Developing
The survey report requires registration to download; this article relies on MarTech's summary.
In 60 seconds
- Two-thirds of enterprises have dedicated AI budgets and 95.3% have AI agents on their roadmap.
- Only 10.8% of agent initiatives are fully scaled in production; nearly 90% are in planning, proof of concept or limited production.
- 40.2% of martech leaders cannot show a clear financial contribution from their technology investments.
- 56% of teams that could prove value received budget increases, against 37.5% of those relying on "faith-based" demonstration.
Impact Layer
- What changed
- A survey quantifies the gap between AI budgets and scaled, proven results in enterprise martech.
- Why it matters
- Teams that can show value get more budget, so measurement is now a funding issue.
- Who is affected
- Martech and marketing operations leaders and their finance partners.
- Martech stack area
- Analytics, AI
- Stack impact
- Define the financial metric for each agent project before scaling, and report it the same way each quarter.
- Business impact
- Moderate Based on MarTech's summary of a survey whose full report we did not read. Sample size and fieldwork dates are not given in the article.
- Related technologies
- What to watch
- The full Enterprise Martech Outlook report.
MarTech reported on October 9, 2026 findings from The Martech Weekly’s Enterprise Martech Outlook 2026 survey, which requires registration to download.
Findings
- Two-thirds of enterprises have dedicated AI budgets; 95.3% have AI agents on their roadmap.
- 10.8% of agent initiatives are fully scaled in production; nearly 90% are in planning, proof of concept or limited production.
- 40.2% of martech leaders cannot show a clear financial contribution from their technology investments.
- 69.3% say AI has a reasonable, clear or substantial impact on the martech stack, against 59.9% for customer experience.
- 56% of teams that could prove value received budget increases, compared with 37.5% of those relying on “faith-based” value demonstration.
Human oversight
1.6% allow fully automated, AI-generated customer-facing content, 43.3% allow external use only after review, editing and verification, and 24.4% limit generative AI to internal use.
Where agents are working
Further along, with better reported ROI: co-pilots, copywriting and editing, data management, data analysis and video generation. Less mature: journey optimisation, decisioning, audience selection, campaign creation, attribution, loyalty and offer agents.
Our read
We only have MarTech’s summary, with no sample size. The pattern is plausible and actionable: pick agent projects where the value can be measured, and measure it.
Sources
- MarTech: AI budgets are growing faster than proof of ROI (opens in a new tab)
Source of all survey figures, drawn from The Martech Weekly's Enterprise Martech Outlook 2026.