CMOs & CIOs split over AI platform decision ownership

Acquia has published research showing that Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Information Officers disagree over who leads major AI and digital platform decisions. The study surveyed 500 senior technology and marketing executives in the US, UK and France.

The findings suggest conflicting views within the same organisations over ownership of content management system and digital experience platform decisions, as companies try to set rules for AI use across marketing and technology teams.

Among Chief Marketing Officers, views on ownership were split: 25% said marketing led those decisions, 24% said IT was in charge and 18% pointed to the Head of Digital.

Technology leaders gave a different account. Among Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers, 57% saw themselves as the primary decision-maker on major platform choices, while 66% said they were the key evaluator. By their account, Chief Marketing Officers and Marketing Directors were decision-makers in 33% of cases and key evaluators in 42%.

The gap matters because many companies are moving AI tools into customer-facing operations without a clear internal structure for oversight. The research suggests marketing and IT are being asked to share responsibility for decisions that affect governance, data quality and brand risk, while holding different views on who has final authority.

Confidence gap

The research also found limited confidence among marketing leaders in their ability to control AI deployment. While 66% of Chief Marketing Officers said proving AI-generated marketing is governed and controlled has become a brand reputation issue, only 41% said their team was confident it could embed real governance into AI initiatives.

That was the lowest confidence score among the priorities tested in the study. By contrast, 73% of Chief Marketing Officers said they were confident in their ability to drive revenue growth.

Acquia linked some of that uncertainty to fragmented systems. According to the study, 61% of Chief Marketing Officers said their content was spread across so many systems that no one had a single reliable source of truth, and only 40% said their current technology stack was ready for AI agents to work within it.

Technology leaders reported a similar tension from a different angle. Seven in 10 Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers said data sovereignty was essential to their organisation, while 56% said they would not deploy AI until content structure and data integrity were in place.

At the same time, 51% said migration complexity was a significant barrier to improving that foundation. The figures suggest caution over AI governance is not matched by an easy path to fixing the underlying systems.

Shared pressure

The research also highlighted pressure on marketing leaders to show commercial returns from AI spending. Some 43% of Chief Marketing Officers said failing to prove a return on AI investment was the biggest threat to their position as a marketing leader, ahead of missing revenue targets or losing budget to IT.

Chris Tranquill, Chief Executive Officer at Acquia, said the issue was no longer limited to marketing performance or compliance checks.

"Trust used to be earned one visitor at a time. Now it's judged instantly, by a machine, on behalf of someone who may never see your homepage. You don't win that kind of trust with a bigger marketing budget or a stricter compliance checklist. You win it when everything an AI agent finds about your brand comes from one governed source of truth, built by marketing and IT together," Tranquill said.

The study comes as businesses face a broader debate over how AI systems should be governed internally, particularly as tools move beyond back-office tasks and begin to influence customer communications, content production and digital experiences.

In that context, the findings suggest governance questions are not only about formal regulation or technical safeguards. They also depend on whether companies have agreed which senior leaders own the decision, the risk and the outcome when AI is deployed across shared systems.

The research was based on separate surveys of 250 Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers and 250 Chief Marketing Officers. Respondents were drawn from the US, UK and France, and VCCP analysed the results using fieldwork conducted by Coleman Parkes Research.