We looked at 3,773 sitting Chief Marketing Officers and the 3,274 companies they lead. The typical CMO has held the seat for 3.1 years, more than a third held the title somewhere else first, 83% post publicly but only 2% share opinion, and 38% already show some sign of AI in their work. The full report, The State of the CMO, is free to read.
Every CMO I speak with is being asked the same question by their board: what are we doing about AI? Most have an honest answer. They are experimenting, they are worried about the risk, and they are not yet seeing the results they were promised. That conversation is what sent us into this research. We wanted to know who is actually in the seat right now, how they got there, and how far along they are, one person at a time rather than one survey response at a time.
The result is The State of the CMO, September 2026, a 22-slide research report you can read in about fifteen minutes. This post is the short version, with the findings that changed how I think about the role.
The seat is steadier than the story
The revolving-door narrative about CMOs has been around for a decade. Our numbers do not support it. Across all 3,773 people, median time in the current seat is 3.1 years. A quarter have been there under 19 months, and a quarter more than 5.8 years. Bigger companies hold on a little longer: 3.3 years at enterprise companies, 3.0 at mid-market, 2.6 at companies of 500 people or fewer.
That lines up with what Spencer Stuart found in January across 346 CMOs in the S&P 500: average tenure of 4.1 years, and of the CMOs who left, 62% moved to an equal or bigger role and 9% went straight into a CEO chair. Their population is large public companies. Ours is mostly mid-market and smaller, which explains the gap in tenure and, to me, makes the point stronger. The seat is a career stage people pass through on the way up, not a trap door.
Most of them have done this before
Here is the number I did not expect. 1,353 of the CMOs we studied, 35.9%, have held the CMO title at least once before at another company. Counting only real prior seats (no side consultancies, no stints under six months, no moves between divisions of the same parent), 30% have one and 10% have two or more. Spencer Stuart’s S&P 500 figure for a prior CMO seat is 27%, so the pattern holds across very different populations.
Company size matters most here, and in the direction you might not guess. 35% of CMOs at small companies held the title before, against 28% at enterprise companies. A lot of small-company CMOs are veterans working between larger jobs. The same tail shows up elsewhere: 159 CMOs publicly advertise services for hire, and 112 of them carry no fractional or interim wording in their title. At companies of 500 or fewer, one CMO in ten is also for hire. At enterprise companies it is one in a hundred.
If you are hiring a CMO, that is useful context. The “fractional” label undercounts the people who are available, and the small-company seat is often occupied by someone who has run marketing somewhere much bigger.
The road in is long, and it usually runs through marketing
The typical CMO held five roles at four companies before taking the seat. A quarter had seven roles or more. About half, 49%, came up through marketing. Another 29% switched in from a neighbouring discipline such as sales, product or general management, and 22% started as generalists.
The job they held immediately before this one is mostly one of two things: another CMO seat (23% overall, rising to 27% at small companies) or running a business as a president or general manager (17%). First jobs out of school vary enormously. What the group shares is business school. 97% have education on record, 35% went through an MBA or equivalent graduate management program, and the most common names are Kellogg, Harvard Business School and Wharton.
What they say in public, and what they avoid
83% of these CMOs publish original posts, and 59% posted in the last 90 days. That is a vocal group. But the content is mostly announcements. Job changes account for 24% of posting CMOs, events 17%, hiring news 12%, recognition 8%. Opinion pieces are the rarest category at 2%.
Among their business posts, brand and creative leads at 39% of posting CMOs, content and community is next at 29%, and AI is already third at 28%, ahead of customer experience and demand generation. The audience does not reward that mix, though. Recognition posts draw a median of 63 interactions, product launches 56, events 44. The analytical themes earn less. What CMOs write about most is not what their audiences respond to most.
The CMO Survey from Duke Fuqua, Deloitte and the AMA polled 308 senior US marketers in January 2026 and recorded the most economic pessimism since mid-2020, with marketing budget growth at 1.7%, the weakest in years. Christine Moorman, who directs the survey, summed it up: “Faced with uncertainty, marketers are pulling back toward what they know.” The public feed we measured looks like that. Safe news, few positions taken.
AI: 38% show a signal, and the small companies are ahead
We scored every CMO for AI involvement using their own record: title and headline, bio, role descriptions, certifications, and what they write and share. 1,451 of them, 38%, show some AI signal. 12% are AI-forward, meaning AI is in their title or they have written three or more posts about it. Another 22% are AI-active, with at least one AI post or AI somewhere on their profile. 4% only share other people’s AI content. The remaining 62% show nothing.
Two details in that picture stand out.
First, the gap between talking and doing is visible in the data. 16% of CMOs mention AI in their bio. 2% list an AI skill. AI posts also earn less than everything else, a median of 25 interactions against 34, which suggests the audience has not yet decided that a CMO’s AI opinions are worth reacting to.
Second, the share with an AI signal rises as companies get smaller: 35% at enterprise, 39% at mid-market, 45% at companies of 500 or fewer, and 53% among fractional CMOs. The people with the least infrastructure are the most likely to be working with the tools themselves.
The external surveys tell the same story from the budget side. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders found that CMOs put 15.3% of budget into AI and 70% call becoming an AI leader a critical goal this year, while only 30% say their organization is ready to scale it. BCG’s global CMO survey of 300 CMOs found 96% say AI is transforming marketing end to end, but only about a third have transformed significant parts of their own function, and 8% run campaigns where multiple AI agents operate on their own. And the CMO Survey reports AI now performs 22.4% of marketing activities, up from 7.0% two years ago, with leaders projecting roughly 56% within three years.
Our own Agentscout project adds one more data point. This summer it checked 6,505 company websites for a single sign that a marketing service had been made usable by an AI agent. Fewer than fifty had one. Brands are further behind than their own decks suggest.
What this means if you hold the seat
A few practical readings from the data.
Your tenure is probably longer than you fear. Three years is the median, and the top quarter of the group is past five. Plan the work on that horizon, not on a rumour about eighteen months.
The AI question is about how the team works, not this year’s campaign theme. The CMOs who show up as AI-forward in our data are the ones doing the work themselves, and they are disproportionately at smaller companies where nobody else was going to do it. Gartner’s readiness gap and BCG’s one-third figure describe the same thing from the top down. If you want a place to start that does not require a data science team, our Build Manual walks a non-technical leader through putting an AI agent to work on their own machine in an afternoon. If you want to know where your organization actually stands, that is what our AI readiness assessment is for.
Say something. 2% of posting CMOs share opinion. The rest of the feed is job changes and event photos. Anyone willing to take a position is, by the numbers, a rare voice in a very large room.
How the report was made
This report draws on public career records and professional profiles, the companies’ own websites and newsrooms, commercial B2B data providers, and the public statements the executives make themselves. We brought it together under one set of definitions, cross-checked the sources against each other, and reviewed it by hand. A commercial B2B data provider independently lists 97% of the people we counted, 98.6% of them with a chief-marketing title, and 778 of the seats are confirmed on the company’s own website. No individual is named or pictured in the public report, and every number can be regenerated from the underlying data.
The full report is free, there is no form, and it works on a phone.
Frequently asked questions
In our research across 3,773 sitting CMOs, median time in the current seat is 3.1 years. A quarter have been there under 19 months and a quarter more than 5.8 years. Spencer Stuart reports an average of 4.1 years among S&P 500 CMOs.
35.9% have held the CMO title at least once before at another company. Counting only real prior seats, 30% have one and 10% have two or more. The share is highest at small companies (35%) and lowest at enterprise companies (28%).
38% show some AI signal in their own record or public posts. 12% are AI-forward, with AI in their title or three or more posts on the subject. The share rises as companies get smaller, from 35% at enterprise to 45% at companies of 500 people or fewer.
Mostly announcements. Job changes, events, hiring news and recognition make up most of the feed. Only 2% of posting CMOs share opinion pieces. Among business topics, brand leads and AI is already the third most common subject.
Yes. The full report is free to read at couch.associates with no registration. An AI agent can also request it on your behalf through our agent-operable services.
Public career records and professional profiles, company websites and newsrooms, commercial B2B data providers, and the executives’ own public statements, combined under one set of definitions and cross-checked against each other. No individual is named or pictured in the public report.
The CMOs who treat AI as a change to how the marketing team works, and not as this year’s campaign theme, are going to define what the job means for the next decade. If you are working out where AI fits in your own marketing organization, let’s talk. That is the work we do.
By Mike Couch, Managing Partner, Couch & Associates. We help executives who know AI matters figure out where it will pay off, what could go wrong, and how to get from pilots to something that runs. Connect with our team.
