trained editor or strategist detects that a model doesn’t.
Reconstruction of measurements. Last click attribution cannot see a customer who requested a recommendation from ChatGPT and never clicked on anything. On May 20, 2026, AMEC (the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) launched its GEO principles. These and a true Citation Share of Voice metric make for a more honest place to invest next year’s measurement dollars.
None of this means that SEO, paid media, content marketing, social media marketing, or digital marketing is going away. This means your budget flowchart stops reflecting PESO’s outdated media model (paid, earned, shared and owned media), which did real work to sort budgets and assign campaigns to channels. But this framework answered a distribution question, not the one marketers currently face. Knowing where to place content doesn’t tell you if it will be seen, and visibility today is decided by algorithms, not people scrolling through a feed.
Reorganization of your 2027 budget: 3 steps before submitting
Step 1. Re-label last year’s spending against the five functions, not the old channels. Extract 12 months of budget data and sort every dollar into AI visibility, trust verification, delivery engineering, human monitoring, or metrics reconstruction instead of SEO, paid social, email, and display. This alone usually brings up work you’re already funding that doesn’t yet have a name on your budget template.
Step 2. Analyze your audience data on each feature, not on each channel. Use SparkToro or GWI to check where your customers are really paying attention right now. Fund the function where the gap between spending and attention is widest first, not the loudest channel in the planning meeting.
Step 3. Enter the CFO chat with a number that is not last click. Provide your citation share of voice, or equivalent GEO metric, as proof of the reorganization. A CFO who hears “AI is changing things” will respond. A CFO who sees a trendline in citations next to last year’s stable organic traffic will wonder what’s next.
I will conclude this article by saying what Gartner press releases will not do. A CMO presenting a 2027 budget organized around outdated channels, in an environment where AI is already reallocating attention faster than any technology I’ve covered in 20 years, is not exercising caution. They are not prepared.
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Featured image: ImageFlow/Shutterstock
