The Missing Success Factor for Growth in the Agentic Era: How CMOs and CIOs Win with Digital Experience

To translate AI investment into better brand experiences — and higher profits — the relationship between the CMO and CIO has never been more important. But is your business striking the right balance between growth and governance?

It’s time for CMOs and CIOs to rethink their partnership. Seriously rethink it.

That’s because AI has changed so much about business growth: from who evaluates a brand first to how fast content can be produced, and how easily that speed actually erodes trust when governance fails to keep pace. 

This new dynamic has a significant impact on two leaders: the CMO, accountable for growth, and the CIO, accountable for the systems and data that growth runs on.

Digital experience is the point where these functions meet. Ask 500 CMOs, CIOs and CTOs who should own the next platform decisions, and no single voice wins out:

• 24% of CMOs name the CIO or CTO as head decision-maker.
• 25% of CMOs name themselves.
• Even when they aren’t the primary decision-maker, 30% of CMOs say IT is a key evaluator, and 40% say they're consulted.

It’s a joint undertaking. But marketing wants speed. IT wants control. How do leaders strike the right balance between growth and governance for the agentic era?

At Acquia, ensuring the success of both the CMO and the CIO is at the core of what we do. So, we spoke with leaders in the UK, US and France to find out.

The new mandate for CMOs and CIOs

The mandate for both CMOs and CIOs is changing. Now, the first visitor to evaluate a brand is often not a human, but an LLM — resetting the rules for brands’ digital experiences:

• CMOs identify structuring content for agent readability as their top priority — 57% place this in their top three initiatives for 2027.
• 66% of CMOs have already evaluated how AI search engines cite or recommend their brand.
• But more than half (56%) admit their content is still built for human readers rather than structured for AI to use. 47% lack confidence their content would be accurately used if an AI assistant answered a customer question today.

This is a content and data problem before it’s a marketing problem, which is exactly why marketing cannot solve it alone. But CMOs and CIOs have different priorities.

Ask CIOs and CTOs what matters most in a content or experience platform, and 73% say security, ahead of every other factor by a wide margin. Ask CMOs what matters most for 2027, and the top answer is growth: driving revenue and demonstrable results, a top-five priority for 53%.

Moving fast and staying safe aren’t mutually exclusive goals – and CMOs and CIOs need an operating model and platform that will serve both.

What to do next for a winning digital experience

So, how can marketing and IT work more closely together? Buying more tools and getting better at prompting are table stakes now. What actually delivers AI-powered growth today is departments working across old boundaries toward shared outcomes. 

Roles are already evolving: 59% of marketing leaders say their team will need AI and engineering-adjacent skills that marketing has never required before.

Now, the teams need greater alignment. 55% of CMOs report that IT cannot turn around requests in the timeframe the market demands, and 37% say the platform roadmap is set by IT priorities rather than customer priorities.

AI-readiness is suffering. Only 34% of CMOs say their stack is ready for AI agents to work inside it today, while 62% estimate it would take them more than a year to match a competitor’s AI-driven setup because of outdated IT and manual processes.

Marketing is open to closer collaboration: 61% say they need to work more closely with IT to understand what the technology can actually do. 

Both sides want the same three things: fewer handoffs, standard usage policies, and an honest, shared account of what the platform can already do. It’s only by creating a joint roadmap – that accounts for both growth and governance – that CMOs and CIOs can balance speed and safety.

Unlocking growth in the agentic era

The agentic era is already here. And as AI becomes the new gatekeeper of buyer discovery, the line between marketing speed and IT control is dissolving fast.

Picture a prospect's first real interaction with your brand happening inside an AI assistant's answer, drawing on content marketing published and infrastructure IT built, with no human from either team in the room to catch a mistake. That's the job now: get that moment right before it happens, not clean it up after.

Making that change happen starts with acknowledging that the mandate for CIOs and CMOs has changed. The organizations that thrive will be filled with leaders who are curious and collaborative about how they can use AI to accelerate time to market, lower costs, and deliver measurable growth. 

We need jointly defined brand guardrails that empower people to represent the brand the way it’s supposed to be, with the flexibility to move quickly without risking the business – all based on a digital experience platform that serves marketing and IT.

That's the real mandate shift: not faster marketing or tighter IT control, but one team accountable for both.

Find out how to co-own AI and drive a better brand experience in our new report.